Rishi Sunak is wrong, it's always worth getting a degree

Quite simply, a degree is for life. Vocational training is not. If you decide mid-career that you might like to change track (and I’m old enough to have seen a lot of people do that) then it’s a gigantic pain if you lack a first degree. All kinds of interesting pathways are blocked if they involve four years of study, rather than a year-long Masters. And many, many employers won’t even look at your CV because they use a degree as their first filter.

If you leave school at 18, your vocational training may well be for an industry that doesn’t exist anymore five decades later when you finally get your state pension. And much of those five decades may well be spent looking on as graduates whizz past you into better-paid, more senior roles. Yes, we have an Education Secretary, Gillian Keegan, who left school at 16 to become an apprentice - but she also picked up two degrees along the way. And her colleagues are predominantly Oxbridge graduates, even if they aren’t great adverts for that route.

It's true that some degrees nowadays don’t seem to offer great value for money - thanks to a funding formula that rewards them for signing up students and barely scrutinises the education they’ll be receiving. But you have to judge their value on a lifetime, not the first few years of a career. Apprenticeships aren’t as rigorous as they used to be either. When I signed my indentures with the Jewish Chronicle, it was a serious pledge of employment and training. Modern day apprentices can be dispensed with much more easily.

I remember listening to a government minister explaining a new scheme to recruit graduates as social workers. “We want the brightest and the best,” he said. I wondered what differentiated “brightest” and “best”, and how he could be so sure that Russell Group graduates were either. The British exam system is designed more to identify privilege than innate talent. But the message was clear - there will always be ways for graduates to leapfrog the rest of the crowd.

Vocational training may well launch you into a great career. Looking at it from the outside, I haven’t suffered from the choice I made at 18. But a university education will open doors for the rest of your life. And if I had that choice again, I’d have opted for English at Goldsmith’s.