Oxford, South East, England News
Morris Minor's 60th year marked
Hundreds of enthusiasts celebrate the 60th birthday of the the Morris Minor with a special parade around Oxford.
Hundreds of enthusiasts celebrate the 60th birthday of the the Morris Minor with a special parade around Oxford.
Video to help people find homes
A new video hopes to help people in Oxford effected by the city's chronic housing shortage.
A new video hopes to help people in Oxford effected by the city's chronic housing shortage.
Doorstep death jury is sworn in
The jury is sworn in in the trial of a 22-year-old charged with the murder of a man in Oxford last year.
The jury is sworn in in the trial of a 22-year-old charged with the murder of a man in Oxford last year.
Animal rights activist cleared of sparklers bomb charge
A prominent animal rights activist accused of planting petrol bombs at Oxford University was yesterday cleared of possessing an explosive substance - packets of sparklers - with intent. The verdict in the trial of Mel Broughton, 48, is a setback for the police...
A prominent animal rights activist accused of planting petrol bombs at Oxford University was yesterday cleared of possessing an explosive substance - packets of sparklers - with intent. The verdict in the trial of Mel Broughton, 48, is a setback for the police...
Tests on cell therapy to fight HIV
Researchers have developed a new "assassin cell" therapy for treating HIV which involves engineering the patient's own immune system to fight the virus...
Researchers have developed a new "assassin cell" therapy for treating HIV which involves engineering the patient's own immune system to fight the virus...
Science Weekly podcast: After winning the US election, what will Barack Obama mean for science
An extended US election special edition of the Science Weekly podcast. We analyse what Barack Obama's election means for the scientific community...
An extended US election special edition of the Science Weekly podcast. We analyse what Barack Obama's election means for the scientific community...
Recommended reading
The Chronicle's book editor recommends these recently featured titles: A Passion for Nature...
Does a degree really set you up for life
In the haste to bundle one's difficult teenagers off to university, it can easily slip your mind to ask them if they actually want to go. For those of us who have suffered the earache of marching our children at gunpoint through A-levels, this doesn't seem the time to entertain doubts that they might be unsuited to an academic environment. They have to go, and that's it. What else is there I used to warn my eldest son - who is still recovering from his freshers' fortnight - that the choice was swotting for exams or wasting his life in a dead-end job. The joke of course is that there aren't enough dead-end jobs to go round. When I left school at 16 in the early Seventies, our town offered a variety of unskilled employment - the sauce factory, the dyeworks, the bins - while three O-levels could get you a job as the managing director of the Yorkshire Bank. No one knew anyone with a degree. We don't have factories now, and Britain has long been banging the drum for the benefits of hard study. Today there are twice as many 25-year-olds with degrees than there were 18-year-olds with A-levels in the Sixties. Even I have a degree, having gone back to school in the Eighties as a 'mature' student of 27. Higher education took an exciting turn in 1993 when the polys were transformed into universities, gathering speed in 2000 when Tony Blair declared his aim of turning half of all under-30s into graduates by 2010. Would under-achievers from poorer backgrounds be lured by the promise of lifetime earnings at £400,000 above those without degrees Perhaps 50 per cent seemed possible then, with the figure already at 39.2 per cent, but by last year it had only crept up to 39.8. The ambition remains though. The new higher education minister, David Lammy, says: 'Labour has been working tirelessly to raise aspirations in communities like mine in Tottenham, where not many young people grow up thinking university is for them. Our hard work is paying off - over 50 per cent of young people from every social class say they want to go to university. So our target is a way of showing our determination to make their dreams a reality. The Tories think the trouble with higher education is that too many of other people's kids go to university these days.'And they do - there are three times more students today about 2.4m than in the early Eighties, though snipers are quick to point out that many of them are attracted to golf studies and surfing theory. To be fair, in the 19th century they made the same jibes about history, but it is the sort of thing that gets people wondering whether the race to 'widen participation' is such a great idea.It is vexed at all ends. Students - fearful of piling up debt and ending up with a 'McJob' - complain about poor standards of