Ten years from graduating, I'm still not sure university was a good decision

I studied English, slept a lot and developed an aversion to ‘hard’ books. Was university anything more than an expensive blip? asks Eleanor Margolis in The Guardian


 

‘I suppose I’d say, ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’, but I was asleep the week I was supposed to read A Tale of Two Cities.’ Photograph: incamerastock / Alamy/Alamy


Under my bed, in a shoebox covered in dust, lie a disused strap-on and my degree. In a sense, this physical copy of my 2:1 in English literature from a middle-ranking university is the most expensive thing I own. This month marks 10 years since I graduated into a thumping recession and – joke’s on you, Student Loans Company – a whole decade in which I haven’t paid off a single penny of my student debt. A fact that has made me look back on those three years, all that time ago, I spent at uni and wonder – what exactly was that?

Obviously, I was incredibly lucky to go to university. Especially at a time when tuition fees were a third of what they are now. Or – perhaps more pertinently – at a time where a global pandemic wasn’t sending the entire education system into a very real existential crisis. I was lucky that my middle classness made higher education an inevitability. Like growing boobs and starting my period, university was a fact of life. When it came to choosing my degree, I simply went with the subject I’d always done best in at school.

It never occurred to me there was any other way. But this was when I was still a a perpetually horny, semi-closeted lesbian teenager with depression and anxiety up to the eyeballs, and the self-esteem of a naked mole rat that finds itself in a hall of mirrors. I was in no way ready to make a major life decision that would cost me tens of thousands of pounds. I had no idea who I was yet, let alone how I should be spending the next three years of my existence.

I assumed I’d muddle through it – just how I’d muddled through GCSEs and A-levels. You do the reading, you churn out essays, you progress to whatever the next thing is that’s expected of you. Plus, the work side of things was a minor consideration compared to the thought of all the other queer girls I might meet. It was going to be fun, eye-opening, vital.

It was and it wasn’t. Over the next three years I would date boys, become even more anxious and depressed, and cultivate a resentment towards “hard” books. To this day, I suffer from a sort of reading-induced narcolepsy. I’ve always been a painfully slow reader; being given a week to read Ulysses along with fluttering mounds of literary theory so dense you’d think it had escaped from the Cern lab, was not a recipe for happiness. When I’m stressed, I sleep. Even by students’ sleepy reputation, I was practically comatose for three-quarters of the time. On the flipside, I made good friends, learned what “dasein” meant, and came out as gay. I suppose I’d say, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”, but I was asleep the week I was supposed to read A Tale of Two Cities.

How much of life do we do simply because it’s the “done thing”? Last month, Euan Blair, the son of that guy who was very into the idea that getting more people into higher education was the best way to even the societal playing field, wrote in the Times that degrees are now “irrelevant.” His argument that we need to “retrain the nation” was especially spammy coming from someone who runs a tech startup specialising in apprenticeships.

Should I really have gone to university? I honestly don’t know. All the jobs I’ve ever applied for have required a degree, but then again no one’s ever asked to see the scrap of paper in the dildo box under my bed. What if I’d said I have a first in sub-linear aquatics from Mary Berry College, Cambridge, and ended up in a better position than I’m in now?

What I do know is that if I had the opportunity to go back to university, now would be the time I could actually make the most out of it. At 31, not only do I have a greater sense of who I am, but I know what fascinates me. I’m infinitely more receptive to learning now than I was at 18; and I wish I hadn’t so brazenly pissed my university experience up the wall. When I think of the seminars I turned up to without having done the reading, I feel queasy. If university has played no definable role in the 10 years since I graduated, and I didn’t have the awareness to milk it for everything it was worth at the time, then I ask – once again – what was it? Other than a very expensive and quite interesting blip.

And all the while, I could have just done a Marcus Rashford and become a world-class footballer, led a successful campaign against child poverty, and got an honorary degree – all without going to university. You know, the easy route.

Is your university degree barely worth the paper it’s written on? Discuss

Sonia Sodha in The Guardian

In the past few decades we’ve seen a huge growth in undergraduate numbers. Back in 1945, a tiny 2% of the population went to university; today, just over 43% of young people in England go; the latest prediction is that an extra 300,000 places will be needed by 2030. We’re frequently told that graduates earn more on average than non-graduates; that universities boost local economies; and, of course, that a degree stretches the mind and nurtures critical thinking. Those who interrogate this logic are easily dismissed as philistines, or reactionaries who don’t care that expansion has occurred alongside record numbers of disadvantaged young people going to university.

But the thinking around why we’ve expanded undergraduate education so significantly is rather woolly. Is more always better? What are we hoping to achieve by sending ever greater numbers to university, apart from widening access (which could instead be achieved through the use of quotas for young people from poorer backgrounds for university admissions)?

The economics professor Bryan Caplan raises an important question in a controversial new book, The Case Against Education. How much of the benefits of a degree comes from the skills you acquire in studying for it? And how much from the piece of paper at the end – what your degree certificate signals to employers about the skills and attributes you might have had long before you filled in a university application form?

Universities UK claims that the institutions add over £60bn worth of skills with each cohort of graduates. But this analysis simply wishes away Caplan’s question by assuming all the higher earning that graduates get is down to the skills they pick up doing their degree.

