GRADUATES ARE “EDUCATED BUT UNTRAINED” INSISTS ROYAL (WHO DIDN’T GO TO UNI)
Prince Andrew has claimed graduates are unprepared for the world of work, and that young people should only regard their university degree as “icing on the cake” when it comes to getting a job – not a guaranteed “route to market”.
The Queen’s son also questioned whether graduates leaving university without commercial experience were “useful people” to an employer as they are “educated but untrained”.
The Duke of York’s comments are likely to anger many graduates who have put in three years of hard work and paid over £27,000 for their degree, especially as the prince did not go to university himself. That’s quite an investment for “icing”.
Prince Andrew – who is carving out a new role as champion for apprenticeships – made the comments while praising the government’s expansion of University Technical Colleges (UTCs), which young people aged 14 to 19 are encouraged to attend before they go to university. Speaking to the Daily Telegraph, he said:
“Coming out of university there’s a tendency to believe that you’re trained as well as educated, which is not actually true.
“In some respects I think that choosing the apprenticeship path and doing a foundation degree and then going on to university you will always have the advantage over many of your university colleagues because you have earned your spurs in the business world before going to university, so you’re going into university as a trained person, you’re not coming out as an untrained person.”
The former Royal Navy helicopter pilot said he believed that offering a more vocational education for 14 to 19-year-olds will turn out teenagers who will have an advantage over many who stay in traditional education. The prince also told students at a UTC in Reading that bringing businesses into the school to set projects and help set the curriculum would give them an edge:
“…because without that business input how are you ever going have a skills knowledge to be able to go into a workplace and be useful people?”
Graduate Fog wonders whether this is the same Prince Andrew who stepped down from his role as the UK’s trade ambassador following a series of scandals over his business contacts – and who has no education expertise whatsoever? If so, we are unclear on why he feels he is in a strong position to lecture today’s graduates about who is a “useful person”, and who is not.
In recent months we have noticed a growing trend for creating yet more stages of (unpaid) training for young people, before they can have a job that provides an actual salary that they can live on. This coincides with a campaign to convince you that without commercial experience your contribution has no monetary value.
Graduate Fog challenges both these trends. Instead, we ask: when are employers and politicians (and waste-of-space minor royals) going to stop bashing Britain’s young people and start backing them by offering proper jobs, training and pay that reflects their valuable contribution to the nation’s workplaces?
*WAS YOUR UNIVERSITY DEGREE JUST “ICING ON THE CAKE”?
What do you think of Prince Andrew’s comments? Do you feel you’ve invested tens of thousands of pounds on “icing” – or has your degree prepared you for the world of work? If a degree is just “icing”, should this be made clearer to young people when they sign up to go to university? Share your views below!
Tanya, I’m afraid I have to agree with Prince Andrew’s key points.
A University degree is, undoubtedly, icing on a cake with work experience (including retail jobs, bar jobs, etc), extra-curricular activities, hobbies, legitimate volunteering and charity work (rather than unpaid work under the guise of ‘volunteering’) etc, being the metaphorical sugar, milk, eggs, flour, etc.
The man I was before a part-time job and the man I was after (during Uni) are two different people. I’m a much better person for it. In contrast, Higher Education changed me very little (except enriching my knowledge). I don’t know if I’d be in the position I am without my part-time job, but I can’t say the same about my degree. However, the degree was evidence of a commitment to academic achievement, and that is an important statement (as part of the whole picture).
The idea that a degree alone equates to a job in this day and age is quite frankly mental. Degrees don’t exist to get you jobs; they exist to screen you as potential academics and deliver funding to Universities from research councils.
I don’t think any of the above requires you to “work for free”. I don’t agree with unpaid internships, and charities have a lot to answer for because they are the worst offenders. But, I can’t say the same about legitimate volunteering and charitable work. There’s a world of difference between organising a bake sale or running a 10k to raise money for charity and the unpaid internships which charities justify as “voluntary”. I don’t believe any student that tells me that in three years of University, they haven’t had the opportunity to do some, if not all, of those activities.
I’m normally very much an advocate for graduates, but I’m afraid that some graduates have it in from themselves from the beginning by not differentiating themselves from the competition and enriching themselves beyond their degree.
I’ve just noticed a re-tweet you’ve made on Twitter “i got a degree yet no work is coming my way”. What a terrible attitude. Maybe that statement alone isn’t the whole picture – I don’t know. But if I were an employer and aware of an applicant saying that, I wouldn’t ask them for interview.
