University can be a waste of time for the gifted too

People like me are the dirty secret of the debate about the value of university. I have a first class history degree from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). It was a waste of three years.

Thousands of former boffins will shudder in silent shame when the Government announces its review of student fees next week. Debate will froth over how to finance higher education and nurture the less academic through vocational teaching instead. But there is a neglected truth to this issue too: however much it costs, university can also be pointless for the intellectually gifted.

I feel bad trashing my degree, with its attached sense of sweeping destiny. My mother – a keen but underprivileged pupil of the Harold Wilson era – left school at 15. I – the clever daughter bankrolled by a post-Thatcher family business – would naturally achieve better things. The class wall that had entombed my family was crumbling. My first day at university was the last swing of the hammer against the final few bricks.

I did well at university. I also learned nothing of use. By the end (seven years ago) I was borderline unemployable. I had no teamwork skills. No aptitude for prioritising. No ability to embrace mundane, important jobs with energy and good will. I got into Cambridge for a masters. But the realisation that I was settling into the caricature of a clever incompetent clanged on my conscience. I thought of the £20,000 of further debt. I turned the offer down.

SOAS immersed me in the wonder of world history. But over the years I’ve accumulated just as much knowledge from TED talks, open access journals and adult evening courses. And hilariously for an aspiring writer, university actually made my writing worse. I wince reading my old essays, a pompous fog of “a priori deconstructions” and “homologous evidence”. At university, lecturers scribbled “excellent” in the margins. But at my first internship at a newspaper, the sub-editors slashed my copy with red pen, then threw it back with a grunt. Thus began real life.

They say university teaches you how to think. Tutorials sharpened my logic, but the Left-wing orthodoxy wafting through the halls softened my brain. My essays had “nuanced views”. Yet, over vodka oranges with mates in the bar, Lenin was “misunderstood” and the Tories were “scum”.

University taught me how to reason. It also taught me how to toss reason aside every time I put down my pen. My delusions extended to employment. I thought I’d be working in my dream job within months. It would be years before I achieved it.

The mutation of degrees into consumer goods did not help this attitude. “I’m shelling out 10 grand a year for this,” I’d mutter when a lecturer was running late. With my borrowed money, I felt entitled to flawless service, and a fast-track career at the end of it. None of my experience is uncommon.

The Student Loans Company sends occasional letters. But graduates don’t feel crippled by debt; the burden is too remote, too academic (the final irony). I do feel taunted by it though. Was it really worth it – my £40,000 rite of passage to middle class acceptance? It’s not just what you pay for university, but what you get for it that matters. at telegraph.co.uk/opinion To order prints or signed copies of any Telegraph cartoon, go to telegraph.co.uk/prints-cartoons or call 0191 603 0178

It takes quite a lot to shock a journalist. You might think we would be inured to most things: that almost no form of outrageous political behaviour could evoke more than a wry shrug. But I have to say – absolutely sincerely – that I have been shocked by the rabid, outrageous, visceral hatred that is emanating from the Remain team in what passes for public debate but is deteriorating into simple calumny.

God knows, we have seen vitriol before in British political life, much of it gratuitously personal. From the shameless snobbery and misogyny of the anti-Thatcher attacks (“the greengrocer’s daughter”) to the hysterical “Blair is a war criminal” farrago, there has been no shortage of ad hominem denigration. But this is of a different order.

For one thing, it does not have the plausible justification of those earlier episodes: however much you supported the Thatcher reforms, they did actually have a cataclysmic impact on some industries and the local workforces which depended on them, and however you felt about the Saddam regime, the Iraq war resulted readerprints@telegraph.co.uk