Greeny News

Blair's dream of a working-class kid getting a degree that would catapult him or her up the social ladder has not come off

So predictable, so rote is the newspaper coverage of exam season that I can only presume editors of mid-market newspapers have to sit their own A-level on how to report them. Shots of exuberant blondes jumping up and down clutching their results? That gets you a basic pass. Fancy-that story about an Asian lad with top grades in maths and science â€" even though he's only 10 and in all likelihood faces an adolescence of Belmarsh-style bullying? Now you're up to a B. Oh, and the conviction that university is the best place for any 18-year-old? Bingo: you've scored the A* required for a place at Associated Newspapers.

And many parents are ready to do their patriotic duty and send Jack and Emily in college. Over the past couple of decades, students at universities, has become almost ritual, with more than 40% of school leavers toddling from the collection of degree - investing 3 or more years and racking up tens of thousands of pounds of debt process.

A couple of years ago, two economists at the University of Kent

What about the extra money that degree-holders are meant to earn over their careers â€" the so-called graduate premium? Even by Whitehall calculations, that has dropped from £400,000, to £100,000 now â€" which works out to an annual £2,500 over a 40-year career. But even that more modest average is swollen by the number of Oxbridge students who end up at Goldman Sachs.

Ewart Keep, an economist at Cardiff, taking an example of a young man who studied history and social sciences in the former field and comes out with the average: "Statistically, it 's unlikely to earn more than if he 'D just left school at 18. "Keep together with his colleague, Ken Mayhew , argues that the reason the Great Degree Scramble has not paid off in better jobs is because Labour did not try to provide them. That would have required nurturing new businesses and raising conditions for the most awful jobs â€" the sort of thing Blair and his party emphatically did not do.

The scramble for degrees resembles the audience at a theatre standing up: as each row stands up, those behind them have to get up on their hind legs too â€" so that no one can see the play any better but everyone is a lot more uncomfortable. That metaphor comes from the Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang who, in his new book 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, points out that plenty of economies have prospered without forcing their young into university. Up until the mid-90s, Switzerland â€" one of the richest and most industrialised nations in the world â€" sent only 10-15% of students off to get a degree. But it made sure the others had apprenticeships with actual businesses and vocational training. There must, surely, be a lesson in that.