The truth is that a fair bit of the earnings boost provided by a degree – we don’t know how much – is likely to come from the fact that a graduate has, in the eyes of employers, jumped through a hoop in a world where growing numbers of their peers are doing likewise. If everyone else going for that bar job has a degree, you’d better have one too. It’s becoming more common to have a degree in jobs for which you wouldn’t have needed one 30 years ago. South Korea provides a cautionary tale: 70% of the country’s school-leavers go to university, but recent graduates are facing relatively high rates of unemployment, and it is not unheard of to find graduates working as caretakers.

Boosting earning potential is not the only reason we send young people to university. But to go beyond that, we need to be able to better answer the age-old question of what undergraduate education is for. A distinction is often drawn between those who see its primary purpose as the expansion of the mind that comes from learning for learning’s sake – and those who see it as providing important vocational training for specific jobs. Both traditions have a longstanding history in our system.

The philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues powerfully that in an increasingly uncertain world, it has never been more important for universities to “educate the imagination” rather than impart specific skills. She’s not alone: the technology giant Apple has poached renowned thinkers such as Joshua Cohen to be part of the faculty at its employee “university”; Silicon Valley firms are recruiting not just computer whizzes but liberal arts grads.

With the absorption of polytechnics back in the 1990s, universities have played a growing role in vocational training – and not just for professions like engineering or nursing. Universities are increasingly focusing on graduate “employability”; one new university that promises to take its students on a “personal development journey” is even guaranteeing them all a one-year work placement at companies such as Microsoft as part of a three-year degree.

So perhaps we don’t have to zero in specifically on what we want universities to achieve with young people. The former higher education minister David Willetts is very relaxed about the notion that different courses do different things: studying history might be great preparation for some non-history related jobs; but he’s also a big fan of universities that have a great reputation for specific skills, like construction at Southbank or media production at Bournemouth.

But this still doesn’t answer the Caplan challenge. When it comes to hospitals and schools, we have impartial – albeit imperfect – data about how good they are at fulfilling their missions. Because universities award their own degrees, and firsts from different universities cannot be regarded as comparable, this is a difficult task for undergraduate education. This is a problem, particularly given we don’t really know whether university is the best place to pick up “on the job” skills, or whether we are trying to emulate in our universities – at much greater cost to taxpayers and students – what employers would have once provided.

Trying to generate good and comparable data about the skills young people develop as a result of studying for a degree is not without risks of reductionism. But if universities think their courses expand creativity, nurture critical thinking and develop important workplace skills, surely they should be up for putting that to the test?

This is critical in a world where it is entirely rational for individuals to opt to go to university so they can compete on a level playing field – even if they suspect the skills they develop might not in themselves be worth the price-tag or time. It might be difficult to develop the measures we need to test the hunch behind the established education consensus that more is better. But we owe it to young people to at least try.

What To Do After You Graduate College

Gary Vaynerchuk

I’m scared. I’m scared because I know exactly what happens around this month every year. There are so many of you who have graduated (or will be graduating) and still have no idea what you want to do with your life. And you know what? That’s ok! Most people don’t. You shouldn’t be stressed about that. What I’m scared about is that you don’t realize that you are entering the greatest 5-year window of your life.

If you are 22 years old, regardless if you’re graduating from college or not, there are two things you should keep in mind. The first is to acknowledge that you are entering some of the greatest years of your life. The second is that this is the moment when you don’t go practical—don’t take the “safe” route. This is NOT the time to get the job Mom always wanted you to get. This is NOT the time to try to maximize as much money as you can make so you can save up to buy a sick ride. This IS the time, however, to realize that you have a five-year window (three for some, eight for others) for you to attack the life that you want to win.

Something else that scares me is the naïveté of what the world is like after graduation. I am by no means saying that “winning” is going to be easy. It’s not. What you’ve been doing for the last 16 years is easy. Classes and school are easy because they’re structured. The world? It’s hard. It changes every day.

The fact is that the world is going to be exactly the way it is going to be without regard to the way you thought it would be, think it should be, or whatever big plans you’ve already made for yourself. Your parents might have already told you it’ll be one way, but they don’t really know. They just want you to do what they think is best, which usually means avoiding big risks. But, what you need to recognize is that now is the time when you can afford to take those risks.

What I wrote above is going to contradict what I’m about to tell you now. Even though the real world is hard, the next five years of your life will be the opposite. These will be the best and easiest years of your life because it’s your chance to attack what you love and try out what you want to do. Why? Because you don’t have all the baggage.

Look, I understand you might have college loans. I respect that financial debt is a real hardship. You may have to live up to the expectations of your parents. That’s mentally hard—fake hard. You may have many other obligations, but this time is exactly when you can live with 4 roommates in a basement and eat fast food.

Most of you don’t have children yet. Most of you are not married and have not yet promised your life to someone else. So, this is the time before the world has sucked out all your hopes and dreams. You still have this window—the next five years to help you achieve your goals.

Time is the number one asset and now is when you have the most flexibility to use it.

