The value of education

I don't watch an awful lot of TV, mainly because I wasn't really brought up with it. Being currently unemployed has meant that I now occasionally watch The Jeremy Kyle Show (there's a lovely picture of him with an explanation on an earlier post), but that's it during the day.

One programme that I always watch though is The Apprentice (UK version, on the BBC every Wednesday at 9pm between March and June). Perhaps my previous training as an accountant meant that a show about business appeals to me in some way, even if the "prize" at the end of it is to work for Sir Alan Sugar.

The candidates are often hailed as "Britain's brightest business brains". Some of them are so highly qualified it makes me embarrassed just to have a Batchelor of Science degree. Sir Alan isn't quite so intimidated. As everyone knows, he didn't even get near a degree: he left school at the age of 16 to sell car aerials out of a van. Many highly-educated candidates with a string of qualifications as long as one's arm have been bluntly cut down by Sir Alan's no-nonsense remarks. "These certificates and qualifications, all they tell any employer is that the person's got a brain," he once famously fumed. "It really doesn't matter whether someone comes to me with an MBA, an OBE, a KFC or a YMCA, as far as I'm concerned. You can't learn business practices out of a book."

Is he right? Just how important is education in the world of business - or even the world of work?

When you're at school, you're always taught that education is the key to success: if you don't work hard, you won't get good grades; and if you don't get good grades, you won't get a good degree; and if you don't get a good degree, you won't get a good job. It would seem that acquiring lots of good, solid educational qualifications is the only way to guarantee career success - or even business success. Sir Alan, it would seem, doesn't share that opinion: he once snapped at a Cambridge University-educated candidate on The Apprentice (after her disastrous attempt at running a pizza stall): "This is not some further education college, you know, where dummkopfs come to learn to make mistakes."

Clearly the lack of further education never held Sir Alan back from success. It didn't hold back a former schoolmate of mine who left school at 16: two years later he came to visit us all in the Sixth Form. There we were, at 18 years old, sweating over our A-Level revision and university application forms, and there he was - having worked his way up through his company over the previous two years - commanding a salary of £30,000 (the average starting salary for a university graduate now is about £23,000, but back in the year 2000 it was probably less than £20k).

One of the managers I worked under in my first accountancy job left school at 18, found her first job in a tiny accountancy firm on a tiny salary and persuaded them to train her for the chartered accountancy qualification. Once she qualified at the age of 21 she left them to join a bigger, world-famous firm. By the age of 25 she was already a manager on £50,000. By the age of 25 I was still struggling through my chartered accountancy qualification on a fraction of her salary. Not to mention £10,000 of student loan debt I'd incurred from getting my BSc Mathematics degree, which of course she didn't have. And I was nowhere near her seniority level.

The point I'm trying to make is, salaries aside, by the ages of 18 and 25, these people were far further along in their lives and their careers than I was at those ages. They got good enough GCSE and A-Level grades for their desired careers, then instead of going on to university (and they certainly could, if they wanted), tried to get their foot in the door of their chosen field by accepting a low-paid, low-skilled position and working their way up. Despite my top-class degree from a top-class university, at the age of 23 I still spent the first few months at the accountancy firm making tea and photocopying while I was "learning the ropes". I may have started on a higher salary than if I'd started at the age of 18, but I'd always be about 3 or 5 years behind in career progression.

Our former Prime Minister Tony Blair once pledged to have 50% of all young people in the UK in university education. Never mind that, frankly, some of these teenagers may not be suited to higher education, and as above, may not even need it. Entry to higher education certainly increased under his tenure, and so did the number of loans taken out by the Student Loan Company as a result. But, we were all promised, getting yourself into debt for a good university degree would all be worth it as you were guaranteed to get the best jobs as a result of spending an extra 3 to 5 years in a schooling environment. Try telling that to the class of 2009, who leave university in the middle of a recession only to find the "best" employers are not hiring any graduate recruits and the only jobs available are the low-skilled ones. Does one really need a degree to flip burgers in McDonalds?