teaching, tutors complain about poor standards of student literacy, and everybody else complains about the gold standard of A-levels turning into chocolate coins, and that what Britain really needs is more plumbers. Which is true. And not just plumbers. Many talented school leavers are waving goodbye to academia and diving straight into hands-on training or setting up in business, helped by energetic charitable foundations such as Young Enterprise and Edge, whose chairman Gary Hawkes says: 'Our work to combat the perception that vocational and practical learning is a second-class option is crucial to the well-being of our future generations, and to our country's economic vitality.' For those less bullish about their motor skills and entrepreneurial nous, university is still the place to spend your A-levels - somewhere to turn raw, binge-drinking joie de vivre into something noble and fine. Many would add 'marketable' to that, though I am still glued to the idea of education for the adventure of it, on the grounds that thinking long and hard for three years, even about surfing, might teach you how to think in general. And where better to grow up, smoke, learn to cook and contract an unpleasant disease than 100 miles from home As Prof Edward Acton, pro-vice-chancellor of the University of East Anglia, says: 'Going to university is the fastest, most agreeable way to gain confidence and enhance one's creativity. A society rich in critically thinking graduates is best equipped to build and sustain the good life.'Yet all is not well. The drop-out rate is 22 per cent, despite the government pumping £800m into schemes designed to plug the leak. For these escapees they are more likely to be at Bolton and Sunderland than Oxford or Cambridge, something has gone wrong. And current job prospects are not great, with traineeships dwindling, recruitment moribund, banking in tatters. Where, you ask, is your £400,000 coming from Where do you go from here Back to your parents' house No one wants that.PHFyfe Dangerfield: The rockerRejected Oxford, now singer of GuillemotsDuring his year out after school, Fyfe Dangerfield, singer of Mercury-nominated pop group Guillemots, received two offers. The first came from Oxford University; Dangerfield, now 28, had been accepted to study English. The other came from a bar in Cheltenham, which was looking for a piano player to supply background music three nights a week. For Dangerfield the decision was straightforward. 'I couldn't imagine doing anything other than music,' he says. 'A qualification wasn't going to help me make it - the best experience you can have is going out and playing.'He turned down Oxford and moved to Cheltenham, where for the next two years he played piano in the bar and spent the rest of the time on other musical projects. His first band, Senseless Prayer, folded after a year, but he pressed on, playing guitar with his brother's band and writing songs. It must have seemed a perverse choice to Dangerfield's teachers - 'I went to a typical public school, it was all about going to uni and becoming an accountant' - but he was less than starry-eyed about studying at Oxford. Dangerfield reaped the benefits in 2006 when his new band Guillemots released their debut album Through the Windowpane to widespread acclaim. It consisted mainly of songs written four years before on the floor of his room in Cheltenham. ACPolly Stevenson: The schoolgirl rebelSees a degree just for the sake of it as a waste of money, and intends to be surfing in Australia while her peers are swottingAt her fee-paying school in Essex, 17-year-old Polly Stevenson's attitude to university is not one shared by her peers or teachers. She explains: 'I don't want to go and just do a random degree - I want it to count towards something I want to do when I'm older. It seems a big waste of money if I don't know what I'm going to do with it.' But cost, she's found, isn't something teachers talk about. 'My school's attitude is ridiculous. They're basically like: "Go to university or you don't have a life." Teachers just want us to go because it looks good for the school. I don't think they really care what we do as long as it makes the school look good.'Out of her year group of more than 100 girls, almost all are going to university but Polly's bucking the trend with plans to do a lifeguard qualification and then work for an activity holiday company abroad. 