I’m sure some people will leave comments about their loans or whatever other financial obligations they might have. Again, I respect that. But one way or the other, that loan is going to be there whether you build something for yourself or not in these five years. I truly believe that you can wake up on your 26th or 27th birthday, start being practical, and still pay off your loans and any other debts. While I’m sure those obligations might have compounded interest, leaving the opportunity of “going for it” in those five years (especially if you have entrepreneurial DNA) is a mistake and actually lacks practicality.

Yet, so many of you are so hungry for short term gains right after college. For example, you would rather take the job that maximizes your pay at $3,000 more a year, despite the fact that you would have enjoyed a lower paying job more suited for you. For what? For a new iPhone? A slightly nicer apartment? You get to live life one time.

(By the way, you can work at night! This is when you put in your 18 hours a day to make the life that you want happen. That’s practicality.)

Promise me, all you youngsters who are reading this, that you understand that the land grab for happiness starts right now. You don’t have to worry about getting “that job.” What you should do is go and travel and learn. Go and start that business you always wanted. Travel with those three friends and start that band. This is the time to be massively risk oriented. There will be plenty of time to be risk averse later. Now is the time to understand what’s actually happening and map your behavior to something that will impact you for the next 80 years of your life.

When you are in your early 20s, this is when you can grind at your highest level because you don’t have the baggage that comes later in life. It’s harder for the 42 years olds to listen to this advice. At that point, you can’t just wake up tomorrow and say “let’s go” because little Sally has soccer practice and you have a million other things that are holding you down.

If you are lucky enough to be graduating today without any clue what about what you want to do with your future, no one’s ever been luckier than you. Please recognize that.

Brexit is a disaster, but we can build on the ruins

 

A voter leaves a polling station at the Elim Pentecostal church in Merthyr Tydfil, south Wales. Photograph: Matthew Horwood/Getty Images


GeorgeMonbiot in The Guardian


Let’s sack the electorate and appoint a new one: this is the demand made by MPs, lawyers and the 4 million people who have signed the petition calling for a second referendum. It’s a cry of pain, and therefore understandable, but it’s also bad politics and bad democracy. Reduced to its essence, it amounts to graduates telling nongraduates: “We reject your democratic choice.”

Were this vote to be annulled (it won’t be), the result would be a full-scale class and culture war, riots and perhaps worse, pitching middle-class progressives against those on whose behalf they have claimed to speak, and permanently alienating people who have spent their lives feeling voiceless and powerless.

Yes, the Brexit vote has empowered the most gruesome collection of schemers, misfits, liars, extremists and puppets that British politics has produced in the modern era. It threatens to invoke a new age of demagoguery, a threat sharpened by the thought that if this can happen, so can Donald Trump.

It has provoked a resurgence of racism and an economic crisis whose dimensions remain unknown. It jeopardises the living world, the NHS, peace in Ireland and the rest of the European Union. It promotes what the billionaire Peter Hargreaves gleefully anticipated as “fantastic insecurity”.

But we’re stuck with it. There isn’t another option, unless you favour the years of limbo and chaos that would ensue from a continued failure to trigger article 50. It’s not just that we have no choice but to accept the result; we should embrace it and make of it what we can.

It’s not as if the system that’s now crashing around us was functioning. The vote could be seen as a self-inflicted wound, or it could be seen as the eruption of an internal wound inflicted over many years by an economic oligarchy on the poor and the forgotten. The bogus theories on which our politics and economics are founded were going to collide with reality one day. The only questions were how and when.

Yes, the Brexit campaign was led by a political elite, funded by an economic elite and fuelled by a media elite. Yes, popular anger was channelled towards undeserving targets – migrants.

But the vote was also a howl of rage against exclusion, alienation and remote authority. That is why the slogan “take back control” resonated. If the left can’t work with this, what are we for?

So here is where we find ourselves. The economic system is not working, except for the likes of Philip Green. Neoliberalism has not delivered the meritocratic nirvana its theorists promised, but a rentiers’ paradise, offering staggering returns to whoever grabs the castle first while leaving productive workers on the wrong side of the moat.

The age of enterprise has become the age of unearned income, the age of the market the age of market failure, the age of opportunity a steel cage of zero-hours contracts, precarity and surveillance.

The political system is not working. Whoever you vote for, the same people win, because where power claims to be is not where power is.

Parliaments and councils embody paralysed force, gesture without motion, as the real decisions are taken elsewhere: by the money, for the money. Governments have actively conspired in this shift, negotiating fake trade treaties behind their voters’ backs to prevent democracy from controlling corporate capital.

Unreformed political funding ensures that parties have to listen to the rustle of notes before the bustle of votes. In Britain these problems are compounded by an electoral system that ensures most votes don’t count. This is why a referendum is almost the only means by which people can be heard, and why attempting to override it is a terrible idea.

Culture is not working. A worldview that insists both people and place are fungible is inherently hostile to the need for belonging. For years now we have been told that we do not belong, that we should shift out without complaint while others are shifted in to take our place.

When the peculiarities of community and place are swept away by the tides of capital, all that’s left is a globalised shopping culture, in which we engage with glazed passivity. Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chainstores.

In all these crises are opportunities – opportunities to reject, connect and erect, to build from these ruins a system that works for the people of this country rather than for an offshore elite that preys on insecurity.

