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This opening paragraph needs some further explanation, so I’ll rewind a few months. Friday 14th July 2006 was probably the best day of my life. Why? On this day I graduated from the University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne and in the vein of every poorly scripted teen angst/rights of passage/college movie, it felt as though the whole world was opened up to me. Of course this was naïve but I had finished with a first class honours in Politics and I felt as though I’d been given a key and I could open whichever door I wanted to explore.

University had been a blast, probably for different reasons than most people. You see, I really enjoyed my Politics degree, as anyone who’s had to sit with me for more than four pints knows. So much so that I’ve had to curtail my rants about various things much like a recovering alcoholic has to curtail spending seven consecutive nights of drinking Vladivar vodka diluted with methalated spirits before waking up in his bed in a puddle of his own vomit. I’ve realised that short of a few people i knew on my course at University, that politics bores a lot of people. There are lots of reasons for this but that’s another story. It may come as a surprise to many, because it did to me, that many of those who were on my course at University, weren’t all that interested in politics either. In fact, I often found the University experience highly apolitical, and given that some would consider undergraduates the future world leaders, I would conclude that this is a worrying trend. But why is this? Why are our higher education institutions breeding an army of graduates whose prime concern is settling down in the workplace, getting a mortgage and perhaps catching up with “I’m a Celebrity Big Brother Pop Idol Dancing on Ice”?

In my opinion, there are many reasons for this too but I’m going to give three because it’s a magic number. Firstly, and this links to Rob’s thoughts on careers, University nowadays is geared towards firing people into the graduate jobs market. Higher education is for many people (employers mostly), a necessary stage before you finally “arrive” with a regular job and an arena people inexplicably call “the real world”. If you don’t have a career or a job then how can anyone define you? How can you define yourself? How will the University you’ve graduated from demonstrate their ability to craft an efficient and work-ready young man/woman, and most of all, if you’re not going in to a career then WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN DOING ALL OF THESE YEARS?

This well worn path of progress is not just part of my imagination. The large firms stand waiting at the end of the University machine with sharp suits, an array of slightly pretentious finger food and glasses of cheap fizz. They are there to hoover up the promising graduates, for some of whom this will be their ideal job, for others this will be a means to an end and for many it is simply the least worst option. Either way, the aim is to cut the umbilical cord of education, snuff out the last remaining spark of creativity that your “student life” has led to and shape you into the sort of machine that can slip into the rushing torrents of the contemporary global economy.

It’s like a twenty-first century twist on the national service route: it’s not that your country needs you, your economy needs you. Its not “you’re in the army now boy” but rather, “you’re with the company now boy”. This prospect filled me with fear, I could see myself ten years down the line sitting at an Ikea flat-pack furniture desk in a bleak London office, with coffee that was strong enough to wake the dead being fed intravenously into my bloodstream, listening to the sound of my line-manager bleating non-sensical management speak whilst the breakdown-inducing buzz of the air-conditioning unit provided the confirmation that the last few brain cells I had left of original thought had finally burned themselves out and been taken over by only facts and figures designed to sure up investors and keep me on target for my salary and job and the end of the month.

I’ve seen my vision of hell, it’s a gaggle of office workers standing around a water cooler heaping praise on Robbie Williams for being so adept at reinventing himself each album whilst planning their next meeting to discuss “communication strategies” and “synchronising company relations”. At the risk of overstating my case right now, I think I should simply return to the point that I’m trying to make: University prepares you for this existence should you wish to choose it. I think its clear by now that I would rather not.

The second reason University is responsible for producing apolitical beings is financial. Now I’m no bleeding heart, but when a full time student someone has to work a “part-time job” which is in fact a 32 hour week, print out work in a computer cluster that charges 5 pence per sheet of A4, eat frozen food which bares only a passing resemblance to nourishment, find time to go to the library to buy books that would otherwise cost £30 each and still be expected to find time to socialise and generally live a life… then something has gone wrong in our higher education system. This is of course not my experience, I would most likely not be here if it was, it is an example of what I have seen. It is also reality for many students who simply wish to attain higher education (that is supposedly open) to all but either choose to, or are forced to fund themselves.