'I've been saving up for years and years, and I've got my heart set on Australia - that's the first place I'm going to go as soon as I've got the money.' She jokes that she'll be a tanned goddess, surfing to work while her friends are stuck here writing essays and getting into debt. Most of them, she complains, 'don't even think about the cost of university; they just have no concept of money because lots of them are quite well off. It's really annoying because I've worked since I was 14 and I'm quite careful with my money.'Her first job was a paper round. While studying for GCSEs she also took on weekend shifts in a bar and part-time work in a high street shop. With three jobs on the go she admits: 'I pretty much died. My teachers weren't happy about it.' Her parents' attitude was different: 'They were really keen on me getting a job because I have to pay for so many things myself.' Her mother is a social worker and her father is a carpenter: 'They support me as much as they can but my dad wants to retire and hasn't been working as much so we don't have loads of money at the moment.' It's understandable then, that the cost of university strikes her as exorbitant: 'I definitely think university's too expensive - it's thousands and thousands of pounds. I think it's ridiculous that people build up these massive debts and still have them when they're 30.'HHJames Greenhalgh: The campaignerA member of the UK Youth Parliament, James is taking a year out to fight tuition fees - and to work at M&STo a lot of young people, a gap year means a round-the-world plane ticket and several months of revelling: not so for 18-year-old James Greenhalgh. As a member of the UK Youth Parliament he jokes that the only travelling he's doing is 'going between London and Lichfield every couple of weeks', organising petitions and protests, all while working a 40-hour week in Marks & Spencer with a two-hour commute to work.His year out is to earn money for university he has a place at Leeds to read politics and parliamentary studies next year but, more importantly, it is a chance to continue his national campaign to abolish tuition fees, one that he began in 2006 when he became a member of the parliament.One of his most recent achievements was to publish a report on university fees that he hopes will garner government attention. It found that one in three respondents who wanted to go to university would not be able to afford it. That 'makes me mad, really really angry,' he says. 'It's my belief that there shouldn't be any barriers to university education. Nothing should get in your way. Whatever system we've got - maintenance grants and all the rest - it isn't enough.'In his eyes, the students who need the most help in funding university are those from what he describes as 'average families'. 'Say your dad's a policeman and your mum's a nurse - key to the economy, we need those jobs. Now they don't quite qualify for the grants and all of the support but nor do they have enough cash, so it's incredibly difficult.' He counts himself as being from an average family - his father is a lorry driver and his mother a beauty therapist - and, like many of his peers, the decision to go to university wasn't straightforward. 'I always knew that cost would be a very worrying issue - it still is a big worry. But the reason I'm going is not because I think if I go to university I'm going to get this job - it's because I want to fulfil my potential and learn.'His background may be 'average' but his commitment and energy are anything but. 'I'm quite a determined person: if I want to do something then I do it. This has taken up a lot of my life but I don't want that to change.' HHNunons Tagoe-Borllons: The trailblazerShe couldn't see any reason to go to university. Now, thanks to a teacher, she is studying lawWhen 20-year-old Nunons Tagoe-Borllons first started looking through university prospectuses as a teenager, she enjoyed the images of the lifestyle portrayed there 'It seemed really exciting, all the things they had to offer, all the things you could be doing' but assumed it wasn't for her. Brought up an only child by her mother, a Ghanaian immigrant, she had no close relatives who had gone to university. And, unlike many sixth-form students, she could see many reasons for not going. 'It was partly the financial cost. One of my older cousins had been to university and had to take a break and work at Harvey Nichols before going back to finish his degree. And a lot of people are getting undergraduate degrees, so you need something else to make you stand out. I was thinking, "Is there really any point going to university because then I'd just be one out of a thousand"'A visit to the School of Oriental and African Studies SOAS in London with Aimhigher, a Department of Education scheme which encourages under-represented groups to consider university, and a nagging head of sixth form at her west London school 'He could be quite anal but I'm very grateful to him', helped change her mind. Now in her second year studying law and economics at SOAS, she says university has made her think seriously about careers she had thought were beyond her. She now volunteers for Aimhigher, encouraging sixth-form students like her to make the same choice. ACTom Mursell: The refusenikSeeing graduates stacking shelves led Tom to change direction. Now he runs a jobs website called notgoingtouni.co.ukLike most middle-class teenagers, Tom Mursell, 19, had always assumed he'd go to university after A-levels. He won a place at his first choice, Bournemouth, to study law. 