If it is true that Britain will have to renegotiate its trade treaties, is this not the best chance we’ve had in decades to contain corporate power – of insisting that companies that operate here must offer proper contracts, share their profits, cut their emissions and pay their taxes? Is it not a chance to regain control of the public services slipping from our grasp?

How will politics in this sclerotic nation change without a maelstrom? In this chaos we can, if we are quick and clever, find a chance to strike a new contract: proportional representation, real devolution and a radical reform of campaign finance to ensure that millionaires can never again own our politics.

Remote authority has been rejected, so let’s use this moment to root our politics in a common celebration of place, to fight the epidemic of loneliness and rekindle common purpose, transcending the tensions between recent and less recent migrants (which means everyone else). In doing so, we might find a language in which liberal graduates can talk with the alienated people of Britain, rather than at them.

But most importantly, let’s address the task that the left and the centre have catastrophically neglected: developing a political and economic philosophy fit for the 21st century, rather than repeatedly microwaving the leftovers of the 20th (neoliberalism and Keynesianism). If the history of the last 80 years tells us anything, it’s that little changes without a new and ferocious framework of thought.
So yes, despair and rage and curse at what has happened: there are reasons enough to do so. But then raise your eyes to where hope lies.

What the great degree rip-off means for graduates: low pay and high debt

Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian

 

‘Ministers needed to sell universities to teenagers and their families – and in the process they have mis-sold them.’ Illustration: Bill Bragg



A few years back, I got my knuckles rapped by a government minister. In public. It was 2010: David Cameron had just come to power, and he was about to thrust university students into a new regime of higher tuition fees and debt.

Against that backdrop, I’d written a column criticising the way in which both Labour and Conservative governments marketed degrees as being some kind of social-mobility jetpack, zooming their wearers to more money and high-powered jobs. It was no such guarantee, I said, citing among other things Whitehall’s own plunging estimates of how much more graduates earn over a lifetime. Graduates, I said, would “probably end up doing similar work to their school-leaver parents – only with a debilitatingly large debt around their necks”.

For David Willetts, then universities minister, this was sheer and unpalatable sauce. In a speech to the annual conference of Universities UK, representing the top management of higher education, he named me – then tried to shame me. I was “wrong”, he claimed. Previous governments had indeed claimed that a graduate could expect to pull in £400,000 more over their lifetime than someone who hadn’t been to university. And, yes, his officials had knocked that estimate down to £100,000. But the difference, you see, was nothing to do with the increase in graduates – but “an improved methodology”. So I was “not comparing like with like”. Two Brains, one slap!

Willetts has since left parliament and gone to a far, far better place: the Resolution Foundation, an inequality thinktank that does much better work than the coalition government ever managed. But looking back, I shouldn’t have been surprised by either the reproof or the forum in which it was made. To sprinkle even a little doubt over the instrumental value of a degree is to take on both the well-paid managers of our universities, and Whitehall orthodoxy.

Higher education is “a phenomenal investment”, Conservative ministers tell us – even with tuition fees at nine grand a year. Repayments are only the equivalent of one “posh coffee” a day, according to the then universities minister Greg Clark (who is now communities secretary). “I think people recognise that that is a phenomenal investment,” he said. “It’s not just a good investment for the student, but actually it’s a good investment for the taxpayer.” I’ve seen ads on daytime TV for loans that do a softer sell than that.

And the marketing is still wrong. Take a look at research published last week by a team of economists from Cambridge, Harvard and the Institute for Fiscal Studies. They found that at 23 universities men typically earned less even 10 years after graduating than their counterparts who’d never been. The disparities are so yawningly wide that it makes a nonsense of talking about the “graduate premium”.

A student of economics at the LSE may walk into a City job and very soon be earning six figures. Their life and career will be utterly different from someone doing business studies, say, at a post-1992 university close to home in the north-east, and then chooses to work in the same area. Yet both are deluged with the official and industrial marketing that a mortar board and gown is worth an extra £100,000 over a lifetime.

Both New Labour and the dwindling band of Cameronian Conservatives have peddled the line that higher education breaks down class barriers. Again, untrue: last week’s research shows that students from the richest families did better than everyone else in the graduate job market – and earned far more than even those who’d done the same course at the same university at the same time.

Ministers needed to sell universities to teenagers and their families – and in the process they have mis-sold them. In this new world of tuition fees and debt, children and their parents have been assured that degrees earn big salaries. At the same time, voters have been told that higher education brings social mobility. Both claims have been made far too broadly – and the losers are those now coming out of university with 50 grand owing to the student loan company, a socking great overdraft and the discovery that internships and coffee shops are the only prospects.

I and others have argued down the years that there is no point in creating more graduates unless you have more graduate-level jobs. Such a position strikes me as being so obvious as to be crass, but it has been ignored by successive governments.

The result can be seen in research published last August by the Oxford economists Ken Mayhew and Craig Holmes. They found that the UK now has proportionately more graduates than any other rich country bar Iceland – yet uses their brains much less than most other countries: the “underutilisation” of graduates – at work but not using their skills – is higher in the UK than anywhere in the EU bar Romania, Greece, Croatia, Latvia and Slovenia.

