TheParagon-Education

Ben Richardson “can hand-on-heart say that I honestly do not remember the last time, if ever, I read the ‘education’ section on an incoming CV”. When hiring people to his property marketing firm, he skips straight to applicants’ experience, “and, most importantly, their personality traits. Do they fit the company culture? Do they have a hard-working attitude? Do they demonstrate ambition and drive?” These things are far better markers of a good employee than university qualifications, he says. Mandating the latter for new hires “feels like a really out-dated thought process”.

Richardson, who runs After Nyne Consulting, is one of many business owners eschewing the requirements of old, having found that young people who enter the workplace without a degree often have as much, if not more, to give. According to research published by LinkedIn, the proportion of vacancies that do not require applicants to have completed university rose 90 per cent last year.

Richardson’s thoughts echo those of Rishi Sunak, who last month wrote in the Daily Telegraph of his desire to curtail the swell of “low quality” university courses that leave young people “saddled with tens of thousands of pounds of debt.”

“Changing the national mindset” about vocational courses would help future generations avoid falling into the same trap, the PM added.

“He has a point,” thinks Richardson, 43. “Learning on the job has got to be a winner for all. The employer gets a cost-effective supply of young, enthused talent and the talent gets exposure to new skills in a sector of interest to them.”

Degrees have become an expectation among job candidates in recent decades. When Tony Blair called for at least 50 per cent of people under 30 to participate in higher education in 1999, 1.86 million students were pursing full-time courses, at a cost of £1,000 per year. Today, that number is 2.86 million, while tuition fees are at a record high of £9,250 per annum.

Various governments have floated apprenticeship scheme ambitions as an alternative route into work, beginning with then-chancellor Kenneth Clarke in 1993, David Cameron’s 2015 pledge to create three million apprentices by 2020 and the 2017 introduction of an apprenticeship levy, which has led to a rise of around nine per cent in take-ups. It’s significantly less than the 35 per cent jump in university applicants, however, and also sees far higher dropout figures; a report by education thinktank EDSK last year found that some 47 per cent of apprentices quit before having finished their course, with 70 per cent citing concerns over quality as their reason for giving up.

Sonal Keay assumed that her first hire would be a graduate – but those who applied to her skincare company “lacked zeal and ambition,” she found. Having attended university (and undertaken an apprenticeship, for a barrister) herself, she instead employed a “wonderful” young 19-year-old whose only work experience was with other small business owners.

“It was one of the best decisions I ever made,” Keay, 43, says, citing her employee’s attitude, work ethic and desire to learn as “astounding”. The experience also changed her hiring mindset: “I look at apprentices differently. I see a young person who has decided not to go to university as someone who has assessed their own character, assessed their own finances and decided to take a risk… and most of all, someone who wants, more than anything, to invest in obtaining practical skills for their working life.”

This kind of “pragmatic and lateral thinking” easily beats the “con” of current university courses, Keay adds. She believes that too many have been “brainwashed into thinking that a university degree is a ‘passport’ to the traditional trappings of middle class life” – but that encouraging young people to pursue formal education “for the sake of it may actually psychologically disadvantage a child”.

She has also become aware that having a degree can “engender attitudes of both indebtedness and entitlement at the same time” among staff.

The only graduate she has hired to This is Silk is also the one she fired “because he felt (and stated) he was ‘above’ the other employees because they were apprentices and mothers who had not gone to university…. [he] had a terrible idea that he was superior simply because he had gone to university and this began to show in his work.”

Keay points out that this graduate doesn’t represent all of those who enter employment, and that some careers, such as medicine or law, necessitate formal training. But she thinks that the vast cost of getting a degree now – which leaves the average student in £45,600 of debt – is having a fundamental impact on how new staffers see their work, causing them to prioritise earnings alone. “I am sure that mass university education is linked to our country’s loss of productivity and growth, and I think it is because it trains young people out of taking risks and the importance of ‘doing’.”