Many graduates ‘would have preferred apprenticeships’

By Chris Parr. More than three quarters of recent university graduates were not told about apprenticeships or vocational training routes before leaving secondary education, a survey has revealed. According to a poll of 1,774 people who graduated in the last two years, 76 per cent said they were not informed about the alternatives to university before leaving school. Of these, more than half (54 per cent) said they would have picked an apprenticeship or vocational training route instead of their degree had had they received better information. The top reasons why the graduates would have opted for vocational training as opposed to university were to avoid debt (77 per cent); to gain a better position at work (61 per cent) and because of a belief that it would be less stressful than university (39 per cent). Around a third (31 per cent) said that they were now in an industry for which their degree was “completely irrelevant”. Read more...