It’s great to get a degree but there are dozens of alternative routes to happiness and prosperity
Testing times
IT may seem like the end of the world for Covid-generation sixth-formers who fell foul of the tougher A-level marking yesterday.
Far from it, though.
It’s true that life has moved on from the 1970s when only one in ten teenagers ever went to uni.
And it’s still true too that a good degree can be a vital leg-up for bright working-class kids.
But there’s an essential truth behind Jeremy Clarkson’s jokey annual message about his exam disasters never holding him back.
Increasing numbers of employers now value ambition, nous, raw talent and hard work over degrees.
There are simply too many of the latter, often in meaningless niche subjects which don’t impress bosses.
Are they really worth three years and a £60,000 debt?
There are many alternative routes to happiness and prosperity.
Like training for a trade.
Or having a great idea and throwing yourself into it.
It’s not easy for a disappointed 18-year-old to hear. But life, thankfully, doesn’t revolve around exam results.
The no-dealers
NO ONE in their right mind would object to our post-Brexit trade deals beyond the EU.
They are the future, not the past.
And, long-term, a much more lucrative prospect than the troubled euro bloc.
But not everyone IS in their right mind.
So while 67 per cent of the public back Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch’s new deals, about a fifth are indifferent or even hostile.
No prizes for guessing how they voted on June 23, 2016.
They detest agreements with Australia, Japan, New Zealand and the vast, multi-nation CPTPP not because they are bad for us.
They are the opposite.
It is solely because each one represents Britain moving on — and makes Brexit’s economic success ever more likely.
Remoaners still pine for the pre-referendum world for reasons so faded that even they can barely still recall them.
How sad to waste so many years engulfed by nostalgia, regurgitating the same dreary arguments.
King of chat
ANYONE raised on modern TV chat shows where fawning hosts help celebs flog books or movies won’t know what they missed.
But interviewers should all learn from clips of Michael Parkinson.
The Yorkshire miner’s son was a master.
A proper journalist, he was genuinely curious about his subjects.
He researched them fastidiously.
He gave A-listers the time and opportunity to make reflective and sometimes insightful remarks rarely heard now.
He wasn’t afraid to be the butt of a joke, either, as his famously hilarious encounters with Muhammad Ali — and of course Rod Hull and Emu — proved.
RIP, Parky. You were the best.