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Who Needs a Degree?
KATE SAUNDERS takes a roll call of people who, like her, have succeeded without going to university.
In the tightly-knit literary circles of the metropolis, people don’t ask you which university you went to. They want to know how they could have possibly missed you at Oxford or Cambridge. Like 93% of the adult population, I did not go to any university at all, and this has become faintly embarrassing since I accepted the honour of helping to judge this year’s Booker Prize. Certain colleagues look down their noses when they discover I have no dreaming spires in my CV. The sorry truth is that while my contemporaries were frolicking in the groves of Academe, I was playing a nurse in a TV soap, and toting a spear at the National Theatre.
However, I am in excellent company. My fellow graduates of the University of Life include not only entrepreneurial wizards such as Alan Sugar of Amstrad, but also politicians such as John Major and James Callaghan. In the literary field, P.D. James, the thinking person’s crime novelist, best-selling romancer Jilly Cooper, and playwright Tom Stoppard have achieved eminence without university degrees.
The fact is, although universities are wonderful places, putting yourself through one of them is no guarantee of brilliance. And many people who have engineered their own education actually believe that they would have been less successful if they had slapped a three-year preservation order on their adolescence and gone to university.
The novelist Lisa St. Aubin de Teran was too busy roaming the world and picking up three foreign languages in her youth to fit in going to Cambridge, as she had originally planned. “I probably learned more, living the life I did,” she says.
Instead of swotting for exams, de Teran was managing a sugar plantation on a remote hacienda in the Venezuelan Andes. “When I was younger I did regret not going to university,” she admits. “It seemed such an easy way to spend three years. But I was 25 when I returned from Venezuela, and I couldn’t really see myself sitting there with a lot of eighteen-year-olds.”
Exotic experiences are far more useful to a novelist than a degree. However, the graduate-dominated world of the media is another matter. So it’s refreshing to learn that Michael Grade, head of Channel 4, never went to university. Neither did Anne Wintour, head of features at BBC Radio. “I remember feeling self-conscious about it at first,” she says, “but I stopped worrying about it years ago. Graduates get on by conforming and I think people without degrees tend to be more original.”
“It all comes back to experience of life,” declares Ann Winterton, Conservative MP for Congleton. Like Winston Churchill before her, she has no degree, having entered politics “straight from the kitchen sink” in 1983. “No number of letters after your name can teach you about life. I used to be rather in awe of people with qualifications. But, being self-taught allows you to do things in your own way. I think a lot of people go to university to put off the evil hour of getting stuck into a real job — it can be a soft option.”
I must confess, it’s this soft option element which makes me wish sometimes that I had gone to university — it does sound such fun, discussing the meaning of life over midnight coffee. And there’s a lot to be said for the classic liberal education which broadens the mind by filling it with a lot of delightful and rather useless knowledge. By the time you leave you may not be able to type, but you sure as hell know about Cosimo de Medici.
Picking up culture without a degree is rather like doing Venice without a guide book. You may not have anyone to advise you where to look for the highlights so you are forced to find them for yourself. And you will be freer to form an original opinion, uncoloured by those who wore down the stones before you.