WEEKEND READING: Why wealthy families still believe in university – and what that tells the rest of us

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This blog was kindly authored by Dr Fadime Sahin, Senior Lecturer and Course Lead at the University of Portsmouth, London.

Wealthy British families continue to send their children to university, even as a growing public narrative suggests that it may no longer be worth it.  This gap is a story we should not ignore.

As one first-generation student put it, her wealthier peers operated with ‘a massive safety net’ – for them, failure simply meant resetting; for her, it was debt, no degree and no career. That difference in risk reflects long‑standing structural patterns in who goes to university.

That debt burden is deeply tied to the current student loan system. For this reason, the structure of student loans itself requires urgent attention, because it amplifies the risks for those with the least financial buffer and shapes who feels able to participate in higher education at all.

Students from the most affluent households now account for nearly a third of all undergraduates in the UK, up from a quarter in 2021/22. Over the same period, the share of students from semi-routine working backgrounds – typically customer‑facing or operational jobs such as postal, machine‑operative, security, caretaking, farm or retail assistant work – fell from 13 per cent to 9 per cent in 2024/25, matching the already low rate seen among routine‑occupation families, whose work commonly requires low qualifications and including lower‑autonomy manual or service jobs such as driving, cleaning, portering, packing, labouring and basic hospitality. IFS data tells the same story from the other end: over 70 per cent of privately educated young people hold a degree by their mid-twenties. For children from the poorest households, that figure is under 20 per cent.

Why affluent families still prioritise degrees

The ‘university isn’t worth it’ argument is usually framed as a return-on-investment calculation. But many wealthy families do not appear to be running that equation, and if university were simply about financial return, and those returns were no longer adding up, then they would be the first to abandon it, because they have the capital to afford alternatives. Instead, many treat a degree the way they treat other long-term investments: not for its immediate return, but for what it protects against.

There is, of course, a counterargument: wealthy families are not rational actors but prisoners of tradition, reproducing credentials because it is what their class has always done, regardless of whether it still delivers. But if that were true, wealthy families who have the resources to act on any doubts would be the first to move towards alternatives. Yet the wealthy are doubling down, not hedging.

For many affluent families, university functions less as a financial calculation and more as a form of long‑term positional security. It consolidates status, opens networks and confers the kind of cultural legitimacy that labour markets reward long after graduation. The Sutton Trust’s Elitist Britain 2025 makes this stark: Britain’s elites are 21 times more likely than the general population to have attended Oxford or Cambridge. One in four went directly from an independent school to a Russell Group university. The pipeline is deliberate and self-reinforcing. It is chosen, maintained and reproduced.

The return-on-investment argument measures only what it can see – tuition fees, starting salaries and graduate employment rates. It rarely captures the relationships, the networks and the social ease that students accumulate alongside their degrees. As sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued, education generates cultural capital: resources that can be converted, over time, into economic advantage. For the wealthy, degrees function as long‑term insurance rather than income boosters, not because they misunderstand labour market realities, but because they understand what university provides beyond them.

The data supports that intuition and shows why the two are connected rather than competing. IFS research modelling lifetime earnings found that – even after accounting for stronger prior attainment and more advantaged backgrounds and netting off tax and loan repayments – graduates earn around £100,000 to £130,000 more over a career than non-graduates. That premium is not simply a return on what is learned in lectures; it partially reflects the networks, credentials and cultural capital Bourdieu describes converting into economic advantage over time. In other words, the ‘long-term insurance’ the wealthy families are investing in shows up in the earnings data, too – it just is not only about the degree itself.

Critically, that advantage is back-loaded: the salary gap between graduates and non-graduates widens significantly through the thirties and forties, long after the graduate job search is forgotten. Wealthy families investing in a degree are not buying a starting salary. They are buying a forty-year asset.

The rhetoric is not class-neutral

The issue is not that debate exists. Labour markets do change, graduate outcomes vary and universities should be scrutinised. But the current rhetoric does not land equally. It is class‑blind in its delivery, but not in its impact.

More advantaged families are largely insulated from the ‘university isn’t worth it’ message. In middle-class families, going to university is simply the expected next step. In working-class families, parents push back: steering children toward apprenticeships, questioning the value, expressing doubt about whether university is ‘the right kind of place’ for people like them. This is reflected in participation intentions: recent research shows that just over half of white working‑class pupils (52 per cent) say they are likely to go to university, compared with more than four‑fifths of their middle-class peers (82 per cent). And only 22 per cent of white working‑class pupils believe that university is important for getting a good job, according to polling reported by Times Higher Education as part of an independent inquiry into their educational outcomes.