“It’s not what you know but who you know” is as true today as it’s always been. It was not until the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, let the cat out of the bag about internships that I realised I’d been duped by a whole host of professionals into believing that I could get a graduate job.
The country is still ruled by an elite class. It’s changed in character over the centuries, but the aristocracy and the wealthy industrialist families, continue to adapt to the situation they find themselves in, and absorb a small percentage of the lower orders in order to present themselves as a modernizing and progressive force. But make no mistake, it’s a closed shop.
“New” universities have been created to act as a buffer between the rich and the workers. But these universities are not taken seriously and again, unless your parents are entrepreneurs or went to university themselves and pass on the benefits of networking to their children, odds are that you will end up in non-graduate work for many years.
Alan Milburn, social mobility czar, couldn’t change 500 years of history. Tony Blair offered false hope to tens of thousands of working-class parents and their children. Prince Andrew is entitled to his opinion and I am entitled to mine, although I believe he is wrong.
I don’t think he is wrong about graduates being unprepared for the world of work. Some will be and others won’t. I wasn’t, in the sense that I had never had a full-time job until afterwards. The best place to learn about work is while working.
I don’t feel that it’s the job of university to prepare people for work. You are there to study. However, there is a difference when you study for a vocation and when taking other subjects. I don’t think able graduates of vocational subjects are wrong to expect progression in their vocation.
The problem as I see it is that there is a lack of suitable training/opportunities for people to make progress in their chosen career. I’m not talking about dead-end ‘schemes’. We therefore see people languishing in extremely low-paid, temporary work (if at all) and a government celebrating the fact that people have jobs. The issue, as always, is who pays for this lack of investment?
@Simon Hargreaves Do you think employers have a responsibility to train their young staff to make them work-ready? Employers used to hire on potential, whereas now they hire on experience – which seems unreasonable to me for a junior job?!
@Brian Do you believe there are now some industries where it’s impossible to get in if you don’t come from the ‘right’ background, no matter how bright and talented you are? If people don’t have personal contacts already, can’t they create them from scratch?
@ CostaDel
Do you think we need to ask serious questions about what university is actually for?
Hi Tanya, thanks for responding.
Personally, I’ve known what University is for since I was in my early teens. We had a careers advisor in our High School and she asked the question to us “What is the purpose of a University?” to which the inevitable answers from the class came:
1) To equip us with skills for jobs;
2) To teach;
3) To award degrees;
To which she replied “No. They are not there for your benefit. Universities exist to produce research. You are simply there to be screened for suitability and interest in an academic career.”
I don’t think anyone I know took those words on board that day because I have friends who were in that class with me who to this day feel let down by University. But it stuck with me and since then, I have never thought about a degree as a route into a job. I’ve always thought about it as something I did because I wanted to do it, not because I felt I should.
I pass that message on to younger siblings or young people I work with because I think the earlier you realise that, the less you’ll be disappointed when your degree doesn’t land you the dream job you’ve been promised.
@Tanya de Grunwald
That depends on what you mean by ‘work-ready’. Certain skills like writing, reading and arithmetic should already be acquired. If the job requires specific, specialist knowledge or skills that can’t easily be obtained outside of actually working then yes, I think they should be training people. That is obvious and unavoidable.
The point we keep coming back to is: whose responsibility is it to train people to do the job, the state or private employers? We have a lack of training in this country. Why? It is cheaper and less hassle to simply poach the employees of other countries, rather than invest in people here. Something to keep in mind when we hear the phrase ‘skills gap’. Long-term this creates a problem with people losing whatever skills they once had, which encourages more poaching and well, you can see the circulatory here? It’s a self-fulling prophesy.
The royal family and their ilk are all benefits scroungers.
How outdated is that quote. Universities are now a business. Most people go to university not because they want to enter academia but because they need that piece of paper just to get past the screening stage.
You have made the mistake of conflating people’s reasons for going to University with what Universities are trying to accomplish.
I would still stand by that quote today. Simply because Universities have to *act* like businesses in order to compete doesn’t make them businesses. Universities exist to produce academics and therefore research.
Simply because graduate recruiters are asking for “that piece of paper just to get past the screening stage” is irrelevant. There are plenty of other routes into employment than graduate jobs.