A degree of reluctance

Do you – and your child – really want them going to university?

A-level results day is history. The thrill of university offers confirmed and accepted – that’s gone too. This, now, is the reality for your teenager and for you: they are leaving home.

Around half a million parents are about to experience what writer Jack Rosenthal’s exquisite 1990s BBC play called Eskimo Day – the moment their offspring cut loose for university, venturing into the big wide world on their own for the first time.

“It’s Eskimos, isn’t it,” said Rosenthal’s wife Maureen Lipman as anxious parent Shani, “that when they get old and no use to no-one no more, they just quietly sling their hooks and toddle off into the snow – for good. And their kids don’t much bother because they’re all too busy catching fish in holes and hoovering their igloos, and life goes on. Well, theirs does. Not the poor old bugger lying in the snow.”

In the early 1960s, only about 4% of school leavers went to university. This year, 37.9% – a record 272,000 students – have signed up for a full-time undergraduate degree course.

A degree is not necessary – or right – for many talented young people

This figure surprises me. It’s true that over the past 60 years university education has journeyed from a privilege through an aspiration to an academic right for those who want it (while conversely, of course, it’s shifted from a government gift to something those who do want it have to fund themselves). And it’s true that over that period, governments both blue and red have encouraged our teens into believing that greater career opportunity comes from a degree level education.

But for the last decade or so, more and more opportunities have sprung up for alternative routes into fulfilling, well-paid careers. Apprenticeships, on the job training, college day release – all can give today’s teenagers sky-high attainable aspirations without the need to go to university. And there’s always later life learning – the fragrant Mrs TW earned the degree needed for her current job at the age of 40. I’m therefore surprised record numbers of teenagers are flying the nest to university.

And it got me wondering, do that many young people really want to go? Or are they doing what they think is expected of them, by their parents, their teachers, by society? A degree is still perceived by society as the most superior educational achievement, and going to university is generally seen as something to which all talented young people should aspire.

But they should also be given the support and choice to resist that pressure to go if they don’t want to. And many don’t. Around 7,000 students quit within months. In some universities as many as one in six teenagers drop out in their first year, and many of those before Christmas. (This, incidentally, includes the University of Bedford, where one of my first girlfriends went, crushing our teenage romance. The fact she stayed on at a uni with one of the country’s largest drop-out rates rather than return to save our love tells the story of her attitude to our relationship better than I can.) As might be expected, Oxford and Cambridge shed the fewest students in the first year – only 1% – and their high retention rates will, one would hope and expect, mainly reflect the quality of the Oxbridge experience. But I do wonder how many students stay there unhappily because they feel quitting such a great opportunity for such a prestigious would let down the families and teachers who helped them get there.

'I don't want to go – but everyone says it will be good for me'

There must, after all, be parents who can see an acute, extreme reluctance in their child to go to university – any university – but push/force them into it because they think that’s what’s expected – even if it rips out those parents’ own hearts to make them go?

All these thoughts came to me because a young friend of mine – let’s call her Suzy – has just departed for university. She’s a shy, quiet, self-deprecating 18-year-old, and she and her parents have spent the last year not looking forward to this day, but throughout and beyond her A-levels she has insisted “me and my mum and dad think it will be good for me”. Hmm.

Let’s make it clear, of course I know that for thousands of students university is a truly fabulous, transformative experience and I hope it is for Suzy. It gives thousands of people the very best time they’ll ever have in their whole lives, developing who they are, making lifelong friends and sometimes meeting life partners.

That’s certainly what happened to my elder brother, who embraced undergraduate life and its opportunities so warmly that he pretty much never returned home. I remember his own Eskimo Day, back in the late 1970s. He sat on his bed, in his new halls, and although I was only 12, I seem to recall him metamorphosising instantly, in front of our eyes. He immediately seemed to want to hurry me, my mum and my dad along so he could begin the rest of his life, armed with his suitcase full of Rich Tea biscuits (I think my mother assumed Liverpool had no shops), his reading list of psychology and sociology books, an arresting assortment of khaki and orange jumpers and his extensive vinyl collection. My memory pictures our mum dabbing her eyes and our dad upset but stoic, although the latter was probably distracted by the desperate hope that our embattled Hillman Minx would make the three-hour journey home again.

And university did change my brother – so much so that it’s almost as if it had been waiting for him to arrive. Within months he’d ditched sixth-form favourites ELO and Supertramp for the apparently so much cooler Television, Focus and King Crimson. He would join his male and female peers in late night coffee-fuelled world-righting conversations, discussing until the sun came up the end of oppression, racism, sexism, all under the gaze of the 1970s posters reflecting exciting newly discovered heroes – Guevara, Marley and the Athena tennis girl with no pants on. And, as I say, in this environment he met the woman who became his wife (not the Athena girl). He even got a degree, too. And we barely saw him again.

So university can be a life-affirming, life-changing, life-enhancing experience. But there will, across the country, be thousands of imminent freshers and their parents who cannot bear the thought of parting. Flying the coop is of course a rite of passage whose pain in most cases will pass – especially if the student needs a degree for their chosen career and if attending university is the best way to attain it. But what if the pain is more than that?

University is excellent – and many other routes are its equal

Just as post-school education is a choice, it’s vital young people have the right to take a different pathway and crucially, understand that this is not an inferior route. A young relative of mine took her three A-grade science A-levels to university to study marine biology because, cautioned her teachers, her school careers officer and her own father, it would be a “waste” not to. Sadly the only person who didn’t want her to go was herself. Having been driven the 200 miles to start term, for the next four days she made hourly, sobbing phone calls home, prompting her anguished mother to force her “it’s character building, she’ll settle in” father finally to cave in and go and get her. Much tense exasperation, eye-rolling and muttering ensued, but fast forward 15 years and she independently owns a zoo, is in complete love with her life and has a mountain of relevant animal husbandry qualifications – but still no degree.

Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn I didn’t go to university. I never wanted to. I went through the motions of applying to please my own parents (and my big brother, who failed to see why I should be cossetted at home for any longer than necessary) but didn’t get a single offer, which relieved me enormously at the time. My place at home was then confirmed after I bombed out of my A-levels with two E grades and an O, meaning not even clearing would take me. Did that fear of flying lead to subconscious sabotage? I have no idea. I did, though, find other routes into my chosen journalistic profession and can look back on a career as successful as I wanted it to be. (Strange thing, though – now I’m at an advanced age and have worked long enough not to need academic qualifications to prove I can do my job, I’d love to go to university now. Go figure.)

Good luck to all freshers, all teenagers taking a different route, and to all mums and dads at this moment of seismic change. And good luck to Suzy. I’ve no doubt most parents believe they are giving their children a genuine choice of what they want to do after leaving school. And the overwhelming majority will be.

But please do check. For the sake of their happiness right now, and yours too. Do it so they can embrace the future THEY want. It might stop you lying face down in the snow.