I have a real dilemma advising my girls and last night Mrs F grumbled I was using the chat on this site to influence our 15yr old to start thinking of not going to uni. I didn't mean to be obviously biased but...
Had the potential for uni but became fed up with education by 17 and only just scraped some A-levels. Immediately found a good career job at 18 though and by the time my uni friends had finished their courses and found jobs I'd well established earnings, decent car and on my second house (restoring them as an aside to my job).
I reckon it took until we were all about 40 for the graduates to catch up (with one or two exceptions). However I threw in a curved ball at that time by deciding I'd had enough of being employed and have done my own thing since then.
Mrs F's career path is even more extreme in that she left school at 17 to do bar/waitress work and have a laugh. Then somewhat by accident in her mid 20s she fell into a career path and achieved decent management positions. Today by and large she is managing graduates rather than the other way round.
These two unconventional life paths are very poor examples for our kids as it all could have gone so badly wrong.
I see on the links John H gave above it was stated the average lifetime earnings of a graduate will be £100K more than the non-uni guy. If you'd ended up with £30K of student debt and missed out on the £45K the other guy might have earned while you were at uni the lifetime figures then look to give little advantage and greater risk to the uni route??
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