'I had my heart set on that until just before I had to decide whether I was going or not,' he says. 'I really left it right up to the last minute because I wasn't sure.' A moment of realisation in Sainsbury's proved the cataylst for his decision not to go. 'All through college I was working stacking shelves. Then one day I realised that there were graduates doing the same job as me, not using their degree.'Having decided to take a year out, and resenting 'shocking career advice, almost all of it focused on university', he began to have an idea for a website inspired by his own experiences. From a laptop at his kitchen table in Southampton he started work on notgoingtouni.co.uk as a hobby. Now, with an investor on board and the site set to launch fully in a few months, it's a full-time job. Although Tom's parents - both graduates - were happy about him not going to university, Tom acknowledges that 'a lot of people, especially of my parents' generation, think a degree's a golden ticket to employment. That's not necessarily the case any more though.'The website is: 'A split between careers adviser and job advertisements - a sort of non-graduate milkround, that's our mission.' Everything suggests that now is a perfect time for such a mission. He plans to become an online entrepreneur, and Channel 4 is following him for a documentary series.Government targets of 50 per cent of young people in higher education by 2010 are, in his words, 'ridiculous, especially now, with the higher debts and the economic crisis that we're in.HHJack Forsdike: The disappointed graduateGraduated in film studies from Sheffield Hallam University in May. Now works for a security firm, providing stewarding at festivals and eventsAfter three years and thousands of pounds in tuition fees, Jack Forsdike can only think of one area in which he has benefited from his degree. 'All I can use the information for are trivial things,' he says. ' It's the kind of information that comes up in pub quizzes.'When he left school in 2004 he did not originally plan to go to university. But having been unable to break into a career with the police, he applied through clearing for a place at Sheffield Hallam a year later. He was accepted on a course entitled 'Society in Cities,' which he hoped would help him reapply to the police, but soon discovered it was not sociology-based, and switched to film studies. He enjoyed his studies but as the course progressed began to worry it was not equipping him with skills he'd be able to use after university. 'There was an ongoing catching-up on 100 years of film but it didn't seem applicable in any other area. It started to make me think: how is this going to help set me apart from people who I'm going to be up against when applying for work'After graduating, the 22-year-old found employers were unimpressed by his qualification and unconvinced by the skills he had picked up during his degree. 'You're always going to get some people thinking it's a Mickey Mouse degree. But at school you're told, you get a degree, and no matter what you get it in, it shows an employer you have spent a long time in education. He now finds himself in exactly the same position he was four years ago, biding his time in temporary work while waiting for South Yorkshire police to recruit again. 'It would have been better if I hadn't gone to university,' he says. 'There's a lot of pressure on people to go who aren't going to benefit from it. I've finished university and I'm seeing friends starting again at the bottom. AC1962 1963 Colleges of advanced technology are upgraded to universities. 1979 679,010 British students attend undergraduate courses. 1990 The Student Loans Company is set up to make up for falling grants.1992 Polytechnics are granted the right to become universities.1997 The Dearing Report recommends the end of universal free education and the introduction of student tuition fees. All full-time undergraduates have to contribute £1,000 per year of study on a means-tested basis. 2001 39% of under-30s are university educated in Britain. At the beginning of the 1980s, 12.5% of schoolchildren went on to university. In his election manifesto Blair announces the Labour Party's aim to raise participation to 50% by 2010.2006 Following the 2004 Higher Education Act, university top-up fees become law: students must pay up to £3,070 towards each year of a course funded by loans. Scotland had a separate funding system which involved a single £2,000 fee, but this was abolished in April 2008. Wales adopts the same system as England but Welsh students at Welsh universities pay £1,200 a year, means-tested.2006 1,636,205 British students take undergraduate courses at British universities.ICUni by numbers: Facts and figures54% of current students are concerned about debt.41% of current students are given or lent money by friends or family to survive at university. Of them, 26% get regular amounts throughout the term.35% of students hold a term-time job. 51% of students work during the holidays.109 - Universities in the UK.0.8% - The UK's public expenditure on higher education as a percentage of GDP. At 1.8% Denmark spends the most.80% of UK applicants successfully gained university places through Ucas in 2007.46% - Increase in students studying undergraduate degrees in the UK since 1994-95.113,685 full-time academic staff at UK higher education institutes. 37% are female.EP & ICStudentsStudent financeGraduate careersGraduationguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
