At 21, Marcus Buchanan drives a Mercedes, cruises around the Spanish coast, boasts a wardrobe bursting with new clothes and has his sights firmly set on the property ladder.

Ashley Waugh, just a year older, can’t afford holidays, petrol for her car or even a takeaway pizza — and relies on her parents to pay her rent.

So which of these ambitious youngsters, with very differing fortunes, has a degree? Were you to believe successive governments’ obsession with university attendance, you would assume the former.

After all, the clearest path to success is higher education. Or so we — and the legions of freshers who began courses last month — have been led to believe.

At 21, Marcus Buchanan (left) cruises around the Spanish coast, boasts a wardrobe bursting with new clothes. Ashley Waugh (right), a year older, cannot afford petrol for her car

But it’s Ashley who is the graduate. And four months after completing her degree, she is crippled by the resulting £31,000 debt and earns £7.50 an hour as a barmaid.

Marcus, meanwhile, shunned university to start an apprenticeship as an electrician and now earns £27,000 a year — a sum not dissimilar to the debt Ashley and her peers will spend a lifetime paying off.

The disparity between these two young people illustrates the new earnings divide between those leaving school for apprenticeships and their classmates who choose university.

Such is the shortage of skilled workers these days that tradesmen and women can earn a fortune. Electricians, it was revealed last month, may take home as much as £156,000 annually — the sort of income traditionally enjoyed by graduates.

Bear in mind, too, that a junior doctor earns £23,000 a year, working night shifts and long hours, and Marcus’s chosen career path seems even wiser. On top of that, one graduate in five ends up working in a low or medium-skilled job, while one in four, according to a recent survey, regrets going to university.

Ashley Waugh admits ‘wishing I’d never gone’ and says her degree in performing arts, from Sunderland University, has led her no closer to her dream of starring in the West End.

Ashley, who graduated with a performing arts degree from the University of Sunderland, is pictured on her graduation day with parents Sharon and Greg

‘We were told a degree would leave us head and shoulders above everyone else in terms of getting a job,’ she says. ‘But mine hasn’t helped at all.’

At her sixth-form college, where she studied English, media and drama at A-level, it was taken for granted she would get a degree. ‘We were told to pick a subject we were good at. I thought about going to drama school instead, but my teachers said that if I had a degree I would always find work. It was almost as if we were set up to fail.’

Marcus, who hopes to be earning £50,000 a year by his mid-20s, displays no such bitterness. He realised academia wasn’t for him after sitting his GCSEs. ‘It wasn’t that I was incapable — I was always driven,’ says Marcus, who still lives with his parents in Manchester and admits that his father, a floor fitter, had an influence. ‘When I was a child we built things together and at college my favourite subject was business studies. I wanted to stick to my strengths.’

Nonetheless, his decision took courage when more than 90 per cent of pupils at his sixth-form college went to university.

‘University was something everyone aimed towards but my parents were supportive,’ says Marcus, whose 24-year-old sister studied international business at Birmingham University.

His four-year apprenticeship in electrical installation at Bury College entailed shadowing a qualified electrician four days a week and spending one day a week at college.

The wages were meagre at first — rising from £2.64 to £6.20 an hour — and he admits he struggled. ‘I was too tired to go out after work. I felt I was missing out, but I matured and adapted quickly.’

Marcus shunned university to start an apprenticeship as an electrician and now earns £27,000 a year — a sum not dissimilar to the debt Ashley and her peers will spend a lifetime paying off

After passing the exams he needed to qualify as an electrician two years ago, he set up his own company — and business boomed so quickly that within six months he had hired an apprentice of his own. His hours are long — he starts at 7am — but the rewards are great.

As well as the holidays and his Mercedes, he has taken his girlfriend on mini-breaks to Barcelona and Paris, enjoys Italian restaurant dinners and in the next couple of months is planning to get on the property ladder some ten years earlier than most of his student peers.

He recently merged with a plumbing firm to launch a property maintenance company and launched a slick new lighting installation website — osuralighting.com.