So what are our graduates doing? Jobs that previously didn’t need a degree. Over one in 10 childminders (11.5%, according to the 2014 Labour Force Survey) are graduates. One in six call-centre staff have degrees, as do about one in four of all air cabin crew and theme-park attendants. In a labour market flooded with graduates, picky employers are now able to take the CVs boasting a university education. And so any young person who didn’t go to university now stands to be treated as a second-class employee.

And universities – with the connivance of their vice-chancellors and marketing departments – have allowed themselves to be sold to the public largely as CV-finishing schools. It is a gross act of vandalism to have committed on a higher education system that the rest of the world once admired. And it has displaced all the other values that accrue both to the individual and to society from education. Critical thinking, public knowledge? You won’t get much change for those from a government that plans to gag academics from using their publicly funded research to question public policy and hold politicians to account.

As for Willetts, he owes me an apology. But nothing like as big as the one he and his colleagues owe to tens of thousands of university graduates, stuck in low-paying jobs that don’t use their expensively acquired skills and certainly don’t pay off their vast debts.

How a corporate cult captures and destroys our best graduates

George Monbiot in The Guardian

‘

People who had spent the preceding years laying out exultant visions of a better world were suddenly sucked into the mouths of corporations dangling money like angler fish.’ Photograph: Daniel Pudles

To seek enlightenment, intellectual or spiritual; to do good; to love and be loved; to create and to teach: these are the highest purposes of humankind. If there is meaning in life, it lies here.

Those who graduate from the leading universities have more opportunity than most to find such purpose. So why do so many end up in pointless and destructive jobs? Finance, management consultancy, advertising, public relations, lobbying: these and other useless occupations consume thousands of the brightest students. To take such jobs at graduation, as many will in the next few weeks, is to amputate life close to its base.

I watched it happen to my peers. People who had spent the preceding years laying out exultant visions of a better world, of the grand creative projects they planned, of adventure and discovery, were suddenly sucked into the mouths of corporations dangling money like angler fish.

At first they said they would do it for a year or two, “until I pay off my debts”. Soon afterwards they added: “and my mortgage”. Then it became, “I just want to make enough not to worry any more”. A few years later, “I’m doing it for my family”. Now, in middle age, they reply, “What, that? That was just a student fantasy.”

Why did they not escape, when they perceived that they were being dragged away from their dreams? I have come to see the obscene hours some new recruits must work – sometimes 15 or 16 a day – as a form of reorientation, of brainwashing. You are deprived of the time, sleep and energy you need to see past the place into which you have been plunged. You lose your bearings, your attachments to the world you inhabited before, and become immersed in the culture that surrounds you. Two years of this and many are lost for life.

Employment by the City has declined since the financial crash. Among the universities I surveyed with the excellent researcher John Sheil, the proportion of graduates taking jobs in finance and management consultancy ranges from 5% at Edinburgh to 13% at Oxford, 16% at Cambridge, 28% at the London School of Economics and 60% at the London Business School. But to judge by the number of applications and the rigour of the selection process, these businesses still harvest many of the smartest graduates.

Recruitment begins with lovebombing of the kind that cults use. They sponsor sports teams and debating societies, throw parties, offer meals and drinks, send handwritten letters, use student ambassadors to offer friendship and support. They persuade undergraduates that even if they don’t see themselves as consultants or bankers (few do), these jobs are stepping stones to the careers they really want. They make the initial application easy, and respond immediately and enthusiastically to signs of interest. They offer security and recognition when people are most uncertain and fearful about their future. And there’s the flash of the king’s shilling: the paid internships, the golden hellos, the promise of stupendous salaries within a couple of years. Entrapment is a refined science.

We have but one life. However much money we make, we cannot buy it back. As far as self-direction, autonomy and social utility are concerned, many of those who enter these industries and never re-emerge might as well have locked themselves in a cell at graduation. They lost it all with one false step, taken at a unique moment of freedom

.
We have but one life. However much money we make, we cannot buy it back.

John Sheil and I sent questions to eight of the universities with the highest average graduate salaries: Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, the LSE, the London Business School, Warwick, Sheffield and Edinburgh. We asked whether they seek to counter these lavish recruitment drives and defend students from the love blitz. With one remarkable exception, their responses ranged from feeble to dismal. Most offered no evidence of any prior interest in these questions. Where we expected deep deliberation to have taken place, we found instead an intellectual vacuum.

They cited their duty of impartiality, which, they believe, prevents them from seeking to influence students’ choices, and explained that there were plenty of other careers on offer. But they appear to have confused impartiality with passivity. Passivity in the face of unequal forces is anything but impartial. Impartiality demands an active attempt to create balance, to resist power, to tell the dark side of the celestial tale being pummelled into the minds of undergraduates by the richest City cults.

Oxford University asked us, “isn’t it preferable that [the City] recruits bright, critical thinkers and socially engaged graduates who are smart enough to hold their employers to account when possible?”. Oh blimey. This is a version ofthe most desperate excuse my college friends attempted: “I’ll reform them from within.” This magical thinking betrays a profound misconception about the nature and purpose of such employers.

They respond to profit, the regulatory environment, the demands of shareholders, not to the consciences of their staff. We all know how they treat whistleblowers. Why should “bright, critical thinkers and socially engaged graduates” be dispatched on this kamikaze mission? I believe these universities are failing in their duty of care.
 

