When there was less pressure to get uni degree

[Mr Blob]

In the 1980s when I was in secondary school, there was no tuition fee in England for going to university and the government gave cash grants to undergraduates to meet the cost of living, many school leavers entered the job market straight away and only some sixth formers went to study at university

Recently the cultural shift means teenagers feel a university degree is essential to a good career

Then apprenticeships in some industries and internships is creating an alternative route into work for young people who don't want the cost and big debts from university life and getting academic excellence of being a graduate

 

[MrSki]

And?

 

[Pickman's model]

In the 1980s when I was in secondary school, there was no tuition fee in England for going to university and the government gave cash grants to undergraduates to meet the cost of living, many school leavers entered the job market straight away and only some sixth formers went to study at university

Recently the cultural shift means teenagers feel a university degree is essential to a good career

Then apprenticeships in some industries and internships is creating an alternative route into work for young people who don't want the cost and big debts from university life and getting academic excellence of being a graduate

Even now many school leavers enter the job market right away and only some sixth formers go to university.

 

[Roadkill]

'Cultural shift.'

Yes, that's all that it's about. Nothing more.

 

[lizzieloo]

In the 1980s when I was in secondary school, there was no tuition fee in England for going to university and the government gave cash grants to undergraduates to meet the cost of living, many school leavers entered the job market straight away and only some sixth formers went to study at university

Recently the cultural shift means teenagers feel a university degree is essential to a good career

Then apprenticeships in some industries and internships is creating an alternative route into work for young people who don't want the cost and big debts from university life and getting academic excellence of being a graduate

This statement is very much from your perspective. There are others.

 

[chilango]

'Cultural shift.'

Yes, that's all that it's about. Nothing more.

I think he spelt economic and political restructuring wrong.

 

[chilango]

...of course unpicking this so-called "cultural shift" opens up some really interesting dimensions.

• financialisation
• "Indebted Man"
• neoliberalism
• the privatisation of the social
• the rise of the rentier class
• cultural capital

...and many more.

Crucial stuff.

 

[gentlegreen]

My father was a grammar school kid with a minor academic for a brother, my mother also grammar school did teacher training and was the "high flyer" in her family... I think my mother might have done an A-level.

Neither of them were in a position to encourage any of their four kids to go to university - or even stay on to do A levels.

 

[ElizabethofYork]

Nobody from my working class family ever even considered going to university, even though we were all reasonably intelligent. I left school in 1979 with a few O levels and A levels and went straight to work.

 

[farmerbarleymow]

I was the second person in the extended family to go to uni. It just wasn't really a thing in those days for people of my background - you just went to work at sixteen.

 

[Steel Icarus]

Of my four grandparents, my dad's parents didn't go to uni; he became a copper, she a secretary. My mum's folks met at teacher training college; my grandma was a studious middle class girl and my grandpa got a scholarship otherwise he'd have been down the pit with his dad and brothers (both of whom got out pretty quickly anyway).

Of their kids, my dad went to university but dropped out. My mum wasn't considered bright enough so went to secretary school and my uncle went off to do a degree in fine art.

None of my main mates from school went to uni. I only started a degree in my late thirties. We came out of school at the arse end of the eighties and none of us were pushed or felt drawn towards university.

I hope my kids go.

 

[marty21]

I think I was the 1st person in the extended family to go to university (in 1984) Irish working class , uni wasn't a thing for us then. My mum pushed me tbf , I went to a Catholic Grammar school in Bristol (Christian Brothers ) and the school wanted the pupils to go to university. Otherwise I'd have just ended up 'on the buildings ' like my dad and all his brothers. I didn't want to do that , as I said to my dad when I was about 15 , 'these are not the hands of a builder, these are the hands of an artist' he told me they were the hands of a fucking eejit. Fair comment tbf

 

[equationgirl]

I was the first in my family to go to uni. My parents both went to work straight from school, although my dad did one year of A levels and left at 17. They were from a rural part of the UK and going to a grammar school was seen as a big deal for them, let alone anything further.

 

[skyscraper101]

I was the first too. Neither of my parents, their parents, my uncles, or my cousins went to University.

But back then (2001), student fees were means tested. So coming from a single parent household with a parent on a low wage income, I didn't have to pay fees. I did however have to take the maximum available student loan to live though, which I've only just recently finished paying off. In 2019

Given the years that took, and the fact I have only ever been asked for academic credentials ONCE (more company policy rather than because they were actually relevant), I do question whether I would do it again if I had to be saddled with £27k of fees, and thousands more in living cost loans to pay off. I'd probably study abroad tbh.