In the haste to bundle one's difficult teenagers off to university, it can easily slip your mind to ask them if they actually want to go. For those of us who have suffered the earache of marching our children at gunpoint through A-levels, this doesn't seem the time to entertain doubts that they might be unsuited to an academic environment. They have to go, and that's it. What else is there I used to warn my eldest son - who is still recovering from his freshers' fortnight - that the choice was swotting for exams or wasting his life in a dead-end job. The joke of course is that there aren't enough dead-end jobs to go round. When I left school at 16 in the early Seventies, our town offered a variety of unskilled employment - the sauce factory, the dyeworks, the bins - while three O-levels could get you a job as the managing director of the Yorkshire Bank. No one knew anyone with a degree. We don't have factories now, and Britain has long been banging the drum for the benefits of hard study. Today there are twice as many 25-year-olds with degrees than there were 18-year-olds with A-levels in the Sixties. Even I have a degree, having gone back to school in the Eighties as a 'mature' student of 27. Higher education took an exciting turn in 1993 when the polys were transformed into universities, gathering speed in 2000 when Tony Blair declared his aim of turning half of all under-30s into graduates by 2010. Would under-achievers from poorer backgrounds be lured by the promise of lifetime earnings at £400,000 above those without degrees Perhaps 50 per cent seemed possible then, with the figure already at 39.2 per cent, but by last year it had only crept up to 39.8. The ambition remains though. The new higher education minister, David Lammy, says: 'Labour has been working tirelessly to raise aspirations in communities like mine in Tottenham, where not many young people grow up thinking university is for them. Our hard work is paying off - over 50 per cent of young people from every social class say they want to go to university. So our target is a way of showing our determination to make their dreams a reality. The Tories think the trouble with higher education is that too many of other people's kids go to university these days.'And they do - there are three times more students today about 2.4m than in the early Eighties, though snipers are quick to point out that many of them are attracted to golf studies and surfing theory. To be fair, in the 19th century they made the same jibes about history, but it is the sort of thing that gets people wondering whether the race to 'widen participation' is such a great idea.It is vexed at all ends. Students - fearful of piling up debt and ending up with a 'McJob' - complain about poor standards of teaching, tutors complain about poor standards of student literacy, and everybody else complains about the gold standard of A-levels turning into chocolate coins, and that what Britain really needs is more plumbers. Which is true. And not just plumbers. Many talented school leavers are waving goodbye to academia and diving straight into hands-on training or setting up in business, helped by energetic charitable foundations such as Young Enterprise and Edge, whose chairman Gary Hawkes says: 'Our work to combat the perception that vocational and practical learning is a second-class option is crucial to the well-being of our future generations, and to our country's economic vitality.' For those less bullish about their motor skills and entrepreneurial nous, university is still the place to spend your A-levels - somewhere to turn raw, binge-drinking joie de vivre into something noble and fine. Many would add 'marketable' to that, though I am still glued to the idea of education for the adventure of it, on the grounds that thinking long and hard for three years, even about surfing, might teach you how to think in general. And where better to grow up, smoke, learn to cook and contract an unpleasant disease than 100 miles from home As Prof Edward Acton, pro-vice-chancellor of the University of East Anglia, says: 'Going to university is the fastest, most agreeable way to gain confidence and enhance one's creativity. A society rich in critically thinking graduates is best equipped to build and sustain the good life.'Yet all is not well. The drop-out rate is 22 per cent, despite the government pumping £800m into schemes designed to plug the leak. For these