More than half of businesses say that having a university degree is not important when hiring a new employee.
Polling by YouGov of 1,000 business decision makers in Britain found that while 39 per cent said having a degree was “very important” or “somewhat important”, 56 per cent said it was “not very important” or “not important at all”. A further 5 per cent said they did not know.
The larger the business the more important a degree becomes in the hiring process – 56 per cent of decision makers who work in businesses with over 250 employees said a degree was important.
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This compared to just 20 per cent of businesses with less than 10 employees, and 36 per cent of businesses with 10 to 49 employees.
Sector differences
The importance of degrees also varies by sector – the legal sector believed degrees are the most important (66 per cent). Other sectors valuing degrees included IT and telecoms (58 per cent) and finance and accounting (54 per cent).
Retail, where 30 per cent thought it was important, and hospitality and leisure (19 per cent) were the least concerned sectors.
Regional divides
There were also stark regional divides. While 62 per cent of businesses that mainly operate in London felt having a degree was important, in Yorkshire and the Humber the figure was 14 per cent. Thirty-three per cent of businesses in Scotland felt it was important, and 24 per cent in Wales.
The survey comes at a time when the UK Government has suggested too many students may be going to university.
Government criticism
In July, the universities minister Michelle Donelan said that “too many” students had been “misled by the expansion of popular sounding courses with no real demand from the labour market”. She claimed young people had been “taken advantage of” and “left with the debt of an investment that didn’t pay off in any sense”.
The Government has pledged to scale up technical and vocational education as an alternative to university.
Despite the minister’s comments, research has found that going to university gives people an average earning boost of £100,000 or more over their lifetime, although it did find one in five would have been better off financially if they had not gone.
University admissions were very buoyant this year, with accepted UK applicants rising four per cent on 2019, to 441,720.
The increase was likely to have been boosted by the decision taken by governments across the UK to revert to more generous teacher assessed grades following the results fiasco, leaving students with higher grades than normal.
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