‘My university friends say I’m earning so much money,’ he says, adding with admirable humility: ‘But it’s not that I’m doing better than them — I’ve just been working longer.’

But that, perhaps, is part of the point. ‘Apprentices are going to get on the housing ladder quicker, be able to take out a car loan and feel very quickly that they’re ahead of their friends,’ says careers expert Zena Everett, author of the careers manual Mind Flip.

In an age when ‘snowflake’ (hypersensitive) millennial students have acquired a reputation for being ill-equipped for the working world, it is easy to see how more pragmatic apprentices are gaining the upper hand.

‘There is less prejudice against apprentices than there might be against the millennial generation of graduates,’ says Everett.

‘People realise these are kids who are ambitious, with a great work ethic, who are serious about their careers.’

Ashley admits ‘wishing I’d never gone’ and says her degree in performing arts has led her no closer to her dream of starring in the West End

Then there is the fact that so many young people — about 50 per cent — now enter higher education that degrees have effectively been devalued, especially those in ‘Mickey Mouse’ subjects such as puppetry, which are unlikely to be taken seriously by many prospective employers.

Of course, those unsuited to the specific demands of academia are less likely to get an impressive grade on graduation, further diminishing their prospects.

Naturally, Ashley rails against any implication that graduates aren’t prepared for hard graft.

‘This reputation annoys me,’ she says. ‘I’ve had part-time jobs since I was 15.’ Her father, an accountant, and mother, a teacher, contributed to her living costs, but Ashley, who spent her first year in halls of residence before renting a room in a student flat, still needed to take out loans to pay her £9,000-a-year tuition fees and £1,000-a-year maintenance costs.

‘At college we’d been told we wouldn’t have to pay back our student debt until we were earning enough, and were made to believe the money we owed didn’t matter. But by my second year I could barely afford to pay my rent,’ she says.

Since she graduated with a 2:1 degree last July, the highlight of Ashley’s career has been a summer stint playing a dancing gnome at a shopping centre in Newcastle. She has sent her CV to countless prospective employers with no response.

‘As well as acting roles I applied for jobs in call centres and bars, but didn’t even hear back,’ she says. ‘Most of my university friends are working in bars and restaurants like me.

‘Arts degrees aren’t valued. Mine was a waste of time. I would have been better off getting a drama diploma at college instead and saving myself the debt.’

Lizzie Roberts, 22, is another who eschewed higher education. She is in her final year of a toolmaking apprenticeship, and the only woman among 50 trainees on the floor of a car-manufacturing factory in Swansea.

She is currently paid £16,000 a year, but will be earning £27,000 when she qualifies next year — and aspires to manage an engineering company on an estimated starting salary of £60,000. ‘My boss has a company Jaguar,’ she says. ‘There are a lot of perks.’

She could be forgiven for feeling slightly smug when she compares herself with friends who all chose the university route, not least because her salary is paying for a new Audi and she is about to fly off to a five-star hotel in Turkey on holiday. ‘An apprenticeship gives you freedom,’ says Lizzie, from Swansea, who still lives at home. ‘My university friends can’t afford to survive on their student loans.’

Nonetheless, she admits her parents were ‘sceptical’ when she announced, halfway through studying for the English literature and religious studies AS-levels which they had persuaded her to take at college, that she wanted to become an apprentice.

‘They were never academic — my mother was a window-fitter and my father a machinery driver — so they wanted their children to be,’ she says. ‘They felt that if you weren’t academic, you wouldn’t amount to anything.’

So too, it seems, did her sixth-form college. ‘There was never any mention of apprenticeships there. My brother, who studied physics at university, laughed when I told him and my friends thought I was mad. They bought into the stereotype of graduates with good jobs. But I’m quite bossy and said I was going to do it anyway.’

Inspired in part by her grandfather, who was a toolmaker, Lizzie signed up to the apprenticeship at Gower College, in Swansea, aged 19. Her four-year course entails one day of studying a week; the rest of her 39-hour week is spent shadowing four different types of toolmaker at the car factory where she makes parts and tools from scratch.

