Should there be less people going to university?

So exams have been made much harder this year. I'm sure the government have lots of reasons for this but I think the main reason was to fix the grade inflation, too many people getting As and Bs.

Not sure if the government wanted less people to get into the top unis or just wanted less people going to uni all together.

I personally don't think less people should go, but only because i think there isn't great help for those who just finished a levels. Uni isn't for everyone but if the government want people to go into work straight away I think they should improve apprenticeships

Do you are think less people should go to uni?

Maker got there first with the "fewer" thing (only reason I opened this thread). And I can't even rep because I rep way too much and it won't let me (can somebody fix that whole "can't rep all the time" thing please?). Ok I'm out now.

I try not to be a grammar pedant but the post was about the quality of university candidates so really needed to be of a high grammatical standard which it was not.

Whoops sorry, grammar has never been a strong point of mine

Increasing the difficulty of exams does not necessarily mean that the government wants fewer people to attend university. Rather, I think it's a means of combating grade inflation, where an increasingly large amount of students appear to be clustered towards the upper range, to create a more even distribution, and hence making it easier for universities to discern talent.

It's easy to say that there should be fewer people attending university and more people entering the workforce straight after leaving school/college, but industry itself seems to disagree, given how many jobs now require degrees at a bare minimum. The world isn't exactly a sea of opportunity for today's school leavers.

If industry wanted more apprenticeships, it would recruit more, and school leavers wouldn't be faced with such bleak opportunities compared to graduates. Instead, outside of the traditionally strong areas for apprenticeships, e.g. engineering and manufacturing, they're largely seen as a scam, as a means to pay people far below the minimum wage to perform basic jobs with little career progression.

We don't need to go all Daily Mail about this. We don't need to listen to sound-bites about how great apprenticeships are and exaggerated figures about graduate unemployment. We need to pay close attention to what is actually happening and what the real facts and figures are.

As far as I'm aware the facts and figures are 45% of people that go to uni under the current loan system will never pay back the full amount as they will not have a job that pays over £21,000 for the requried 30 years.

Also in my part of the country (south-east) 60% of school leavers will go to uni.
14% of the jobs a degree is seen as essential.

I think it's quite difficult to predict that, although certainly large amounts of graduates today won't achieve high paying careers that enables them to quickly pay off their student loan.



Seen as essential to perform the job, or an essential requirement to be recruited?