While we debate the theory, young people are making decisions without us

This blog was kindly authored by Julia Roberts, Founder and Principal Consultant at Julia Roberts Advisory.

On 6^th May 2026, HEPI published a thoughtful piece by Professor Dame Athene Donald of Cambridge asking whether skills and education are opposing concepts. It is an interesting question. Professor Dame Donald argues, reasonably, that the two are not in opposition: that critical thinking is both a skill and an educational outcome and that false demarcations do no one any favours.

She is probably right. But I want to suggest, respectfully, that this conversation is also a near-perfect illustration of the problem.

I have just come back from a three-day rugby tour with my son and a group of teenagers from all walks of life. Some had every advantage you could imagine. Others had the world stacked against them before they had even sat their mock GCSEs. Somewhere between training sessions, matches and a great deal of food, they discovered I might know a little something about education.

What followed was one of the more energising conversations I have had in years. These kids were curious, sharp, and full of brilliant questions. They wanted to know about careers, about what university actually does for you, about whether it is worth it. The questions were good. The knowledge behind them was not. Quite a few had almost no idea about the range of extraordinary careers available to them, let alone how education connects to getting there. One young man who has never shown the slightest interest in education in the five years I have known him was all ears the moment I mentioned nanotechnology and biomedical engineering.

Meanwhile, on HEPI, the sector is debating what to call things.

I do not say that to be dismissive of serious academic argument. The skills versus education question matters for curriculum design, for policy and for how universities describe themselves. But it matters to people who are already inside the system. For the young people on that tour, the debate is not about semantics. It is about whether anyone in higher education is going to bother explaining why any of this is relevant to their lives.

We talk a lot about the existential crisis facing higher education. But I wonder if we are framing the wrong problem. The question is not just how universities survive financially. It is whether they can make the case, clearly and urgently, for why they need to exist at all. Universities accepted the marketised model. With it came an obligation to make the case for the product to the people being asked to pay for it. That case is not being made. And this matters more than many in the sector acknowledge, because even students whose parents went to university are the first generation in their family to have paid for it. The experience their parents described, and the financial reality they face, are not the same thing. For those with no graduate family history at all, the gap in understanding is even wider.

Universities are stacked with brilliant people. Researchers, scientists, entrepreneurs, artists and public servants. And yes, there are dedicated teams doing community engagement and outreach work, often brilliantly, often on a shoestring. But this cannot remain a peripheral activity delivered by a small team with a limited budget. If universities are serious about making the case for their own existence, community engagement needs to be a strategic priority, resourced and valued accordingly, not an add-on to the main event. The raw material is there. The question is whether institutions are willing to treat this as core business rather than a footnote in the access and participation strategy.

The skills versus education debate is worth having. But let’s have it after we have done the harder work of stopping talking to each other and starting to talk to our future students and the communities they come from. The curiosity is there. I saw it on a rugby tour last week.