The hero of this story is Gordon Chesterman, head of the careers service at Cambridge, and the only person we spoke to who appears to have given some thought to these questions. He told me his service tries to counter the influence of the richest employers.

It sends out regular emails telling students “if you don’t want to become a banker, you’re not a failure”, and runs an event called “But I don’t want to work in the City”. It imposes a fee on rich recruiters and uses the money to pay the train fares of nonprofits. He expressed anger about being forced by the government to provide data on graduate starting salaries.

“I think it’s a very blunt and inappropriate means [of comparison], that rings alarm bells in my mind.”

Elsewhere, at this vulnerable, mutable, pivotal moment, undergraduates must rely on their own wavering resolve to resist peer pressure, the herd instinct, the allure of money, flattery, prestige and security.

Students, rebel against these soul-suckers! Follow your dreams, however hard it may be, however uncertain success might seem.

A very different sort of young cricketer

Will Macpherson in Cricinfo

New South Wales batsman Ryan Carters reads Aldous Huxley, backpacks in Central Asia, and is passionate about helping less fortunate youngsters complete their education


Ryan Carters: majoring in economics and aiming for a Test cap © Getty Images



You'll read plenty about Ryan Carters over the next few years. Sure, you'll read about his cricket, which continues to tick along very nicely indeed, but many of those column inches will be about Carters himself. They will present the young Australian wicketkeeper-batsman as different. Different to modern cricketers, different to the sportsmen whose macho exploits and muddled platitudes fill the back pages, different even to other "normal" young men in their mid-twenties with their normal jobs and normal interests.

And it's true. So far, Carters has had led a cricketing life less ordinary. An on-field career started in his hometown Canberra before a move to Victoria and then, when Matthew Wade's presence provided few opportunities, a swap from Melbourne to Sydney, home to Brad Haddin and Peter Nevill, Australia's first-choice glovemen.

A curious move, but one that has paid off, not behind the stumps but in front of them as an opening batsman. In New South Wales' victorious 2013-14 Sheffield Shield season, Carters managed three centuries in his 861 runs opening the batting. The season just ended was less spectacular for state and player - a third-placed finish and 448 runs at 32 - but did contain one gem of an innings, 198 against Queensland shortly before the Shield broke up for its Big Bash holidays. The guy can clearly play and, as those moves suggest, is pretty fearless.

So, off the field. Why is he different to the rest? In the course of our 45-minute chat at the SCG, we cover ground over which my professional career had not yet taken me: Aldous Huxley's experimentation with mescaline and subsequent recollections in The Doors of Perception; the culture of Central Asian countries such as Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan; and the Australian gambling culture. For the record, the first is what Carters and his book club have just finished reading, the second is where he'll spend his off season travelling and exploring, and the third is the reason he feels his charity, Batting for Change, has enjoyed success so far. It's not, to say the least, all telly and Tinder, Nando's and nightclubs.

"Dougie [Bollinger] calls me 'the philosophy major'," Carters laughs, when asked whether he is a little different to his team-mates. "Which is actually false… because I'm majoring in economics!"

Indeed, away from the field, the studies that followed his cricket from Melbourne University to Sydney after a top-of-the-class school career, the philanthropy, and love of reading place him firmly in the "bookish" category alongside - among others - his friend Eddie Cowan and Cambridge grad Mike Atherton, who famously mistook the letters "FEC" graffitied on his Lancashire locker to mean "future England captain", when in fact the second letter stood for "educated" and the first and third were as coarse as the English language can muster.



Carters on his way to 198 against Queensland in the 2014-15 Sheffield Shield © Getty Images

"You get a few jokes about being educated," says Carters, smiling effortlessly but incessantly the whole time. "It's always been Nerds versus Julios in Australian cricket and I'm definitely on the nerds' side of that equation. I have a lot of interests that maybe aren't typical of sportsmen my age but I reckon a cricket team is basically a cross section of the different young men you encounter in society. Not everyone is some kind of jock and not everyone is from the same background."

Whatever his interests and whether they are similar to those he works with, it's clear that Carters has a pretty broad view of the world that filters into his cricket.

"Cricket provides an interesting and unusual schedule and this off season I'm going to take advantage of that. Every second week we're away playing a match interstate but now we have a load of time off. Usually I've used this period to study but this is the first time in the last five years that I've decided to get away from it all. First, I'm visiting Nepal, where Batting for Change worked last year. They're holding a tribute match to Phillip Hughes there in April [Carters' side, Team Red, won by one run], then in June and July, I'm playing club cricket for Oxford in the UK.

"But between that I'll take a month completely off the grid for the road trip through central Asia, just driving and camping. It's an important thing to do, to just reset, see where you're at away from daily demands. It's not the classic travel spot for guys our age but that's one of the reasons it appeals. We [two school friends] went to Mongolia two years ago and fell in love with that part of the world, so thought we'd try something else off the beaten track. You don't really know what you're going to encounter, which is exciting."

He admits that the breadth and depth of his extra-curricular interests mean he hasn't much time for cricket when he's not playing, which seems healthy. For all the book-worming, he doesn't read about cricket (although Cowan has recommended CLR James' Beyond a Boundary) and doesn't watch much cricket.