 

[Argonia]

My mum went to Oxford and my aunt went to Cambridge. But I wasn't put under pressure to go to university but to make my own decision.

 

[MickiQ]

The Q's are the very epitome of peasant stock. My paternal grandfather told me he was the first Q to learn to read even though his dad and granddad didn't really approve of education. My Dad started an apprentice at 14 and my mum like most working class girls in the 40's & 50's was basically taught sewing and cooking in the expectation she would get married and raise kids which she did by having me at 19.
Of myself and my three siblings none of us went to Uni though my sister did an OU course as an adult whilst being a stay at home Mum.
Mrs Q's dad joined the Navy since his only other choice was being a docker like his granddad, dad and brothers. He had a lot more ambition for his kids and all four of them went though it doesn't seem to have given them any advantage over my siblings.
I think it is a LOT more important now that it was in the 70's/80's and have encouraged mine to go. Eldest didn't and left school at 18, Son and Middle did and were it not for her deciding to take a gap year because of the lurgy, Youngest would be starting at this very moment.

 

[planetgeli]

Not really sure what point the OP is making but I'd like to make a couple.

Uni early 80s, first of family, full student grant. The point of that being you could go to uni for the sake of learning, not to be shoe-horned into a career with a massive debt. I would not have gone to uni if it meant facing a massive debt at the end of it.

I went because I could, because I was clever enough (to pass exams), and because I didn't want to get a 'proper job' right then. I also went to take drugs and cause trouble. I did both successfully. (Ejected Teddy Taylor and Cecil Parkinson from campus, got heavily involved in the Miners strike as we were at a port where coal was imported from Poland by Thatcher, and also got heavily involved in the anti-fascist Harrington campaign at PNL even though I was living 50 miles away - this is what university should be about).

The point of that is that it doesn't happen now and that's for a reason. Cultural shift. Yeah right. As chilango points out it's a bit more than that. A lot more than that.

John Bercow was in a lot of my classes. I think he may have had a different approach.

 

[pseudonarcissus]

In the 1980s ....Then apprenticeships in some industries

Unfortunately the 80s was the end of "proper" apprenticeships with day release and the chance to go on to ONC and HNCs; replaced by YOP and YTS schemes with no academic content. I started a (student) apprenticeship in Barrow in '85 when Vickers had more apprenticeships than the rest of British industry put together.

My father was told in no uncertain terms to go and get an engineering apprenticeship at 16. He did a part time MSc when I was a kid and he was working nights. As well as his main job, he worked as a part time OU tutor from the early days of the OU to give people a chance of a degree without the A-level route.
My uncle ran a training school for the gas board having apprenticed as a gas fitter.
My mother and her brother went to teacher training colleges.

I guess I was the first in my family to do A-levels and go to university, with the huge advantage of it being combined with industrial training.
My sister went to university, but cousins didn't.

Thatcher killing industrial training is responsible for a lot. In the shipyard most of the welders had worked in Germany in the "Auf Wiedersehen, Pet" years. We then lost a generation of skilled trades, leading to the need for polish plumbers to fix the nation.

 

[SheilaNaGig]

I was encouraged to go to university out of school (1981 ish) but refused. As a London kid I was already going out seeing bands taking drugs with a large diverse group of friends and leaving all that to try to recreate some version of it elsewhere was pointless. Plus I had no idea what I'd study, I only knew that Art, English or History (what the teachers suggested) just seemed so narrow. I was already reading loads and writing low grade journalism in my teens, my Dad was an artist so it (art, artists) was part of my normal life. Putting on the blinkers and removing myself from what felt like the centre of the universe just seemed perverse.

I did go to university once I knew what I wanted to study. I did a BSc degree as a mature student (1999-2003) so I missed free tuition and a grant, but also swerved the current fees bullshit.

I'm the first in my family to do a degree, and outside of those school fellows who went on to university - which was about half of my year - no one else I knew went to university. We were all working full time jobs in our teens.

All of my nieces and nephews, and most of their friends and pretty much everyone else I know in that age bracket, has gone into FE.

In the 90s and early 2000s a fair percentage of university students I spoke with would say they didn't like their course, didn't know what else to do, did it because it was expected. Seemed very wasteful to me: of their time as much as anything else.

