UNIVERSITY........NO THANKS!!!!!!!!!

At 15 years old I knew that I was staying on into further education and doing my A-Levels. However I also knew that I wasn’t going to university regardless of what grades that I got.

The reasoning behind this was simple, my lack of motivation away from the classroom. It had been the same story since the age of 11, in the classroom I was fine but whenever I was given something to do in my own time I would typically leave it until the last minute, rush it and hand in a substandard piece of work. I often wonder how I ever managed to pass A-Level Maths and computing with this attitude.

Then there was the added distractions of university life, being away from home for the first time with the parties and cheap alcohol. I knew full well what I was like at the time and my studies would have taken a distant second place. I would have had a great time but it would have come at a massive cost. By the sixth form years I was already hearing stories of people who just went university to mess about, party and avoid the real world for a few extra years. Even if I did pass whatever course I taken then there was the added pressure of trying to find a better than average job to pay off the student debt once university had finished.

For the first few years after leaving school I often wondered if I did the right thing by not going university especially when I ended up doing mundane jobs that “any idiot” could have done. However within a decade I knew I had made the right choice, in fact it was probably one of the best decisions of my life.

A generation earlier university was a place for the elite, the top few percent in each given field. The place for tomorrows doctors, lawyers, scientists etc. So obviously the more people a school sends to university the better it would make a school look.

It was only 10 years later I looked back and seen how there was almost an obsession with getting as many sixth formers into university as possible. All everyone talked about were courses, never jobs or careers. If I had chosen to do a university course that was completely useless with no hope of a job at the end of it I would have been given all the help I needed. On the other hand when I told Mr Turner my head of year I wasn’t going university all I got was a strange look and a “what are you doing then ?”............. “well looking for a job” (obviously!!!!).

Up until about 6 weeks before I sat my final A-Level exams I didn’t have a clue what I was doing when I left school. All I got was one interview with a careers officer where I chosen to do a 13 week work experience program called “Career choice”.

The schools obsession with sending as many people to university as they could had nothing to do with peoples futures. I have since discovered that vast numbers of people went on to do useless degree courses (like the ultra trendy media studies), couldn’t get a job for the subject they graduated in, had a massive student debt and ended up doing a mundane job that they could have just as easily got beforehand. At G.C.S.E and A-Level schools deliberately encourage their students to do “soft subjects” with higher pass rates to boost their schools pass rates as a whole. For the same reason the schools want to send as many students to university as possible to look good nothing else.

This problem got a lot worse 2 years after I left school when the new Labour government was elected in 1997, they made it a target of getting 50% of people into university. Why should 50% of people go university?, many of them are not suited to academic work and would have been better off being skilled tradespeople like plumbers or electricians. It’s worth noting that a decade later these skills were in such short supply that the jobs got filled with migrant workers from eastern europe.

I can’t be the only one who thinks that the government's obsession with sending everyone to university is to keep them off the unemployment figures for a few extra years..........

Not going university was one of my lifes best decisions.