There is also the issue that school and university life doesn't prepare you for the world of work. This has been a frequent complaint among a lot of graduates. At 21 I could tell you all about the Theory of Relativity and numbers on an imaginary plane, but I didn't have a clue about how to deal with office politics or the character transplant required to fit into work culture. I could tell you all about the Navier-Stokes equations for fluid dynamics, but I didn't have a clue why our office working methods were what they were.

I wasn't prepared for the fact that our office chat consisted of mindless gossip and conversations about TV programmes, instead of the debates about literature and world politics that I got used to with my university friends. I simply didn't have a clue that when your boss marches in, announcing that he's gone commando in the office because he's shit his pants and had to throw them away, you have to humour him instead of being horrified. Nothing could have prepared me for that!

So it would seem that academia doesn't prepare you either for real life or for the world of work. What worth does it have, then?

A couple of years ago I gave a talk at a local secondary school about what a career in accountancy would involve. As soon as their career advisor introduced me as an accountant I could see the whole room of 16-year-olds switch off like the lights had gone out. Only one seemed interested, and enthusiastically wrote down everything I said. There was one problem. He wanted to be an accountant, but he couldn't be bothered with his schoolwork. Particularly Maths. Now, while you don't have to be a Maths genius to be an accountant (in fact, it probably helps if you aren't!), you do need to be good at basic arithmetic. If you don't have a good GCSE and/or A-Level Maths grade by the age of 18, then forget it: no self-respecting firm is going to employ a trainee accountant who can't count.

It's not just accountancy: you'd be surprised how important basic mathematical skills are for day-to-day living. Particularly with financial matters: at best it stops you paying more than you necessarily need to; at worst it stops you being completely ripped off.

On The Apprentice a few weeks ago, Paula, a human resources manager, received the "You're Fired" treatment from Sir Alan and crashed out of the competition despite having come up with a brilliant body-care product and organising her team efficiently. The reason? A simple arithmetic error arising from mixing up two essential oils meaning she'd spent over £700 instead of the £5 she thought she'd spent. Paula's bleating that "I'm no good at numbers" was viewed dimly. It was basic maths that we all learned in school.

Other work and life skills build on school learning too: if you've never bothered to learn to spell or use grammar properly, you can't expect other people to understand what you've written. Business clients will think you are unprofessional and incompetent. When applying for a job, it could even annoy the person who is reviewing your application. Computer spell-checkers don't always pick up spelling or grammar mistakes, so it still means you have to learn these academic skills at some point.

Increasingly employers are demanding an ever-widening set of academic skills, such as foreign language skills and basic geographic knowledge. So ignoring your teachers may not be such a good idea after all.

Some professions actually need a relevant university degree: if you want to be a doctor you need to do a degree in medicine. My boyfriend works in IT but he has a Computer Science degree. Sir Alan's assertion that educational qualifications "only tell an employer that person's got a brain" is therefore not entirely true.

Personally, I don't regret the time I spent at university. I'd wanted to go since the age of 11, and being Little Miss Straight "A" Student without much effort meant that there was no way I wasn't going to go. If I had my time all over again, I'd still have gone to university, even if I might have picked a different subject. I loved my time at university. Not only did I get to be independent, I learned how to cook, how to live on a shoestring budget, how to interact with people from vastly different social backgrounds - and cultures - from me. I met great people and got to challenge my brain. I took advantage of all the opportunities I didn't get at school - student journalism, living with friends, martial arts classes and so on. I learned how other people lived, worked, and thought. I learned so many things that I never would have known if I never went to university.

I also learned that life is what you make it. The greatest education in life is that of life itself, but your academic education is of as much value as you make of it. And sometimes the uses you find for your education can be quite unexpected.
The writers of the musical Avenue Q have degrees in English Literature, commonly seen as a "useless" degree that doesn't lead to anything, career-wise... so they wrote a song in Avenue Q called "What Do You Do With a B.A. in English?" You can't argue that they didn't make use of that!