Somewhere, right now, a 17-year-old is afraid to tell her family she wants to go to university. At £9,000-plus a year it feels like a luxury, a thing for other people. Even though she achieved the highest results in her school, and has spent her whole life wanting to be an engineer, she knows her parents are terrified of university debt and that attending the best institutions, in far-flung cities, would mean moving away.

Now imagine this 17-year-old was listening earlier this year as the education secretary – the guardian of aspiration – announced that poorer young people would be better off studying near to home through a “commuter degree” in order to save pennies. That would be the education secretary, Damian Hinds, by the way, who studied at Oxford University, 153 miles away from his hometown near Manchester.

Last week, Hinds made another speech, this time saying we need to get over our snobbery towards vocational education. To this end, the government is changing school performance data so that it rolls together the measure for the numbers of children who go on to do a degree, with the measure for those who do an apprenticeship. “The message here is not don’t do a degree – the message is simply: you don’t have to do a degree.”

Oh well, thinks the 17-year-old, studying engineering at Durham was a nice thought but it will be cheaper to do an apprenticeship with the local factory. She’s right, too. The route will indeed be cheaper, it may lead to a good job, and there’s no reason to feel any less esteem for taking the factory path.

And yet. Across town there’s another 17-year-old, with wealthy parents, studying in a private school that pumps children into top universities, with a sense that his future shouldn’t depend on a single employer because one day he intends to be the employer. Let’s be serious: this kid won’t be taking the apprenticeship route – and Hinds knows it.

Conveniently, however, both choices will now look the same in school performance statistics, meaning Hinds can take credit for “more young people than ever before going into higher education”, even if the number of university places drops in the near future (a real possibility). The new measure will mask the inequalities among those taking up the different routes.

A world in which rich kids do degrees and poor kids do apprenticeships is not a world of parity. It makes for lower debt, better employment rates, reduces the need for immigrants, and gives the education secretary a warm and fuzzy feeling. But equality, it ain’t.

It also misses out some cold, hard facts about the labour market. Women who attended university in the 2000s earned over 50% more by the age of 29 than those who did not, according to a new study by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Some of that was owing to pre-university characteristics, such as family wealth or prior attainment. Cancel all that out and female graduates still earned 28% more than non-graduates. If you’re a woman, and your teacher pushes you towards a degree, it probably isn’t snobbery. It’s economics.

For men, the picture is more complicated. Around a third who attend university earn less than their counterparts who don’t, though much is related to the subject. The truth is, one can earn a lot more by becoming a plumber than by studying English literature. But if a bookish pupil is desperate to study classical texts, is a teacher supposed to tell him no because statistics show that working-class boys like him are better off learning a trade? If it is “snobbery” to tell a pupil to aim for their dreams, sign me up.

Apprenticeships can be the right route for young people. So can going to university. But let’s not pretend everyone’s children will be equally pushed down these routes or that the wealthy will be the ones to give up their aspirations.