"I love the game, of course, but so much of my life is taken up playing and being involved in cricket that I spend more of my time outside of that doing other things rather than in the cricketing world. Watching cricket is not a chore, but is just not something I do every day. Off the field, I try to avoid thinking about the game, and I think that's a blessing.

"I'd be surprised if anyone could honestly say, 'I haven't made runs for four games but it's not affecting me psychologically', but the best I can do is get away from it for a while, re-engage with other aspects of life, come back feeling fresh and looking forward to playing cricket, as opposed to becoming consumed with it and getting stuck in that cycle of negative thinking. That's the theory behind this break, to be hungry again by September, when the Sydney Sixers have the Champions League. I reckon a break from the game will be conducive to getting the best out of myself."

As talk turns to Carters getting the best out of himself, it's impossible not to avoid Batting for Change, which this BBL season raised $102,431 for the education of young women in Mumbai, after the Sixers hit 47 sixes, with $2,179 pledged by donors for each one. A year earlier, Carters' old team, Sydney Thunder, had raised more than £30,000, used to build the three classrooms at Heartland School, Kathmandu, which Carters visited this month. These are impressive numbers but he's already looking at ways in which to expand his fundraising.



Carters (standing, third from left) with his Team Red at the Phillip Hughes' Tribute match in Kathmandu © AFP


"Last time I got away from the game, on my trip to Mongolia, I wanted to start a charity initiative to partner my cricket to promote a cause that I care deeply about and use the stage that I'm at in my career, the people that we know, to find an opportunity to reach a big section of the public. The common theme of our projects - which change annually and are linked to the LBW Trust - [Learning for a Better World] - is educating young men and women - usually at a tertiary level - who otherwise wouldn't have the opportunity, as I believe education is the way to help people out of poverty.

"I learned a lesson that if you have an idea that you're passionate about, people will jump behind it - my team-mates but also donors from around the country who have been very generous in their donations and kind in their messages of support. It's certainly making every six the Sixers hit feel that bit more special!"

Carters, evidently, is ambitious in every sense of the word; in his charity work, in his embryonic plans for life after cricket, which one senses is likely to follow philanthropic, not political (as some have suggested) lines. He's clearly a cricketer apart, but speaking of his hopes, dreams and ambitions, both as boy and man, is a reminder that he's not that different at all.

"Growing up my dreams were all cricket-based," he says, grinning again. "I played loads with my brother and Dad in the backyard and loved watching cricket and always dreamed of being a Test cricketer, like so many others in Australia. Sure, I got more interested in the world, how things work, especially as I got older; politics, economics, philosophy, reading, but cricket was the one.

"I've achieved being a pro cricketer, which is awesome, and I'd be amazed by that if you'd told me that as a 12-year-old. But the Test cricket box isn't ticked, and that - along with remembering how lucky I am and to enjoy the game - is what's driving me."

Deep down, he's just like the rest of them.

Theresa May to 'kick out foreign graduates' in new immigration plans

Foreign graduates could face being sent back to their home countries under plans to “move towards zero net student migration” reportedly being considered by Home Secretary Theresa May.

Students from non-European Union countries would have to subsequently apply for a work visa while abroad in order to continue living in the UK after finishing a course of study, The Sunday Times reported, instead of being able to apply for one while still on British soil.

A source close to the Home Secretary told the newspaper: “Making sure immigrants leave Britain at the end of their visa is as important a part of running a fair and efficient immigration system as controlling who comes here in the first place.”

Mrs May is also pressing for the power to be able to penalise colleges and universities that would have low success rates in ensuring the departure of foreign graduates and to deprive them of their right to sponsor overseas students, the source added.

Under current rules most students can apply for a work visa while still living in the UK, rather than having to leave the country to apply for one before potentially returning.

A degree in life, not just cricket

The MCC university cricket system provides a chance to prepare for life after the game while pursuing a county contract

George Dobell

June 22, 2012

If the last few days have taught us anything, it is that there is far more to life than cricket. So while the outcome of the final of the British Universities and Colleges Cricket (BUCS) competition might not, in itself, seem particularly important in the grand scheme of things, such encounters actually carry much deeper significance. Indeed, you could make a strong case to suggest that the introduction of MCC University cricket (MCCU) is, alongside Chance to Shine, central contracts, four-day cricket and the adoption of promotion and relegation, one of the most positive developments in domestic cricket in the last 20 years.

Professional sport is a seductive beast. It sucks you in with whispered promises of glory and glamour and spits you out with broken dreams and an aching body. For every cricketing career that ends in a raised bat and warm ovation, there are a thousand that end on a physio's treatment table or in an uncomfortable meeting in a director of cricket's office. Many, many more stall well before that level.

And that's where the trouble starts. Young men trained for little other than sport can suddenly find themselves in a world for which they have little training and little preparation. Without status, salary or support, the world can seem an inhospitable place. It is relevant, surely, that the suicide rate of former cricketers is three times the national average.

The Professional Cricketers' Association does sterling work trying to help former players who have fallen on hard times, but prevention must be better than the cure, and a huge step on the road of progress has been taken in the form of the MCCU.

