“Regret”, “guilt”, “a swindle”: just some of the words that parents use when confessing on anonymous forums like Mumsnet and Reddit their buyers’ remorse about their children going to university. Is it any surprise with the average graduate debt in England standing at £53,000 and rising, a mass class action of students suing their universities for compensation for the poor service offered during Covid, and the collapse of entry-level graduate jobs?
“I just feel that there would have been better ways of spending £60,000 than living in a horrible room and having [only] five hours of lectures a week,” says one parent, whose two children are now back living at home after graduating. Another parent told me: “Looking at the burden of loans, I wish I pushed my children to go down an apprenticeship route or just get a job. Even subsidising travel would have been a better use of the money.”
Despite the well-publicised issue of student loans, the cost of university isn’t borne by the students alone, but also by their parents. In 2024, the Higher Education Policy Institute found that the Bank of Mum and Dad has to contribute up to £15,000 for their children to have a minimum acceptable standard of living while at university. If they had to earn their own keep, they’d be looking at finding 19 hours of paid work a week. This £15,000 contribution from taxed income is money that parents are not able to spend paying off a mortgage, putting into their pension or bringing forward retirement plans.
Anna, a parent of three children close in age, says it has had a huge financial impact on her family. “I work in the media and my salary hasn’t gone up in a decade, so despite having saved up for them to go to university, I’m still thinking we may need to remortgage the house to pay for it all. I’m nearly 60 and retiring feels like a fantasy.”
Despite the stark financial reality, most middle-class parents still see getting a degree as the default option. I know I’m guilty: my eldest is just finishing his four-year course, while my other two children will be packing their fairy lights and faux pot plants to move into halls of residence at dinner-party-bragworthy institutions this autumn. Even more questionably, mine are all studying humanities – effectively subsidising STEM students, whose courses cost more to deliver but charge the same fees (as well as normally attracting higher salaries at the end of it).
Yet, when one of my daughters said she didn’t want to go to university or fill out a UCAS form in sixth form, I was resistant to the idea of anything else, fearing the alternative would be lying on the sofa, exhausting the outer reaches of TikTok and Netflix. At the time, she had some vague aim of becoming an “entrepreneur” without any particular evidence of the skills, grit, or product necessary to succeed. I surprised myself with how dismissive I was of her questioning the obvious path and how deep-rooted my pro-university prejudice was.
If university-orientated parents accept any alternative path, it’s that of a degree apprenticeship – it ticks the boxes of getting a degree qualification but alongside a salaried job without paying tuition fees – but they’re so rare it would probably be easier getting a full ride to Harvard.
In 2025, according to Government figures, there were nearly 600,000 university starters and only 60,000 embarking on degree-apprenticeships. In order to secure one of these positions, young people go through complicated, often multi-stage selection procedures while juggling sixth-form studies. Applying to university – even Oxbridge or Imperial, which have additional tests – appears straightforward in comparison. (There are also non-degree apprenticeships that offer debt-free paths to jobs in organisations such as Sky, Network Rail, and Tesco).
And it goes without saying it’s hard graft: once on a degree-apprenticeship, young people are looking at completing a degree in four years in addition to working a four-day week while their university-going peers enjoy their 20 weeks’ annual holiday.
Yvonne Demby, head of private sector partnerships at Not Going to Uni, the platform offering guidance and options for alternative paths, believes that parents are blind to the “amazing opportunities with fantastic firms”. She’s noticed that parents in her circles are still wedded to universities and only two of her children’s peers have gone down an apprenticeship route.
Even with their mother’s expertise gleaned from working in this area for 15 years, her daughter is at university and her son plans to go after his A-levels. “Obviously I’ve not done a particularly good job!” she laughs. “But I did provide them with information, and it’s ultimately their choice.”
It’s not just parents who steer their children into the funnel of higher education. Schools are keen to boast of the number of their pupils going on to Russell Group institutions, while sixth form common rooms are agog with the chatter of open days, offers and predicted grades. The universities work hard to market themselves as a sunlit upland of good times and job prospects.
John Bradley, a consultant educational psychologist, has looked at the ways that universities sell themselves to prospective students/customers. He jokes that it’s always sunny on campus, if the brochures are to be believed. “The genre most prospectuses belong to is that of a tourist or holiday brochure,” he says. “Glossy flattering photos, user endorsements, and overblown claims.” They aren’t, he points out, written by academics, but by marketing specialists whose job is not to present dreams, not research.
Such claims include universities making selective use of league tables and boasting of glowing inspections made decades before. One university “claimed to have a library with two kilometres of shelving”, he says. “To which we might respond, is that a lot for a university library? And are there any books on [all those shelves]?”
Bradley advises parents to let go of their own beliefs based on whether or not they went to university, and to encourage open conversations with their children during which “the young person has to talk about what they want, not us telling them what they should or shouldn’t do”.
This should centre around three issues: the course itself and what the study involves, the social side and independence university life brings, and finally a degree as a route to a career. The issue with the last of these is that any information about progression rates to jobs is out of date: “When you apply you’re looking at data that’s already [at least] two years old. By the time you hit the workplace, it’ll have been six years and a lot can happen in that time in the world of work.”
With that caveat, Bradley still believes that parents need to encourage their child to be a “data nerd, go to Office of Students’ website and look at progression rates, the percentage of students who go onto graduate jobs, which varies hugely between courses”.
It’s the second of his factors – the social side of university – that feels to me as a parent the least easily replicated by alternative paths. Bradley calls it a “finishing school”, while a parent described it to me as a “three-year transition from child to adult”.
Yvonne Demby acknowledges that the desire to have fun and enjoy life is a driver towards university “and I’m fine with that”. At that age, their prefrontal cortices are still half a decade from full maturity, and they get to live away from home but what feels to be a state-sanctioned, managed process. It’s a perfectly designed fledging station, like being kicked out of the nest with a parachute and a route home every few months.
Bea, a lawyer, has two children, one who is graduating this year, the other skipped education to pursue his vocation as a musician. But as a consequence, one child will have a degree and some adult budgeting and independent living skills, while the other is a 24-year-old feeling trapped in his teenage bedroom. “He’s desperate to move out but doesn’t earn nearly enough to rent. I’m mindful of the fact of his brother getting four years of rent paid by us, but if I start paying his, which I can’t afford, where does it stop? At least being a student, there’s an end to it.”
Many middle-aged graduates have a misty-eyed nostalgia about their own student days, one saying “there’s a place for sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, and that place is uni”. Bradley cautions against bringing in too much personal experience into promoting university as the place where you’ll have the time of your life and make your best friends. “Not every student finds it a nourishing and enjoyable experience… you can go to the one you want and study the course you want, and still end up miserable.”
I know rationally the universities have changed since I went, not least in the cost. And yet, I’m filled with excitement and nostalgia as I contemplate driving an overstuffed Skoda across the country to deposit my daughters. Whether that excitement survives the financial onslaught and possible graduate unemployment remains to be seen.
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