There’s nothing quite like the joy of receiving a university offer. It’s a feeling of validation which few other experiences in life can provide; the knowledge that after a calculated appraisal of your strengths and weaknesses, someone in an office somewhere has clicked the relevant button, or maybe put a little tick by your name if they’re particularly old school, and said yes, we want you.
But what if, after all that, you get there and it’s not quite what you thought it would be? Maybe the man in the dreary little office put a tick next to the wrong name after all. As quickly as the pride sets in when you first see that “something has changed on your UCAS track,” it bleeds away again, replaced instead with the niggling sense that you’re only just keeping your head above water.
It’s a feeling familiar to many of us, I’m sure. But for those who actually choose to leave university, it’s usually due to more than just the unpleasant shock of realising that uni isn’t quite like school.
The expectation placed on university as a logical next step from school has increased exponentially in recent decades. Rather than being something bright-eyed youngsters dream of, for many people a degree has become about as optional as school itself. The increasing numbers of school leavers going to uni is of course far from a bad thing, especially given the growing success of students from disadvantaged backgrounds. What the rising number of applicants does do however, is make it increasingly harder for individuals who don’t think higher education is for them, to fight a system which is continually pushing them towards it.
Fintan followed the conventional path, going straight from school to uni in September of 2014. He admits that he always had doubts, but the academic environment of his school made it almost impossible to break away from the rigid yellow brick road which led all the way to the Russell Group. This pressure is likely familiar to anyone who attended a school with a strong emphasis on academics.
Personally, I didn’t apply to uni until a year after I left school, being unsure of what I wanted to do, and wanting to take some time to nd myself on a beach in Thailand before resigning myself to three more years hard slog. But even this raised a few eyebrows from my teachers, despite my assurances that I fully intended to apply the following year. My head of sixth form made me ll out my entire UCAS form anyway, “just in case,” standing over me as I selected entirely arbitrary degree choices. It was clear that she would be signi cantly happier if I simply clicked ‘accept’ and sent o my application to these randomly chosen institutions, rather than taking some time to consider what was actually right for me.
Fintan was under even greater scrutiny during his application. He tells me how, “I attended a public school which gave me a scholarship, and I was expected to show the effectiveness of the scholarship in applying to a challenging subject at a Russell Group university.” In treating his degree choice as a barometer of his worthiness of a scholarship, his school placed an almost unbearable amount of pressure on him. Fintan ultimately left his history course at Glasgow University after less than a term, realising that, under the pressure to get into a suitably prestigious course, he had taken little time to really consider the ins and outs of university life, and the reality of devoting four years to a course largely composed of independent inquiry, as opposed to the heavily guided school experience.
The reality is that few people have a strong grasp of their sense of self at the age of 17. I certainly didn’t, and it’s become abundantly clear to me that simply picking your “best” subject in school and sticking it on your UCAS form is not always for the best. I’ve been lucky, I love my course and frankly I can’t imagine studying anything else, but the same can’t be said for everyone.
Eva, a former E&M student at Oxford, admits that she had her doubts about her subject choice throughout the application process, but was comforted by the fact the Economics is considered a “better” degree.
She says that a major part of the problem was the attitude of her school, where “there was more emphasis on the perceived employment value of your degree, rather than the fact that you’d actually have to study it from 9-5 for three years.”
This is perhaps not an unreasonable outlook taken by teachers and parents, wanting to give the younger generation the best possible start in a market increasingly saturated by graduates. However, the employability of any degree counts for nothing if that degree is never finished.
The commonly held belief that more traditionally academic degrees carry more weight is a tricky one. On the one hand, we all want to believe that we should follow our dreams and do whatever feels right for us, perhaps singing a Disney song along the way. But when degrees are increasingly becoming the norm, how are we supposed to make ourselves stand out from the crowd?
According to UCAS, young people are now 27 per cent more likely to enter higher education than they were ten years ago, an increase which shows no signs of slowing down. I can’t help but wondering, whether sucking it up and applying for a more “prestigious” degree, might actually do you better in the long run.
For some students, like Eva, taking time to reflect and determine upon the right path can make all the difference. Eva considers it “far more inspiring to speak to someone who is genuinely interested in what they do.” Having successfully changed courses, it is clear that for Eva, it was not university it- self that was the problem, but the pressure to apply before being truly prepared. It’s a fine line to tread—keeping the balance between happiness and employability. It’s an equilibrium that Jess struggled to attain in the years following her departure from school. Encouraged by teachers, she applied to St Andrews to study Art History, repressing her desire to go to do a more practical art and design course.
Despite achieving an A* in her art A-Level, Jess was worried that she wouldn’t be able to keep up if she went to art school, and “had very little positive encouragement from teachers to change my mind on this.” This seems shocking that the very people supposedly employed to “mould young minds” would discourage a talented pupil in such a way, but the reality is that many schools are more concerned with statistics than the individual. What is particularly notable about Jess’s story however, is that she says she was worried about missing out on the “university experience.”
This myth of the university experience is drummed into us from a young age, with popular culture perpetuating the idea that uni will be a non-stop dance party with all the greatest people you’ll ever meet. I think we can all agree that the reality is somewhat different. Jess
realised this by her second semester at university, when she was left feeling “unfulfilled by my course and […] like I was there to party and conform to expectations.”
Fearing that she had missed the opportunity to do what she really wanted, Jess left St Andrews and is now studying Art in Edinburgh.
Such a decision is admirable, but also leaves me wondering how many students there are, trapped in institutions up and down the country, who are desperate to make just such a leap of faith? University should be a privi- lege, not a punishment, but the increasingly unbearable pressure placed on young people to get a “good” degree, means that the reverse is often becoming true.
For our parent’s generation, a degree from a respected university offered an almost guaranteed fairy tale path to a bright future. Graduate unemployment figures prove that this is no longer the case. So why do “grown-ups” continue heaping pressure on our generation to follow the same join-the-dots route to happiness that they did?
While university works for many, it just doesn’t for others, and the presumption that higher education is the only indicator of intellectual success only serves to make those with legitimate reasons for not going to university feel like failures.
All in all, I think perhaps an easing up of pressure in school environments could do a lot of good, not only for students themselves, but for a society which is clearly vying for its own sense of intellectual validation.