What commentators say about A levels and university every year

Receiving A level results is a big moment – whatever the letters turn out to be it is a cause for celebration given what a pain doing A levels actually is.

Sadly, older and more cynical generations use results day as a change to air prejudices and received opinions. If you have just got A levels or are supporting someone who has, takes like these are the last thing you should be concerning yourself with: however if one gets under your skin today I’ve included a quick riposte you are welcome to borrow.

A levels are too easy – not like in my day

Since Michael Gove’s reforms in 2010, the proportion of entrants awarded each grade has been (broadly) constrained by a formula. Grades are still determined by exam performance, but the precise mark you get will lead to a slightly different grade each year.

These inter-year movements are very carefully moderated by subject experts at each exam board, hence the very slight changes in proportions. Cynics will note that this has resulted in an end to the “more As than ever before” discourse that is familiar to those of us who took exams in the pre-Gove era. The proportion of As (or A*s) is very similar year on year – illustrated by the brief deviation from this pattern during the teacher-assessed grades during the pandemic.

Depending on how old you are, the content of a given A level will have changed significantly over time – new priorities and new understandings will shape the exam, meaning that some historic material may not be covered. Also, as a species humans are becoming more accomplished at designing exams that test actual understanding rather than your ability to memorise things. This isn’t always a one way street – high stakes final exams were reintroduced as a sole means of assessment in most subjects in the Gove reforms, after many years of modular and coursework driven approaches.

A levels have always been, and remain, the most difficult exams that most people will ever sit. They were hard for you, and have been hard for the current crop.

It is far too easy to get to university, especially for nonsense made-up courses like [insert example]

Firstly, pick your example. Sociology is on trend right now, but previous cohorts of pundits have railed against media (or “meejuh”) studies, golf course management, surfing, and – way back in the day – English literature. There is a greater variety of courses now than ever before, preparing a greater variety of students for a greater variety of things to do after graduation.

The kind of courses people complain about – Mickey Mouse courses, if you must – fall into three main categories: the politically suspect (attempts to make the world a better and fairer places), the super-niche (leading to a very specific job and meeting very specific needs), and the broad and general (introducing young people to various ways of understanding the world around them and the problems it faces). Complaints about each betray a lack of understanding in the commentator, and a failure of empathy.

It is far from easy to get on to any course – even if the traditional entry requirements are low, surviving and thriving on a higher education level course is difficult for anyone. Entry requirements generally are a means of sifting out people who may struggle with a given course at a given university: but the traditionally academic approach is neither the only approach available in higher education nor the most appropriate one. More generally successive governments have railed against academic routes holding greater esteem than vocational ones, but universities can and do offer a range of very vocational courses that suit those with practical rather than theoretical mindsets.

AI is eating graduate jobs so everything is pointless

It turns out that the world continues to change via developments in technology and working practices. I’m old enough to recall the fears that computers and the internet would make many jobs obsolete, but in fact these technologies actually created many new and important jobs. The current (and likely future) state of artificial intelligence is just another technology that has strengths and weaknesses: the calculus of what can be done by machines and what should be done by people is changing.

One of the defining characteristics of graduates is adaptability – your degree is about teaching you to think and respond to new information far more than even the most vocational course is about inserting tab A into flap B. Add that to the ability to evaluate evidence, read critically, and make decisions in uncertain situations and it feels very much like the AI revolution will need an awful lot of university educated people.

There are better opportunities outside of university: vocational/apprenticeship/straight to work

Some of the opportunities available outside of university are amazing. However they are not widely available, and success is often predicated on being in the right place at the right time rather than the opportunities themselves. Vocational courses are hugely valuable for the economy in the short term – they provide opportunities for people to enter professions and careers that are crying out for staff at speed – but there are many examples of vocational qualifications that declined in relevance as the world (and technology) changed. In the first few years it may be easier to get a job and you may well earn more than your peers – but there is no guarantee that this situation will continue.