escapees they are more likely to be at Bolton and Sunderland than Oxford or Cambridge, something has gone wrong. And current job prospects are not great, with traineeships dwindling, recruitment moribund, banking in tatters. Where, you ask, is your £400,000 coming from Where do you go from here Back to your parents' house No one wants that.PHFyfe Dangerfield: The rockerRejected Oxford, now singer of GuillemotsDuring his year out after school, Fyfe Dangerfield, singer of Mercury-nominated pop group Guillemots, received two offers. The first came from Oxford University; Dangerfield, now 28, had been accepted to study English. The other came from a bar in Cheltenham, which was looking for a piano player to supply background music three nights a week. For Dangerfield the decision was straightforward. 'I couldn't imagine doing anything other than music,' he says. 'A qualification wasn't going to help me make it - the best experience you can have is going out and playing.'He turned down Oxford and moved to Cheltenham, where for the next two years he played piano in the bar and spent the rest of the time on other musical projects. His first band, Senseless Prayer, folded after a year, but he pressed on, playing guitar with his brother's band and writing songs. It must have seemed a perverse choice to Dangerfield's teachers - 'I went to a typical public school, it was all about going to uni and becoming an accountant' - but he was less than starry-eyed about studying at Oxford. Dangerfield reaped the benefits in 2006 when his new band Guillemots released their debut album Through the Windowpane to widespread acclaim. It consisted mainly of songs written four years before on the floor of his room in Cheltenham. ACPolly Stevenson: The schoolgirl rebelSees a degree just for the sake of it as a waste of money, and intends to be surfing in Australia while her peers are swottingAt her fee-paying school in Essex, 17-year-old Polly Stevenson's attitude to university is not one shared by her peers or teachers. She explains: 'I don't want to go and just do a random degree - I want it to count towards something I want to do when I'm older. It seems a big waste of money if I don't know what I'm going to do with it.' But cost, she's found, isn't something teachers talk about. 'My school's attitude is ridiculous. They're basically like: "Go to university or you don't have a life." Teachers just want us to go because it looks good for the school. I don't think they really care what we do as long as it makes the school look good.'Out of her year group of more than 100 girls, almost all are going to university but Polly's bucking the trend with plans to do a lifeguard qualification and then work for an activity holiday company abroad. 'I've been saving up for years and years, and I've got my heart set on Australia - that's the first place I'm going to go as soon as I've got the money.' She jokes that she'll be a tanned goddess, surfing to work while her friends are stuck here writing essays and getting into debt. Most of them, she complains, 'don't even think about the cost of university; they just have no concept of money because lots of them are quite well off. It's really annoying because I've worked since I was 14 and I'm quite careful with my money.'Her first job was a paper round. While studying for GCSEs she also took on weekend shifts in a bar and part-time work in a high street shop. With three jobs on the go she admits: 'I pretty much died. My teachers weren't happy about it.' Her parents' attitude was different: 'They were really keen on me getting a job because I have to pay for so many things myself.' Her mother is a social worker and her father is a carpenter: 'They support me as much as they can but my dad wants to retire and hasn't been working as much so we don't have loads of money at the moment.' It's understandable then, that the cost of university strikes her as exorbitant: 'I definitely think university's too expensive - it's thousands and thousands of pounds. I think it's ridiculous that people build up these massive debts and still have them when they're 30.'HHJames Greenhalgh: The campaignerA member of the UK Youth Parliament, James is taking a year out to fight tuition fees - and to work at M&STo a lot of young people, a gap year means a round-the-world plane ticket and several months of revelling: not so for 18-year-old James Greenhalgh. As a member of the UK Youth Parliament he jokes that the only travelling he's doing is 'going between London and Lichfield every couple of weeks', organising petitions and protests, all while working a 40-hour week in Marks & Spencer with a two-hour commute to work.His year out is to earn money for university he has a place at Leeds to read politics and parliamentary studies next year but, more importantly, it is a chance to continue his national campaign to abolish tuition fees, one that he began in 2006 when he became a member of the parliament.One of his most recent achievements was to publish a report on university fees that he hopes will garner government attention. It found that one in three respondents who wanted to go to university would not be able to afford it. That 'makes me mad, really really angry,' he says. 