/vague pointless rambling response]

 

[Idris2002]

I think I was the 1st person in the extended family to go to university (in 1984) Irish working class , uni wasn't a thing for us then. My mum pushed me tbf , I went to a Catholic Grammar school in Bristol (Christian Brothers ) and the school wanted the pupils to go to university. Otherwise I'd have just ended up 'on the buildings ' like my dad and all his brothers. I didn't want to do that , as I said to my dad when I was about 15 , 'these are not the hands of a builder, these are the hands of an artist' he told me they were the hands of a fucking eejit. Fair comment tbf

Is your da. . . Colm Meaney?

 

[ViolentPanda]

I think I was the 1st person in the extended family to go to university (in 1984) Irish working class , uni wasn't a thing for us then. My mum pushed me tbf , I went to a Catholic Grammar school in Bristol (Christian Brothers ) and the school wanted the pupils to go to university. Otherwise I'd have just ended up 'on the buildings ' like my dad and all his brothers. I didn't want to do that , as I said to my dad when I was about 15 , 'these are not the hands of a builder, these are the hands of an artist' he told me they were the hands of a fucking eejit. Fair comment tbf

I think you misspelled "Christian Beaters" there, Marty!

 

[spanglechick]

Is uni pushed as the only goal for too many kids? Probably. But the alternative in the past was that almost all kids of middle class families went, and far fewer working class kids did.

Initiatives like degree-level apprenticeships are potentially great, but really only have capacity for a tiny proportion of sixth form leavers. For the rest, we find that 18 is really young to know what they want to do - even in the short term, and university has some value in postponing the point where they have to make those kind of choices... which is oddly bourgeois, given the economically oppressed area my school serves, but we find that kids from less privileged backgrounds often find it harder to navigate a fulfilling / constructive pathway through young adulthood (compared to their more privileged peers) if they leave school without the next 3-4 years tied up with a degree or apprenticeship.

 

[Throbbing Angel]

I was the second person in the extended family to go to uni. It just wasn't really a thing in those days for people of my background - you just went to work at sixteen.

Same.

Shame.

 

[marty21]

I was the first too. Neither of my parents, their parents, my uncles, or my cousins went to University.

But back then (2001), student fees were means tested. So coming from a single parent household with a parent on a low wage income, I didn't have to pay fees. I did however have to take the maximum available student loan to live though, which I've only just recently finished paying off. In 2019

Given the years that took, and the fact I have only ever been asked for academic credentials ONCE (more company policy rather than because they were actually relevant), I do question whether I would do it again if I had to be saddled with £27k of fees, and thousands more in living cost loans to pay off. I'd probably study abroad tbh.

I was lucky to go to uni in the 80s, no fees, I got a grant, and I could claim Housing Benefit. Graduated with debts of £800 .

 

[mr steev]

I was the first to go to uni (well, it was a poly at the time) in my family in 1988. Thinking back, most of my mates back then went to college and then into work/dole, a few went straight into work, and a few went to uni/poly

 

[farmerbarleymow]

My paternal grandfather told me he was the first Q to learn to read

Looking at marriage and death certificates in my family around late 19th century/early 20th there were quite a few who couldn't write their name - signed the certs with a mark. Difficult to tell if they also couldn't read, but it seems likely.

 

[ElizabethofYork]

I find it frustrating that for even fairly low-level jobs nowadays you have to have a degree. I can't even apply for certain admin jobs because I don't have one - I'm automatically disregarded.

 

[skyscraper101]

I find it frustrating that for even fairly low-level jobs nowadays you have to have a degree. I can't even apply for certain admin jobs because I don't have one - I'm automatically disregarded.

It is ridiculous. If my career is anything to go by there's a high chance it won't even get followed up on if you say yes anyway.

(If you are asked for evidence, just produce a photo of Fayette Pinkney and wing it)

 

[equationgirl]

I find it frustrating that for even fairly low-level jobs nowadays you have to have a degree. I can't even apply for certain admin jobs because I don't have one - I'm automatically disregarded.

A lot of jobs in universities that aren't connected with research still expect you to have a PhD as well as an undergraduate degree, when there's no real reason for it and it excludes some people who would be really good at those jobs.

 

[dessiato]

Pretty much everyone I know has a degree. My parents' generation no one has a degree. I'm not sure entirely why this is the case. I expect it's because it was so much more available to us.

When I first went to work having A levels was good enough to get a good job. Nowadays there's people with PhD doing the same job. A friend of mine who stayed in industrial chemistry degree qualified) found that pay rates had barely changed in 15 years. How true that is generally I don't know. But it illustrates, a little, how things have changed.