Apprenticeships depend on availability and employer viability. For the right candidate in the right situation they are fantastic, but – again – the world is littered with apprenticeships that failed to lead to a permanent job, or were never completed because the employer went under or changed direction. Like any decision made aged 18, they represent a roll of the dice rather than career certainty.

Anyone advising young people to go straight out to work at age 18 should really also be adding what all these 18 year olds are expected to be doing otherwise. Britain has more than a million NEETs (not in education or training) aged between 16 and 24, something that speaks to the low demand for young employees without level 3 or above qualifications.

University is too expensive so people shouldn’t go

University is too expensive. There’s no argument there.

But the conjunction between decades of poor policymaking and the rising costs of just about everything in the world is not the fault of the young people hoping to start this autumn, who have as much right to choose their own path in the world as any previous generation.

The particular cruelty of our current funding model is that is predicated on the assumption of a large graduate premium – which, given successive raises in the minimum wage and an increasing difference in prior attainment between those who take the HE route and those who do not – is mathematically questionable. And the funding model itself eats away at this premium by dint of repayments that start earlier and finish later. Two major pieces of work this year made it clear that a hefty graduate premium still exists in most cases, and the evidence that this breaks down for lower prior attainment is questionable.

Fundamentally, if people want to go to university they should go. The costs will change for reasons of political expediency – as they have before – and the current direction of travel looks like it will (eventually) end up in a better deal for graduates.

Universities are left-wing indoctrination camps and will turn you woke

A few years back, Wonkhe published a superb piece of research by Elizabeth Simon that debunked this lazy stereotype. She used sibling fixed-effects (examining attitudes towards gender and the environment) to compare people who go to university with their siblings who did not, and found only a very mild (and non-significant) liberalising effect. Where and how you grew up has a much greater impact on your political beliefs than higher education, and the (again, mild) leftward-leaning bent of higher education stems from a selection effect: people who already have liberal views are more likely to choose to study at university.

Universities are not indoctrinating anyone – if this was the case academics would all agree with each other and if you think that you have clearly never met any academics. Like much in our current political discourse the cliche of the lefty university student is a straw man – at the risk of labouring the point if you have ever met students you will know they are a pretty diverse bunch these days, with political views just being one axis of that diversity.

Or it could be that university is good at helping people deal with a diverse environment where people have different backgrounds and different views: something that feels like it might be useful in the increasingly fractured society we live in.

Employers don’t want graduates

Employers emphatically do want graduates. We know this because a government agency called Skills England has been surveying employers about their current and future skills needs. Its annual report for 2026 noted:

“Around two-thirds of the new entrants joining priority occupations are expected to need a Level 4 qualification

Level 4 and above is university level – there are some other routes to level four but the majority sit somewhere within the higher education sector. Historically, two-thirds of entrants to priority occupations got there via higher education.

In other words, employers are crying out for people with university-level qualifications to fill key roles. Not all of these will be via a direct vocational higher education route – there is still a general graduate job market.

We know that because most graduates get jobs soon after graduation, and most of these jobs are “graduate jobs” (according to an almost entirely arbitrary distinction drawn at a very broad resolution). This is of course dependent on the wider economy and hiring decisions made by employers in the face of a variety of global headwinds, but even in a historically dire period for the recruitment of young people graduates are doing better than non-graduates.

I got terrible results but look at me now

If your parents owned a successful toy company and sent you to Repton School you may end up a successful motoring journalist even if you do terribly at your A levels, provided you later – er – retrain as a motoring journalist. It is important to remember that people can and do retrain and change careers (for example from motoring journalist to farmer and publican), but having a hefty chunk of money behind you generally makes this process a lot easier.

That said, in the grand course of a life A level results (B, D, D since we are here – though I’d like an A in general studies to be taken into account) soon fade into insignificance: as the world changes around you new jobs and careers open up that would have been unimaginable when you were 18 and no matter what you do you will find your place and your passion. A qualification at level four or above that helps you adapt might help in an uncertain future.