Illustration: Simon Letch You can understand why young people resent being lumbered with education debt when governments have gone for years tolerating distortions in the tax system – negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount – that favour older people buying investment properties over first-home buyers, and push the price of homes and the size of home loans even higher. And it's understandable that graduates should be uncertain about the economic value of their degrees at a time when so many uni leavers are taking so long to find a full-time job – which is partly because the past few years of weakness in employers' demand for workers is being borne mainly at the entry level, and partly because universities have lowered the average value of their degrees by lowering entry standards and by educating far more people for particular occupations than are ever likely to be needed. A big part of this last problem comes from the way successive "reforms" by both sides of politics at both levels of government have stuffed up the choice between going to uni and going to TAFE or a for-profit provider of VET – vocational education and training. The plain truth is, while it's right that, in our ever-more complicated, knowledge economy, almost all students need further education after completing their schooling, it's wrong to believe everyone should go to university.

Illustration: Andrew Dyson. The less academically inclined – of whom there will always be many – would be better served going on to vocational education and training, as would the economy (that is, the rest of us). Yet recent times have seen multiple pressures for every kid to go to uni. The first and most potent is that being a graduate carries more social status – an irresistible lure to many parents and students. Almost all students need further education after completing their schooling but it's wrong to believe everyone should go to university. Credit:Ryan Osland The long-standing policy of encouraging students to stay to the end of year 12 adds to the presumption that young people will and should go on to uni. The last years of high school are overwhelmingly academically inclined.

It was always accepted, in principle, that not all students were suited to university and that, for many, their last years of schooling should be a "pathway" to a trade or other technical qualification. Great idea; doesn't seem to have amounted to much in practice. And then we have the introduction in 2012 of demand-driven federal funding of undergraduate places at university, which has prompted a huge increase in student numbers as unis – some more than others – dropped their entry standards so as to maximise their federal grants. Would it be surprising if this led some students to go to uni when they should have gone to TAFE? I'm told that, at NSW TAFE's big campus at Ultimo in Sydney, more than 30 per cent of the students are there because, though they already have a uni degree, they can't find a job.

I'm told there's a shortage of architectural drafters because people who should have done the tech course have gone to uni to be architects. Then they're disillusioned when they're put to work doing drafting. But would it be surprising if school leavers are steering clear of vocational education when they've read so many stories about the tribulations of TAFE and some private providers ripping off the young and trusting, so as to rort the federal government's VET version of the student loan scheme? The truth is that the efforts of federal and state governments of both colours to make VET "contestable" by making for-profit education providers part of the system have been a disastrous failure. Now the federal bureaucrats have belatedly sorted that mess, we're left with private providers who will only ever cherry-pick the most popular and profitable courses, usually those with low capital costs. So we're back to relying on good old government-owned TAFE – always the education system's poor relation, towards which the feds' commitment runs alternatively hot and cold.