Is going to university still worth it? I teach there – here’s the honest truth

I am starting at university next week. This is not because I am a very mature student – I will be starting at UCL, where I teach postgraduate modules on non-fiction writing.

One of the perks of teaching writing is that at the start of each year I get to channel my inner John Keating, Robin Williams’s character in Dead Poets Society. “You must strive to find your own voice,” Keating tells his students, “because the longer you wait to begin, the less likely you are to find it at all.”

I don’t quite repeat those words, but I do urge my students to spend their time at university not just focusing on exam results but also expanding their minds, harnessing their creativity and seizing the day.

These days, most of my students seem more seized by panic about their post-university prospects, and I would not blame them. The degree in which my modules sit costs just under £20,000 a year for domestic students and more than £35,000 for international students – before living costs. I love teaching but, given the price, is university still worth it?

I was at university in Manchester in the early nineties. I started my degree in 1989, a few months after seeing Dead Poets Society in the cinema, and graduated in 1992 with a degree in economics and politics. While I had an amazing time in Manchester – I loved the city so much I stayed for four years after graduation – none of my happiest memories are related to the degree I studied.

When I think back to university, I remember the gigs, the nights out and the freedom. I saw Radiohead in a tiny room above the Students’ Union on The Bends tour and Oasis at the Hacienda in the week Definitely Maybe was released. I learnt so much from my university years, but the studying was almost incidental.

I remember sitting my A-levels at Luton Sixth Form College and thinking I needed to pass because that would enable me to leave home. I grew up in a fairly conservative, working-class British Pakistani family, which often felt suffocating. So much of what I learnt at university came from being away from my parents and far from home. I learnt how to make friends – still a work in progress – and how to be independent. University was where I learnt who I was when I was not a son.

My advice to anyone considering university today is to try to study somewhere far from home. But that is becoming less common. UCAS data shows that 31 per cent of UK 18-year-olds accepted onto university and college courses this autumn intend to live at home – a record high.

I was a university student in the days before tuition fees. My BA Econ would have cost around £60,000 in tuition and living costs in today’s money. Since my dad was an unemployed former factory worker and my mum was a housewife, I received the maximum grant, worth around £5,400 a year in today’s prices. I graduated with no debt and state-funded living costs.

But there is one thing that connects my experience directly to today’s graduates: I graduated in 1992, straight into the depths of a recession. It was a brutal year to be job-hunting, so I couldn’t get a graduate job and ended up in a succession of menial temporary jobs.

Today’s graduates face something similar. Youth unemployment among 16-to-24-year-olds hit 16.2 per cent in early 2026, its highest level in more than a decade. If anything, today’s students may have it worse: the jobs I did after graduating – directory enquiries operator and data inputting – have largely disappeared, and back in the nineties I did not have to fear AI.

So would an 18-year-old me still choose university? Would it be more sensible to avoid all that debt and spend three years gaining real-world experience and skills?

Given that I teach at one university, am chancellor of another and hold an honorary doctorate from a third, it might be predictable for me to say yes. Fortunately, the numbers still tilt, just about, in favour of going. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has found that graduates earn around 20 per cent more over their working lives than they would have without a degree, even after accounting for the cost of studying and the fact that graduates tend to have done better at school.

That average hides a very uneven picture. Some creative arts and language subjects have close-to-zero or negative estimated returns, while law, economics and medicine deliver much higher lifetime returns.

I struggle to list any tangible benefit having a university degree has had on my subsequent career. I made no useful contacts and have retained little academically from my time there. So was university a waste of time?

Actually, no. It was because I was at university in Manchester that I chose to stay in the city after graduation, and the years afterwards laid the foundations of my later life: work experience at Granada Television that led to my television career, and freelance journalism for the Manchester Evening News that kick-started my career in journalism.

The benefits of university cannot be measured only in dry statistics about lifetime earnings. When I think back on those years, the word that comes to mind is freedom: the freedom to learn, yes, but also the freedom to have fun, dress weird, enjoy being young and become who I wanted to be.

Would I still go to university today? It would cost a whole lot more, but if it was a decent university – like Manchester or UCL – and if I could live away from home and expand my mind, harness my creativity and avoid a life of quiet desperation, then yes, I still believe it is worth going.

Definitely – not just maybe.