'It's my belief that there shouldn't be any barriers to university education. Nothing should get in your way. Whatever system we've got - maintenance grants and all the rest - it isn't enough.'In his eyes, the students who need the most help in funding university are those from what he describes as 'average families'. 'Say your dad's a policeman and your mum's a nurse - key to the economy, we need those jobs. Now they don't quite qualify for the grants and all of the support but nor do they have enough cash, so it's incredibly difficult.' He counts himself as being from an average family - his father is a lorry driver and his mother a beauty therapist - and, like many of his peers, the decision to go to university wasn't straightforward. 'I always knew that cost would be a very worrying issue - it still is a big worry. But the reason I'm going is not because I think if I go to university I'm going to get this job - it's because I want to fulfil my potential and learn.'His background may be 'average' but his commitment and energy are anything but. 'I'm quite a determined person: if I want to do something then I do it. This has taken up a lot of my life but I don't want that to change.' HHNunons Tagoe-Borllons: The trailblazerShe couldn't see any reason to go to university. Now, thanks to a teacher, she is studying lawWhen 20-year-old Nunons Tagoe-Borllons first started looking through university prospectuses as a teenager, she enjoyed the images of the lifestyle portrayed there 'It seemed really exciting, all the things they had to offer, all the things you could be doing' but assumed it wasn't for her. Brought up an only child by her mother, a Ghanaian immigrant, she had no close relatives who had gone to university. And, unlike many sixth-form students, she could see many reasons for not going. 'It was partly the financial cost. One of my older cousins had been to university and had to take a break and work at Harvey Nichols before going back to finish his degree. And a lot of people are getting undergraduate degrees, so you need something else to make you stand out. I was thinking, "Is there really any point going to university because then I'd just be one out of a thousand"'A visit to the School of Oriental and African Studies SOAS in London with Aimhigher, a Department of Education scheme which encourages under-represented groups to consider university, and a nagging head of sixth form at her west London school 'He could be quite anal but I'm very grateful to him', helped change her mind. Now in her second year studying law and economics at SOAS, she says university has made her think seriously about careers she had thought were beyond her. She now volunteers for Aimhigher, encouraging sixth-form students like her to make the same choice. ACTom Mursell: The refusenikSeeing graduates stacking shelves led Tom to change direction. Now he runs a jobs website called notgoingtouni.co.ukLike most middle-class teenagers, Tom Mursell, 19, had always assumed he'd go to university after A-levels. He won a place at his first choice, Bournemouth, to study law. 'I had my heart set on that until just before I had to decide whether I was going or not,' he says. 'I really left it right up to the last minute because I wasn't sure.' A moment of realisation in Sainsbury's proved the cataylst for his decision not to go. 'All through college I was working stacking shelves. Then one day I realised that there were graduates doing the same job as me, not using their degree.'Having decided to take a year out, and resenting 'shocking career advice, almost all of it focused on university', he began to have an idea for a website inspired by his own experiences. From a laptop at his kitchen table in Southampton he started work on notgoingtouni.co.uk as a hobby. Now, with an investor on board and the site set to launch fully in a few months, it's a full-time job. Although Tom's parents - both graduates - were happy about him not going to university, Tom acknowledges that 'a lot of people, especially of my parents' generation, think a degree's a golden ticket to employment. That's not necessarily the case any more though.'The website is: 'A split between careers adviser and job advertisements - a sort of non-graduate milkround, that's our mission.' Everything suggests that now is a perfect time for such a mission. He plans to become an online entrepreneur, and Channel 4 is following him for a documentary series.Government targets of 50 per cent of young people in higher education by 2010 are, in his words, 'ridiculous, especially now, with the higher debts and the economic crisis that we're in.HHJack Forsdike: The disappointed graduateGraduated in film studies from Sheffield Hallam University in May. Now works for a security firm, providing stewarding at festivals and eventsAfter three years and thousands of pounds in tuition fees, Jack Forsdike can only think of one area in which he has benefited from his degree. 