The great flaw in the government’s plan to tackle Britain’s spiralling NEET crisis — the young people not in education, employment or training — is that it seems to rest on a rather optimistic assumption.
Andy Burnham has announced that the government will be moving away from the “degree by default”, including a newly unveiled plan to deliver 22,400 more apprenticeships per year ahead of a review by Alan Milburn.
Apprenticeships seem to be, at least for policymakers, the silver bullet.
The government is right to push them. The pathways into work need to be clearer, apprenticeships better understood, and the stigma attached to vocational education dismantled.
I have written before in The New World about the increasingly absurd proposition that university is a commodity whose price rises as its value falls, and about the dismal job market awaiting many of the graduates who emerge, debt-laden, at the other end.
But what if the problem is not that teenagers fail to understand the benefits of an apprenticeship? What if they understand them perfectly well, and still fancy university?
Yes, apprenticeships carry some stigma of not being as ‘sophisticated’ as a university degree, perhaps a hangover from the days of polytechnics. But I would wager that this is not why so many 18-year-olds glance at the apprenticeships booklet their sixth-form careers adviser hands them, nod politely, and head straight for the UCAS website.
I hate to disappoint any particularly academic readers, but most young people do not go to university because they are consumed by a burning desire to engage in scholarly debate. Nor, for that matter, because they have calculated that a degree will guarantee them a six-figure salary.
They go because how else can you move to a walkable city, live semi-independently with your best friends, meet potential partners, discover new interests and develop a personality that is not entirely a product of your parents’ household? All while enjoying, in one form or another, a degree of financial support and a socially acceptable excuse not to have your life together.
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The traditional path of adulthood is less defined than ever; gone are the days of entry-level jobs, easily accessible mortgages, and cheap pubs you could take a date to. More young people are living at home til their thirties, and unable to meet people without dating apps.
Against this backdrop, why would an average 18-year-old pass up the chance to leave home and spend three years in a place full of people their own age? The freedom to move out, make mistakes, fall in love, fall out of love, deal with horrible landlords, burn the soles of your shoes off working in a pub, and discover that a diet consisting of pasta and whatever is in the reduced aisle at Tesco has consequences. And to do so surrounded by people undergoing much the same indignities.
For most people I know, they entered university as a child and left as an adult, in every sense of the word.
Of course, this is not everybody’s experience. Plenty of students live at home, take their studies very, very, seriously and have little interest in the social side of university. And plenty of apprentices move out, make friends, date, and enjoy all the usual rites of passage.
But the opportunities are not evenly distributed. University offers a ready-made social world, and while an apprenticeship may offer a better salary, a clearer route into a profession, and the welcome absence of a sizable student loan, it does not offer the same infrastructure for living.
What teenagers sit there making a cost/benefit analysis spreadsheet about what their pension pot will look like if they choose an apprenticeship? Okay, maybe some are. But most, one suspects, are also wondering where their friends are going, whether they will meet somebody, and what living in another town or city could look like.
And at 18, how many of us would genuinely have chosen the sensible option over the exciting one? How many would even have understood that they were being asked to choose between the two?
In an interview I conducted for a TNW article headlined “The great university rip-off”, I spoke to Adam, who took a civil service apprenticeship in the north-east. He told me: “It has given me a significant head start to my career and wider life.” However, he conceded that he had to miss out on social events and compromise on the classic “young” lifestyle while working long hours and living at home.
The obvious answer here is to stop asking apprenticeships to compete on careers alone.
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What if apprentices were offered subsidised shared accommodation, on something like the model of university halls? What if apprentice guilds — or their modern equivalent — were properly funded and given the space to organise sports teams, creative societies, club nights and social events?
That way, when teens are choosing what they want to do, they don’t have to sacrifice either a formative life stage or a more cost-effective and potentially better-suited career path. The only question is: “What am I passionate about?” Which should be the entire point of education and a career in the first place.
I have made this argument before, including on national radio, where I faced a fair few callers and texters who had decided that what I was preaching was that18-year-olds olds should descend into unsupervised hedonism, collecting all manner of addictions and sexually transmitted diseases.
Well, for the avoidance of doubt, I’m not. And, by the way, if you believe your child can enter university — or the adult world more generally — without behaving like an idiot, I have some bad news.
Hopefully, demand for apprenticeships does seem to be growing; according to the BBC, competition for degree apprenticeships has quadrupled in recent years. In 2025, there were 21,800 applicants for degree apprenticeships in the UK. That’s not a negligible number. But compare it to the 665,000 applications for undergraduate degrees in the same year. The wider picture is also telling: in 2024/25, 761,500 people were undertaking apprenticeships in England, compared with 2.86 million students enrolled at universities across the UK, the vast majority of whom were in England.
Burnham and Milburn are right to turn their attention to a crisis that has been allowed to fester for far too long. Young people deserve better routes into employment, and apprenticeships should be a central part of that. But if the government wants 18-year-olds to choose differently, it might first try understanding what they are choosing in the first place.
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