Apprenticeships
by William Barclay
In 2024, 36.4 per cent of young persons embarked on a degree. In the same year, less than 1 in 20 started an apprenticeship. Why?
To my mind, this is a total failure of our education system and government. Young people are shoehorned into degrees that don’t serve them later in life and are not academically enriching, saddling them with obtuse amounts of debt. Universities themselves are crippling under financial mismanagement and the nature of academic achievement in these institutions has mutated from what it once was.
The government needs to empower young people whose primary skill set is not academic but practical to move into apprenticeships. In this country, we have forgotten that practiced skill in the trades and arts sustains an economy, not 2.1s in dispassionately pursued degrees.
This is not to vitriolically dismiss the value of a degree. The skills taught are valuable and the lessons learnt more broadly from university about life are indispensable to many.
Rather my point is that we ought to empower young people to recognise their own value, and to take pride in the fact that this value might not be academic. The basic offer of an apprenticeship is deeply attractive: pay, time to study, and the accompaniment of seasoned professionals. Universities ought to get serious about what they are competing against…
University
by Tasha Stewart
University, what is it good for? The four-year long rigmarole of classes, assignments, shitty student flats, and, of course, overwhelming debt (yikes). Sometimes it feels like university is a pointless endeavour – it seems even a bachelor’s degree is hardly worth enough for entry-level roles these days.
But so what? University life is not, and should not, be solely guided by employability, and we should actively resist every attempt for it to be shoehorned into a real-life manifestation of LinkedIn.
Are apprenticeships worthwhile? Undoubtedly. But that does not reduce the importance and value of university and the benefits of earning a degree. Universities should not be places of enforced productivity and job hunting; they should foster active learning, genuine interest, and (when the time calls for it) resistance to dominant narratives.
The capitalist myth of productivity would have you believe that the only worthy endeavour in this world is one that enhances your career progression and makes you loads of money. Okay, I get it, money and comfort are both nice, and they make life a hell of a lot easier. But why can’t we just learn for the sake of learning? Learning isn’t a privilege, it’s a right. And just because something might not make you “employable,” doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing.
There is no correct path to success or happiness. Choosing university does not make you superior or inferior to someone doing an apprenticeship, and vice versa. But why shouldn’t we encourage further education that emphasises the theoretical, the political, the artistic? After all, there’s more to life than money.
Illustration by Anna O’Gara