In 1987, at the height of Thatcher’s boom, the world was the student’s oyster. Or at least it was for Angus. In his second year at the University of Bristol, he was captain of the First XI hockey and cricket teams. In between organising charity dinners he would scratch out an essay before dashing off to another match. Angus was offered a job with the Swire Group in Hong Kong before entering his final year. He was predicted to get a 2:1 but there was no pressure. With his winning Irish charm and a rounded sporting personality, the company wanted him anyway.

If only it were as easy today. Those halcyon days when students were an elite whose class of degree had little bearing on their career are gone. A study of Britain’s top multinationals has shown that even with the all-important 2:1, our graduates can no longer expect to walk into the best jobs. With 40 per cent of young people in higher education, the premium of a degree has dropped and a good class of degree has become critical. But while “ problem-based learning” still gives our students an edge in the global market, research has shown that degrees must also help them to become creative and innovative.

Yet with the demise of the grant for most students and tuition fees set to rise to £3,000 a year, more than half of undergraduates are working during term-time for an average of 13½ hours a week. Instead of playing sports or organising charity balls, students are poring over books or working to pay off debts. But now businesses are cautioning that this new hard-working ethic makes Jack a very dull boy who arrives in the job market without the basic social skills he needs. In February managers from Britain’s top 222 companies said that they did not expect to receive applications from graduates “with the correct skills” and were prepared, if necessary, to leave jobs unfilled. The reason, they said, was that today’s students spend too much time studying and not enough time joining clubs, where they might learn how to work in teams and give presentations. Poor spelling, grammar and arithmetic were also a problem. If students are not learning these skills in their leisure time, universities must build them into the degree course, managers say.

At the University of Southampton, the history department is doing just that. A compulsory second year module — the brainchild of Dr Adrian Smith — asks students to pick from subjects including “War and Chivalry in Tudor England” and “Cricket and Society in Hampshire”. They must then complete a 12-week project on their chosen subject as part of a six-person team. The assignment is worth a quarter of the year’s marks. Students learn how to write and research a long dissertation and develop leadership and presentation skills. Dr Smith says: “This shows that they have transferable skills that they will need in the workforce.” After three months they give a presentation, write a group thesis, a personal essay reflecting on their performance and carry out a “public service”, such as making a radio programme or teaching schoolchildren about their subject. James Harrop-Griffiths, 20, and his group focused on the role that the village of Hambledon played in developing the game of cricket. The project was invaluable, he says, for developing leadership and teamwork skills. “I’d have no fear now of going into a brainstorming meeting or working in a group.”

This year, four universities will offer degrees aimed specifically at small businesses that combine IT, business and project management. Professor Paul Hyland, director of history at the Higher Education Academy, says that traditional academic antipathy towards business is crumbling. “In the old days, universities regarded students as sheep processed through a factory farm,” he says. “Now, they realise that students must take away enduring life lessons from their studies.”

Industry’s cry for more value-added degrees to beat the competition from highly trained multilingual overseas graduates is a wake-up call to the UK’s 120 universities. The issue will become more acute with the introduction of top-up fees: school-leavers will be quicker to judge universities on the employment prospects they offer. Richard Wilson, head of business policy at the Institute of Directors, says his companies would welcome more courses like those at Southampton: “While grades indicate a level of commitment to a course, communication and presentation skills are equally important. If students can show evidence of taking on roles such as president or treasurer in university clubs, it will show that they are a rounded individual.”

Last month 45 top businesses were asked by the Council for Industry and Higher Education what they looked for in a new recruit. The most common answers were “innovation” and “the ability to think creatively”. Britain, they said, will never be able to compete with the volume of highly trained technical graduates from the Indian sub-continent and the Far East. However, while problem-solving remains at the heart of our university studies, a British degree will give graduates a lead in a rapidly changing world where innovation is key.

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