Going to Uni vs Not going to Uni

What subject do you want to do?

If it's some crap subject like History or English then don't bother because it'll get you nowhere.

Which is, of course, why every single one of the English/History graduates I know is now happily employed or in further study, with the majority being employed.

How exactly are they useless degrees?

well i would have thought that not having large amounts of debt would also allow you to 'live a little'. you know, buy your own home at like 21 instead of 28 or so would have its advantages...

No use in the real world.

I'm glad they are employed but they could have landed that role as shop assistant without going to university.

Unless you're very lucky, you're not likely to get more than £15,000 for your first full-time job (outside London, that is). Many people start on far less than that. Assuming you'd be able to get a mortgage of around three times your wage, you're looking at £45,000 (£60,000 would be the absolute maximum, but it's unlikely that you'd be offered that sort of sum). What on earth is £45,000 going to get you by way of a house? You wouldn't even get a poky one-bed flat where I live for that sort of money.

Even if your wages went up a bit between the ages of 18 and 21, they'd be unlikely to go up enough for you to be able to afford a decent mortgage in that period.

At risk of sounding incredibly pretentious (I am sure plenty of neg rep awaits me), I just don't see the value of going to university. In the nicest way possible, I know some real idiots who have gone to university (don't get me wrong, they have just as much right as me or anyone else to go) and it just puts me off. If university was something that people thought 'wow he went to university' about then I would probably really want to go. But everyone does it these days, and I want to feel special .

k the person i know is on bout 20k, with sharp increases coming his way. he's saving up almost all of that money to reduce the size of the mortgage needed. he could probably go up to 200k or so, which isn't that bad. of course, not everybody will be this lucky, it depends on what job you get.

Exactly - that's what I was getting at when I said you needed to be lucky. Sounds like your friend really landed on his feet - but unfortunately most people find it difficult to find opportunities like that.

he planned it before he left school before GCSE exams. compared to us (as in me and his friends), he is seriously mega rich.

Good for him! I still can't stress enough how rare this sort of thing is; but all the same, it's great that he's doing well with no formal qualifications!

well he has GCSE's (he just took the entry tests to do this before he'd taken them), and what he's on now is like higher national diploma or summin ?

I just quit my awful call centre job yesterday to go to uni. Upon stating my reason for leaving a team manager informed me that he studied English and Scottish Literature at Glasgow.

So he took an English degree and ended up in a call centre?

Nice.

So he took an English degree and ended up in a call centre?

Nice.