This pattern is not just about information; it is about habitus – the internalised dispositions, instincts and self-perceptions shaped by social environment. For students from privileged backgrounds, university is familiar territory. For many working-class students, it can feel subtly misaligned with who they are. Many self-select out before anyone tells them to.

The students who push through anyway do so knowing that the stakes are different. Failure does not mean regrouping. It means debt, no degree and no career.

Yet university can be especially transformative for the students most likely to internalise the message that university is not worth it. The Sutton Trust finds that young people from low-income backgrounds are four times more likely to become socially mobile with a degree, which narrows the earnings gap between less well-off graduates and their wealthier peers. IFS data shows that ten years after graduation, women’s earnings are around three times those of non-graduates, making opting out particularly costly for working-class women with the least to fall back on.

The limits of ‘alternative pathways’

If we are telling working‑class young people that university is not a good option, we should be honest about what we are offering instead and whether those alternatives genuinely exist for most.

Apprenticeships

These are limited in number and uneven in quality. The Social Mobility Commission reports that the NEET rate – not in education, employment or training – is 22 per cent for young people from lower working‑class backgrounds, compared with just 9 per cent for those from higher professional families. The gap has barely shifted since 2014. The cost to the economy is £125 billion annually. More than the Department for Education’s budget. The wider NEET data shows the same pattern: only around 15 per cent of NEETs have a degree, compared with 85 per cent who do not. This is a stark reminder of how costly it is to be outside higher education when the labour market tightens.

Part of the explanation may lie in who apprenticeships now actually serve. Just over half of new apprentices in 2024/25 were 25 or over, while barely one in five were under 19, and barely one in five were in a skill-shortage occupation. As recent Financial Times reporting notes, ‘the typical apprentice is now an older, established white-collar employee.’ The pathway being offered to young people as an alternative to university is, in practice, absorbed largely by workers who are already employed. For every 17- or 18-year-old who does secure an apprenticeship, three have tried and failed, according to research from King’s College London.

This is not simply a matter of employer preference; it also reflects deeper structural failures in how apprenticeships are funded and regulated. Excessive regulation, cost pressures on employers and a poorly designed apprenticeship levy have combined to distort where training investment actually goes.

Entrepreneurship

However valuable this is, it requires capital, networks, risk tolerance and a financial buffer if things go wrong. Privileged families can provide these. Disadvantaged families often cannot. Self-directed learning demands time, motivation and guidance, none of which are equally distributed.

These pathways can work well for some, but access is uneven. For many, they risk becoming a narrowing of options rather than expanding them.

When large numbers of young people opt out of university year after year, the cumulative effect reshapes labour markets, tax bases and the very communities that depend on social mobility to function. This is not an abstraction. Failure to raise the educational outcomes of children from poorer backgrounds could cost the UK economy up to £1.3 trillion in lost GDP over the next 40 years. What looks like personal choice can accumulate into structural consequences.

None of this means that alternatives to university are without value. Apprenticeships, technical training and entrepreneurship can serve students for whom a three-year residential degree does not suit. A healthy system should offer more than one route into a career, provided those routes are properly funded and genuinely accessible to the young people they are meant to serve. But expanding those routes should not come at the cost of the one route that has continuously delivered for the majority of the students who use it. If we fail to protect that access while alternatives are still developing, we will leave the next generation with fewer choices and deeper divides. The long-term economic and social costs will be far greater than any short-term scepticism.

What about AI?

A degree bought at twenty-one is a forty-year asset. The argument that AI reduces its value misunderstands where the risk actually lies. If AI compresses labour markets, then the capacity to think critically, adapt and understand complex systems becomes more valuable, not less. Education is unlikely to be made redundant; it is what allows people to navigate it.

There is also a civic dimension. In an era of deepfakes, algorithmic manipulation and AI-generated content, the ability to evaluate evidence, identify misinformation and hold institutions to account is not only a personal skill; it is a shared societal one. The students least likely to develop that capacity are often those most discouraged from pursuing higher education.

Signals we shouldn’t ignore

Privileged families have not missed the headlines questioning universities’ value. They have simply declined to act on them. The wider public shows a similar pattern. A 2025 YouGov survey found that 84 per cent of UK parents and grandparents still want their children to go to university, even as public debate grows more sceptical.

The loudest voices questioning the value of university rarely acknowledge who will pay the highest price if the argument prevails. The rhetoric changes the behaviour of the privileged very little. It can radically alter the trajectory of those with the least room for error.

There is one further signal the data offers. A degree appears to be worth most precisely when the market is at its worst, reducing unemployment exposure most sharply in downturns rather than booms. The students being quietly talked out of university right now are being discouraged at the moment when their qualifications would protect them most. If the UK wants to avoid widening its class divides, reframing public narratives around university access would be a meaningful place to start. The question is no longer whether university is worth it, but who gets to benefit from it