It has had different names along the way but the MCCU scheme was set up in the mid-1990s by former England opening batsman Graeme Fowler. Confronted with a choice between university and full-time cricket when he was 18, Fowler opted for university. It was a decision that provided the foundations for financial stability that extended far beyond his playing days. As Fowler puts it while watching the Durham MCCU team he coaches play Cambridge MCCU in the BUCS final: "Even a cricketer as successful as Alec Stewart had more of his working life to come after he finished playing. And not everyone can be a coach or a commentator."

The fundamental aim of the MCCUs is to allow talented young cricketers to continue their education while also pursuing their dream of playing professional cricket. It is to prevent a situation where they have to choose between the two. It should mean that young players gain the qualifications and skills for a life beyond cricket while still giving themselves every opportunity to progress in the game. Graduates will have enjoyed good-quality facilities and coaching while also maturing as people. It should be no surprise that several counties actively encourage their young players into the scheme as they know they will return, three years later and still in their early 20s, far better prepared for the rigours of professional sport and life beyond it.

It works, too. Just under 25% of England-qualified cricketers currently playing in the county game graduated through the system. Durham MCCU alone has helped develop more than 50 county players, six county captains, three England players and, most obviously, England's Test captain, Andrew Strauss, who credits the initiative as vital to his success. "It was at Durham University that I went through the transition of being a recreational cricketer to one who had the ambition to play the game for a living," he has said. The MCCUs have a mightily impressive record.

And, these days, it costs the ECB nothing. Not a penny. Instead the six MCCUs (Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Cardiff, Leeds/Bradford and Loughborough) have, since 2005, been funded by the MCC. Each institution receives £80,000 a year and hopes to cobble together enough extra funding from sponsorship and other smaller grants to meet their annual running costs of around £130,000. You might well ask why the ECB - despite its annual income of around £110 million and rising - cannot find some more money for such an admirable scheme.

Indeed, it is interesting to reflect on the roots of the MCCUs. In the mid-1990s, the ECB (or the TCCB as it was known at the time) lost its Lottery funding as the Lottery Commission was concerned that the sport did not possess a complete development programme that incorporated higher education. The board, in panic, embraced Fowler's plans and appointed a couple of dozen regional development officers. Had the Lottery Commission not intervened, it is debatable whether the ECB would have had the foresight to act at all.

	Fowler never actually wanted the games to carry first-class status but worries that if such status is stripped the funding may disappear too. He also worries that the matches against the counties - key factors in the development of his young players - might go

There are detractors. When, in April, Durham MCCU were bowled out for 18 by a Durham attack that contained Graham Onions, among others, it provided fresh ammunition for those who say that such games should not hold first-class status.

It is a fair point. Fowler never actually wanted the games to carry first-class status but worries that if such status is stripped, the funding may disappear too. He also worries that the matches against the counties - key factors in the development of his young players - might go. Without those two facets, the system loses its attraction and the safety net disappears. The odd aberration in the first-class record might well prove to be a price worth paying for the benefits of MCCUs.

As it was, Cambridge MCCU, boosted by an innings of 129 by Ben Ackland, defeated Durham MCCU by 24 runs in the BUCS final in the scenic surrounds of Wormsley. Perhaps only four or five of the players on show have realistic hopes of enjoying a career in cricket - Surrey's Zafar Ansari is currently with Cambridge MCCU, though he missed the BUCS game, while Paul Best (Cambridge MCCU and Warwickshire), Chris Jones (Durham MCCU and Somerset) and Freddie van den Bergh (Durham MCCU and Surrey) are among those already affiliated with counties - but it was noticeable that at least one first-class county sent a scout to the match.

"I spent my whole professional playing career on a one- or two-year contract," Chris Scott, the Cambridge MCCU coach, says. "It probably made me a more insecure, selfish cricketer than I should have been. The MCCU scheme provides a safety net for players and helps them grow up and improve as players as people. It helps prepare them for life, whether that is in cricket or not."

"And it's not just about playing," Fowler adds. "Some of our graduates have gone to be coaches or analysts at counties. Some might have become solicitors, but set up junior coaching schemes at their local clubs. There is a cascade effect that people sometimes don't appreciate."

The quality of the head coaches is a vital factor. Scott, for example, is a philosophical fellow well suited to preparing his charges for the inevitable slings and arrows. He has needed to be. As Durham wicketkeeper he was, after all, responsible for the most expensive dropped catch in first-class history. Playing at Edgbaston in 1994, he put down Brian Lara on 18 and moaned to the slip cordon, "I bet he goes on and gets a hundred now." Lara went on to score an unbeaten 501.

Cambridge are the standout side among current MCCUs, and Scott's record in aiding the development of the likes of Chris Wright and Tony Palladino should not be underestimated.

The graduates of Durham MCCU are also lucky to have Fowler. Not just for his playing experience - anyone who scored a Test double-century in India and a Test century against the West Indies of 1984 knows a thing or two about batting - but also his life experience. For his easygoing good humour and mellow wisdom. He enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a player, but the formation of the MCCUs is surely his biggest contribution to the game.

George Dobell is a senior correspondent at ESPNcricinfo