So who benefits from a common or garden university education these days? I don’t mean from a high-end Oxbridge mind-expander or a career-critical science/engineering course but from the bog standard ‘Uni’ experience the system shovels school leavers into by the tipper-bucketload every autumn.

According to today’s Independent, the average student clocks up nearly six grand in loan interest before they graduate. By the time they finish paying all the interest over 30 years, their three years at the University Formerly Known As Nnnnn Technical College will have cost them over £120,000.

Supposedly, this gives graduates an advantage in the jobs market.

It doesn’t.

After a decade of taking on grads who can’t spell, add up or manage critical thinking; and who also require babying through their first two or three years on the job, employers are saying “WTF? We might as well take bright school leavers at 18 and be three years ahead of the game by the time they would have left Uni”.

Moreover, when you consider that these 18-year-olds’ other option is to waste three years of their lives at Uni and come out with a £120k ball and chain of debt round their ankles, it wouldn’t be hard to justify asking them to go to work for virtually nothing if it meant being formally work-certified in some way and largely debt-free after three years.

Employers I know have begun taking apprentices instead of graduates for the first time. They’re getting the pick of the crop of kids who’re too smart to get saddled with a shed load of debt in return for making themselves less useful to those employers three years down the line.

Maybe it will take 20 years for all this to work itself out, at the end of which degrees will be rarer and have regained their value. Until then, my advice to anyone asking whether they should go to Uni is: “Only if you really, really have to.”