Yes absolutely – the smart student should think long and hard about what course they are doing, why and what they will have at the end of it – they should also see if the course offers hands-on and placement opportunity and go for those rather than just 3 years of pure theory.

As a business owner, ex lecturer and an employer of fresh faced graduates I am constantly amazed at just how different the HE space is to a commercial environment.

Roll back to September 2008 and we got two very different CV from two young men.

The first was 21 years old – he had received a 1st Class honours degree from his digital media course, along with a letter of recommendation from his tutor.

The second was only 18 years old – he had left home at 16 and had been freelancing as a digital artist since, a rather precarious existence at such a young age.

I had a lot of preconceptions about educations, coming from a family where everyone has a lot of university education with a father and a sister who both have PhDs I was pretty sure that our second contestant should go to university – afterall I had never employed anyone without a degree. But I decided to take them both on.

Six months later – and my view about university education couldn’t have been more different. We had to let our 1st class degree guy go, because he didn’t make a single commercial contribution to any of the projects, despite our best efforts, he simply didn’t get the fact that you need to make the commercial grade if you want to get paid for it! Worse still because he had a 1st it would seem that he really thought he didn’t need to learn anything new or listen to advice.

Whilst our school-leaver was flourishing – really taking in every shred of advice given to him and producing outstanding work.

Outcome :

we would rather take on young people who haven’t been spoiled by university and train them ourselves – or alternatively – take year out students and convince them to come back to you once they’ve finished their degree.

The best way to learn is on the job – if you can combine on the job training with HE in a meaningful way that is the best way to go forward.

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Although spending 3 years drinking and having non-committal fun with the opposite sex is definitely a great way to avoid responsibilities and make ‘child-hood’ last that little bit longer!

Kam