She admits being the only woman on the factory floor was ‘intimidating’ at first: ‘The men were condescending and kept asking if I was sure I knew what I was doing. I had to work harder to prove myself. But with time my confidence grew.’

She is adamant she is not jealous of her university friends ‘at all’ — not least because of the debt they are now in: ‘Owing that kind of money would have tipped me over the edge.’

Such is the surge of interest in apprenticeships, once an option largely for working-class children, that private schools are encouraging more of their pupils to learn a trade.

Recent research revealed that the number of independent-school students taking vocational qualifications has doubled in the past four years.

Julian Thomas, the headmaster of Berkshire’s prestigious £38,000-a-year boarding school Wellington College, said last month: ‘It feels to me like the blue touchpaper is being lit on what could be a higher education revolution . . . the level of student debt is shocking.

‘At the same time, I speak to a number of CEOs of big companies and they say graduates are not well prepared for work.’

Despite having A-levels in drama, psychology and photography, Lee Mayzes, 20, says: ‘I never had any intention of going to university. A degree isn’t as valuable now. I didn’t want to spend lots of money and not get anything useful out of it.’

Instead, he did an IT apprenticeship sponsored by a creative industry two years ago, and is now an IT analyst on a salary of £27,000 a year.

After researching careers online, Lee learned that lots of companies offered IT apprenticeships — an option his mother, a secretary, and father, a print producer, supported.

‘Neither of them had been to university,’ he says. ‘They knew a degree would be expensive and thought it was a good idea if I worked instead.’

Marcus (who recently merged a plumbing firm to launch a property maitenance company) realised academia wasn’t for him after sitting his GCSEs

The teachers at his sixth-form college were less impressed. ‘They said I should fill out my Ucas form even if I wasn’t planning to go to university,’ he recalls. ‘If I wasn’t as independent-minded, I could easily have been pushed into it.’

After Lee, aged 18, completed what was intended to be a 12-month apprenticeship consisting of three modules in just six months, the creative agency that took him on doubled his salary to £18,000.

After a year, a sister communications company employed him on a salary of £27,000. Lee — whose job entails travelling to his company’s offices around Europe, providing IT support — knows he is earning the same amount in a year that his graduate friends may spend a lifetime paying off.

‘They thought I was barmy for missing out on the university social life, but after their first year they started complaining about the workload,’ he says.

‘My company pays for work nights out in members’ bars and swanky restaurants. This is more fun. I have to pinch myself sometimes.’

His graduate friends, meanwhile, are struggling to find work. ‘One did a drama degree and is working in a fish market,’ he says. ‘They all hate being in debt.’

Melanie Davison, 28, from Birmingham, is another graduate who bitterly regrets her degree. Seven years after leaving Liverpool John Moores University, where she studied geography, she is still £28,000 in debt and earning £400 a month working in a Tesco warehouse to make ends meet.

‘All my friends went to university and it was a given that I would too,’ says Melanie, who got three C grades at A-level. ‘Nobody spoke about the debt we’d get into.’

After graduating in June 2010 with a 2:2 degree, she took a year-long government-funded diploma to become a teacher. ‘I assumed I’d easily get a teaching job after that,’ says Melanie. ‘After all, the government was paying me to study.’

Yet after passing her diploma in June 2011, she was turned down for endless secondary school teaching jobs at interview, and after six months she broadened her search to include other graduate careers.

‘I applied for jobs in my local council, but there seemed to be dozens of applicants for every place. It was demoralising. I realised my degree was a pointless waste of time,’ she says.

Melanie, now a mother to Jake, two, with her partner Shane, an office manager, is not the only graduate in her social circle still scraping a living in a menial job.

‘Most graduates I know don’t have a degree-related job either,’ she says.

‘They work in shops or drive trams and are in loads of debt for a qualification they don’t need.’