Teach new generation to make degrees count

Does going to university enhance your earning power? Or are people who are likely to be big earners also likely to go to college? The truth is somewhere in between, but this week's report from the Council for Industry and Higher Education (page 3) suggests that the wallet-fattening effect of getting a degree is likely to be reduced unless students who come from backgrounds unused to the opportunities a degree brings are taught to make the most of them.

As the share of young people entering university increases, the salary premium that a degree commands is likely to fall. And the welcome development whereby some lower-pay professions such as nursing and teaching are going all-graduate will mean lower average graduate earnings.

As CIHE members know, part of the problem lies with employers, not potential employees. The high-pay blue chips that graduates aspire to join have a poor record in hiring students from untraditional backgrounds, or who have read the wrong subject at the wrong college.

But a world in which half the school-leavers go to university is also going to be one in which power and influence run through different networks from those they followed in the era of elite higher education. The aim should be to ensure that we do not end up with a system in which some universities produce the future chief executives of major companies while others turn out the production-line managers. If some lessons in interview skills at college can have this effect, the people and time to provide them ought to be found.