University Challenged

Britain's universities are currently running open days, inviting prospective students to come for a look-see, to decide at which campus they want to study after their A levels. Our younger daughter has just embarked on her second year of Sixth Form, so we've begun the round of university visits. This Saturday we aim to go to Liverpool Hope; a few weeks ago we went to Southampton. As we wandered around the campus at Southampton it dawned on me that this was probably the first time I had ever set foot in a university. I'll discount the University of East London (UEL) on the grounds that I only did a HNC in Business Studies there on day release and besides it was called the North East London Polytechnic then, and in all honesty, the course was not much harder that A levels (in fact the Economics was easier).

The old North East London Poly, later UEL, now flats..  © Copyright Glyn Baker and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

There is clearly a difference in expectations for school leavers now compared with when I was a teenager. I left school in 1976, proud of my A levels in English Literature, Economics and Geography. I got a B, an E and a C respectively, grades that would be unlikely to get me into any university now, but back then fewer people took A levels. Merely passing one, let alone three was cause for celebration, so I was chuffed. It was only in 1972 that the school leaving age in the UK had been raised to 16, so by 1974 when I reached that age, it was only just becoming the norm for children to take O levels let alone A levels. Now, children born after 1st September 1997 must remain in full time education until they are 18 unless they take an apprenticeship or a job that provides training and the custom is increasingly to study for A levels. As time goes on, going to university will increasingly become the norm, but in 1976 it was the exception; well, it was at my school. I cannot recall anyone actively considering going on to university, although I'm sure a few must have.

 My parents, who both had modestly paid factory jobs at the time, were not all that keen on my taking A levels, since they could really have done with another wage coming into the house in 1974. That year, when I could have left school, I had no idea what I wanted to do for a living. I envied (and still envy) those people who have a career ambition, but I had none, so Sixth Form was, apart from anything else, a two year thinking space. I remember my Mum saying, "I hope you're not going to spend two years in Sixth Form and then just get a job in a bank," because I could have got a job in a bank at 16. After two years of A level studies, a job in a bank was precisely what I got. Not because I especially wanted one, but because they were easy to get and I still didn't know what I wanted to do. Forty years on, and now retired, I still don't know what I would have liked to have done.

 In 1976 there were 1.3 million people unemployed in Britain, but you wouldn't have known it if you were a teenager, fresh out of school, looking for your first job. Banks, insurance companies and the Civil Service all recruited large numbers of school leavers each year; many of my peers had multiple offers but more out of a sense of inertia than anything else, I accepted the first offer I got, from Midland Bank. A job in a bank, or an insurance company and especially with the Civil Service, was then considered to be a job for life. Banks were very labour intensive, with highly manual processes and there was a career path of sorts that many followed. Nowadays the job for life is as rare as hens teeth; today's school leaver or university graduate should instead be prepared to acquire the sort of  transferrable skills that will help make them employable for life.

I mentioned that one of my A levels was in Geography, which is the subject my daughter wants to study at university. On our trip to the University of Southampton, I joined her at the talks on the subject. There are several courses, including Population Geography (PopGeog  as it is referred to by students and lecturers, and to my daughter's disapproval, me as well) and the way the university sold them made me want to go and study the subject there, especially PopGeog.

Gardens on the Highfield Campus of the University of Southampton. Photo: Iamtheabelman

I didn't particularly like Geography at school; I did an A level in it because the teachers thought I was good at it, but there were some elements that I enjoyed more than others. Economic and social geography were fine, but physical geography and practical geography (most of which seemed to consist of converting an Ordnance Survey map into a cross-sectional diagram, or vice versa) were not especially my cup of tea. I remember coming out of an astonishingly hard practical A level exam to see my ashen faced teachers shaking their heads and muttering about it being the hardest paper they had ever seen. Fortunately the economic geography paper featured questions that were so close to what our teachers had predicted that they may as well have written the paper. That I have always felt is a great skill in a teacher, being able to predict with any sort of accuracy, the types of questions that will feature in the exams. Looking back, it seems to me that in all three A level subjects my teachers were pretty good at identifying the topics likely to come up.

Back in 1976, leaving school at 16, with or without O levels, did not make you unemployable, although passes in Maths and English helped in finding employment. Having A levels did not necessarily get you a better job (it entitled me to a few bob a week more than if I hadn't got them though). Today's school leavers , even with decent A levels, may feel that they are at a disadvantage when compared with university graduates as it seems that expectations are (among employers and the potential employees) that higher levels of qualifications are constantly necessary to differentiate between the jobseekers.

There's a saying that youth is wasted on the young; in some ways that is true of education too. At 16 or even 18, possibly even at 21, education is just a means to an end, the A level differentiating from those with "just" GCSE's and the degree differentiating from those with "just" A levels in the race to get a better job. How much satisfaction university students get from their studies is moot, although I do think that those years at university must be responsible for teaching them some invaluable life skills.  Looking back at my 18 year old self, there were several reasons why I did not consider going to university; if I had the opportunity now, I think my decision would be different. I'm not sure how much I would have appreciated or enjoyed it then; rather less than I would now, I suspect.