According to the latest British Social Attitudes survey, one in three people in England now believe a university education isn't worth the time or money - up from just 14% in 2005. That's a striking shift, and it's fuelling exactly the kind of debate playing out in the media right now - degrees versus apprenticeships, debt versus earning, one path pitted against the other as if there's a single right answer everyone should have known in advance. 

There isn't. And chasing one is a distraction from the real problem. 

The question people should be asking is not "is university worth it" - it's "are peopple getting the advice they needed to decide what is best for them?" For too many, the honest answer is no. Our Valuing Careers research found that adults struggle to access proper careers support, and the people facing the biggest barriers to it are the ones who'd benefit most. That gap is where the real damage happens - not in the choice between a degree and a trade, but in the absence of anyone qualified to help someone think it through. 

It's the same gap sitting underneath the NEET crisis. Entry-level opportunities - work experience, Saturday jobs, junior apprenticeships - have collapsed, and without guidance to fill that space, some young people end up on a degree course with no clear route to a career, and others end up with no route in at all. Same root cause, two different headlines. 

And the post-16 landscape isn't getting any simpler. A Levels, T Levels, apprenticeships, Higher Technical Qualifications, V Levels arriving next year - more routes than ever, which should be good news, but only if people can actually make sense of them. Right now too many young people are working it out alone. 

The CDI’s Big Listen survey of career development professionals indicates that a third of respondents felt their school had limited or no resourcing in place to provide one-to-one personal guidance for pupils, and over half said the same for resources to provide work experience.  

None of this means university is a bad bet. Done for the right reasons, with the right information, it's still a great choice for many young people - not just for the qualification, but for the experience of it: working out what you value, testing ideas against other people, watching a career direction take shape rather than arriving pre-decided. That's worth something a spreadsheet won't capture. The problem was never the degree. It's that too many people are choosing one - or ruling one out - on a guess. 

That's why CDI supports the Career Guidance Guarantee, calling for proper access to a qualified career development professional for every young person and adult, so the choice between university, an apprenticeship, or something else entirely is based on real information and self-understanding, not guesswork or default. Get that right, and the "is university worth it" question mostly answers itself.