The introduction of University tuition fees has castrated the student body (apologies to the feminists I couldn’t think of a better word). The NUS is now so feeble it cannot even provide a united front on the sorts of issues that would send student bodies the world over out on the streets to defend their futures against governments much more authoritarian than ours. Whether this is by design or not is irrelevant. That fact of the matter is that many undergraduates simply don’t have the time or money to concentrate on things other than their studies or their part-time jobs. This is unfortunate because it is exactly these sorts of activities that employers apparently look for in the “graduate market” today. Social stratification does not end at University.

Finally, partly as a result of how the jobs market works in this country these days, and how higher education has come to be perceived, there are simply too many people going to University today who either haven’t thought properly about why they want to go to uni or just don’t care. This is controversial, but the majority of people in higher education, particularly on courses such as… politics, just don’t give a fuck. For these people, lectures are an inconvenience which must occasionally be addressed in between pints of turbo shandy and rounds of fuzzy duck at the union. In the words of the late Douglas Adams, these people like the sound deadlines make as they fly by. They attain greatness through boasting about how little they understand about their degree course which is presumably being kept afloat by some unwitting parents working their tits off back at home whilst their offspring attempts to find just one more hilarious position for a traffic cone on their way back from an all-you-can-drink session at the local cattle market of a nightclub, trailing vomit in their wake and leaving every house they drunkenly parade past muttering “twats” in their sleep. These people finish University and realise that they have little to show for it, some of them probably go into politics. Others are content with a job that keeps their blood alcohol level just below critical.

These are three reasons why UK graduates are increasingly less principled and increasingly less likely to leave University, better people, more rounded and ready to enter the workforce creatively, with a firm knowledge of their direction and the desire and drive to make a difference, to be somebody, to take on the status quo and who knows… maybe change the world someday.

I’m an idealist, some may even say a wanker, for holding these views. But unfortunately, this is how I feel. And this is still how I feel after three months in the workplace in France, during which time I worked for a company which provided business to business relations for the wine industry. Why did I do it? Well got me out of the country to somewhere different for very little money as it was subsidized by the EU, and also, my job was chosen for me. All I had to do was turn up. I learnt French, I met some fantastic people, I had fun in a foreign environment, I learnt a lot about French culture and society and I gained “work experience”. Basically this translates to three months of confirming that which I already suspected: the commercial sector is not for me. The market research that I had to carry out as one of my tasks brought me to the conclusion that there are a lot of companies out there providing services, and charging for them, that would be unnecessary were it not for other companies doing exactly the same.

Take the hotel industry for example. If you attempt to book a hotel over the internet today and you type the name of the hotel into a search engine, it is very likely that the first few results that pop up will not be the hotel that you are looking for but rather agents attempting to sell you a room at said hotel by proxy. Affiliated with such websites will be a raft of associates providing similar services, all but indistinguishable from their competitors who operate in exactly the same way, and may even be the same company.

The aim is to create money through confusion, yet the service is not necessary. It would be perfectly sensible simply to ring the hotel up and book a room yet finding the original webpage is all but impossible thanks to a plague of spin-of sites which list the hotel and its facilities but conveniently leave out any way of contacting the hotel directly leaving the only option of booking it through them. This is an example of why I don’t think the commercial sector suits me. These are the sorts of tactics that create money, and if that’s the case, then I’m not interested in creating money. But more importantly this brings me back to my original two points in a slightly unnecessarily drawn out fashion, that:
1) The work-place is a very boring place if you find yourself doing what you don’t actually want to do, and…
2) The commercial sector is a large mountain of bullshit.

So if University has fired me off, as I suspected, in the direction of a career which I not only dislike, but have deeply profound moral and philosophical disagreements with, then I am clearly going to have to reconsider. As a result, I am going to do the only thing which seems sensible. I am going to go back to university. But this time, it’s personal.