'All I can use the information for are trivial things,' he says. ' It's the kind of information that comes up in pub quizzes.'When he left school in 2004 he did not originally plan to go to university. But having been unable to break into a career with the police, he applied through clearing for a place at Sheffield Hallam a year later. He was accepted on a course entitled 'Society in Cities,' which he hoped would help him reapply to the police, but soon discovered it was not sociology-based, and switched to film studies. He enjoyed his studies but as the course progressed began to worry it was not equipping him with skills he'd be able to use after university. 'There was an ongoing catching-up on 100 years of film but it didn't seem applicable in any other area. It started to make me think: how is this going to help set me apart from people who I'm going to be up against when applying for work'After graduating, the 22-year-old found employers were unimpressed by his qualification and unconvinced by the skills he had picked up during his degree. 'You're always going to get some people thinking it's a Mickey Mouse degree. But at school you're told, you get a degree, and no matter what you get it in, it shows an employer you have spent a long time in education. He now finds himself in exactly the same position he was four years ago, biding his time in temporary work while waiting for South Yorkshire police to recruit again. 'It would have been better if I hadn't gone to university,' he says. 'There's a lot of pressure on people to go who aren't going to benefit from it. I've finished university and I'm seeing friends starting again at the bottom. AC1962 1963 Colleges of advanced technology are upgraded to universities. 1979 679,010 British students attend undergraduate courses. 1990 The Student Loans Company is set up to make up for falling grants.1992 Polytechnics are granted the right to become universities.1997 The Dearing Report recommends the end of universal free education and the introduction of student tuition fees. All full-time undergraduates have to contribute £1,000 per year of study on a means-tested basis. 2001 39% of under-30s are university educated in Britain. At the beginning of the 1980s, 12.5% of schoolchildren went on to university. In his election manifesto Blair announces the Labour Party's aim to raise participation to 50% by 2010.2006 Following the 2004 Higher Education Act, university top-up fees become law: students must pay up to £3,070 towards each year of a course funded by loans. Scotland had a separate funding system which involved a single £2,000 fee, but this was abolished in April 2008. Wales adopts the same system as England but Welsh students at Welsh universities pay £1,200 a year, means-tested.2006 1,636,205 British students take undergraduate courses at British universities.ICUni by numbers: Facts and figures54% of current students are concerned about debt.41% of current students are given or lent money by friends or family to survive at university. Of them, 26% get regular amounts throughout the term.35% of students hold a term-time job. 51% of students work during the holidays.109 - Universities in the UK.0.8% - The UK's public expenditure on higher education as a percentage of GDP. At 1.8% Denmark spends the most.80% of UK applicants successfully gained university places through Ucas in 2007.46% - Increase in students studying undergraduate degrees in the UK since 1994-95.113,685 full-time academic staff at UK higher education institutes. 37% are female.EP & ICStudentsStudent financeGraduate careersGraduationguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
The Opposite Bastard, By Simon Packham
Timothy Salt, a "resting" actor "Nigh on twenty years in the acting profession had given me a solid grounding in DHSS form filling", has exhausted the patience of the authorities. He is assigned as carer to a brilliant quadriplegic, whose name, Michael Owen, its owner bitterly resents. Michael has made it to Oxford...
Timothy Salt, a "resting" actor "Nigh on twenty years in the acting profession had given me a solid grounding in DHSS form filling", has exhausted the patience of the authorities. He is assigned as carer to a brilliant quadriplegic, whose name, Michael Owen, its owner bitterly resents. Michael has made it to Oxford...
Bhutan's young king to guide young democracy
In the Chamber of the Golden Throne, a 28-year-old with an Oxford education will assume the Raven Crown of Bhutan on Thursday, to guide the world's newest democracy...
In the Chamber of the Golden Throne, a 28-year-old with an Oxford education will assume the Raven Crown of Bhutan on Thursday, to guide the world's newest democracy...
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