Graduates of University - Do you work in your study field?

Yes, before and after. The transferable skills largely revolving around a focused and self-directed study of pretty much anything are far more important - and no I don't even include the more technical qualifications, at least when it comes to knowledge (I don't mean examinations), because anyone can conceivably learn anything with close to world class instruction if they look for it.

And if you learn how to learn for yourself (which admittedly can take help from an outside perspective), there is no person better to understand that (and change) than yourself - pedagogy is fundamentally broken in a lot of ways. I think people start to realise that in higher education and can't succeed without figuring out what works for them, not the classroom or the teacher. You then leave with an ability to repeat the cycle.

People generally end up learning the wrong way, not the wrong things, settle and feel (owing to society being a bit of a twat when it comes to the value for the education you were told a million times was more important than anything else in your life - even you) guilty about that path set ahead for them or that they were sent down. University is an opportunity to correct that, and I know some spectacularly bright people who sucked at school and got fantastic degrees.

I feel that's one of the wide range of qualities that you get from consistently pursuing study for 3 or 4 years (or more). No matter the subject there'll be some outside aspect of society (or even within that subject) that think it is bollocks. What matters is that you chose that thing and you stuck with it. That takes guts. A surprising amount of people cannot do that, or can only do it if somebody forces them to do it.

So do people use their degree? If they got their degree - yes. That's the point. They followed through because on some level they wanted to do it. And even if they didn't graduate they'll eventually have some kind of insight into why. And that's still a diploma or whatever worth of knowledge.

Being someone who was essentially expelled twice, I'm doubly happy to strawberry float off the idea a degree is or was a waste of time. Learning to fail the right way is valuable. In many ways higher ed is an opportunity to fail in a safe environment. If you do, it's generally (but not always) your fault and you find out why and correct that. That may sound harsh, but failing to recognise where failure happens and why (even if it's somebody or something else's fault) is itself a failure. Unless you're a smug dickweed there are ups and downs in a higher ed setting, people are often working shifts at the same time, learning to live independently for the first time, meeting their first partner, learning what council tax is etc (and yes you can get sent to court for it ). It's more than a certificate.

You have people with perfect GCSES or A-levels and whatever and they jolly on and work somewhere else because they're already so brilliant so why bother. Ok, but keep that up for 16 years while trying to make sense of the world and even if you don't succeed, that says a lot that you tried.

It's for sure a touch aggravating that we have a generation of boomers who got their O-levels and are now in high positions socio-economically grinding young equivalents into the dirt and wondering what all the fuss is about. Watch them dissolve when they face redundancy or ageism because they've been doing the same job for 30 years and then, oh gooseberry fool I have to learn things, how terrible.

So like I say. Learning to learn and learn for you not mum/dad/gizza job/Tony Blair etc is the value of a degree. Navigating an institution like that was a brainfuck for me for various reasons as well (I got slightly obsessed with cybernetics and attacked a few insecurities to make things that basically broke all the rules) but it caught me to cope in such settings.

Sadly one of my first jobs was in a strawberry floating panopticon on £7.50 an hour and I went through al of that gooseberry fool wondering what the strawberry float was the point. I quit and started freelancing again and a decade later I use the same kind of experimentalism and analysis skills to build my own things, which was exactly what I did at university every (week)day for 4 years.

tl;dr yes university is good and you won't half end up doing gooseberry fool unrelated to your degree but it doesn't matter.

I studied journalism and now work in internal communications. Close enough!