Four years on: would I do it again?

The decision was made at a kitchen table in the spring of 2021, over a laptop with about eleven tabs open, and it took roughly a week. I was seventeen. I had an offer from a university I'd visited once and an application in for something called a degree apprenticeship that I could not have explained to you in a sentence.

I picked the one nobody I knew had done. I started that September, moved 150 miles, finished in 2025, and I'm now about a year past the end of it.

So: would I do it again?

Yes. Without much hesitation, actually. But I've spent this whole site trying to be more useful than a slogan, and "yes" on its own is exactly the kind of answer that made the decision so hard to make at seventeen — everyone I asked was either evangelical or dismissive, and neither told me anything. So here's the long version, including the parts that don't help the case.

What I actually got, which isn't what the brochures say

The brochures say: no debt, a salary, four years of experience. All true, all slightly beside the point.

What I actually got was exposure, early. At eighteen, in the space of about ten weeks, I moved to a city I'd never lived in, signed a tenancy, registered with a GP, worked out council tax, ran a household with five other people and held down a full-time job. None of that is a personality trait and none of it made me exceptional. It's just that I had to, and so I did, at an age when my friends were being reminded to do their laundry. Competence like that isn't earned so much as installed by circumstance, and having it installed at eighteen rather than twenty-two turns out to matter a great deal.

The second thing is harder to name. It's being comfortable in rooms. Four years of sitting in meetings with people two and three times my age, of asking questions I was embarrassed by, of getting things wrong in front of adults and discovering that nothing terrible happened — that produces a specific kind of ease that I see the absence of in very capable graduates. Not confidence exactly. More like the absence of a particular flinch.

And the money, which I'll be precise about because the sector is usually vague. I am not rich. What I have is options: no student debt, a pension that's been running since I was eighteen, savings I could actually live on for a while, and — because of that — the genuine ability at twenty-three to take a pay cut, change direction, or say no to something. That's the real prize, and I've written about how easy it is to spend it in lifestyle inflation. It isn't wealth. It's freedom of movement, ten years early.

What it actually cost

If I skip this bit, nothing above is worth reading.

The summer that never happened. Seven weeks from results day to sitting in an induction. My friends spent that August in Croatia and on nights out in our home town, and I spent it on hold to a letting agent. I don't think about it often, and when I do I notice that I never got that summer and there isn't a version of my life where I get it back. Moving out at 18 covers the mechanics; the mechanics aren't the loss.

The freedom to be bad at something. This is the one I'd put top, and it's the thing nobody names when they compare the routes. A university student can be genuinely poor at a module for a term. They can not turn up for a fortnight, get a mediocre mark, decide it isn't for them and change tack. That slack is a real feature of an education, not a defect. On this route, being bad at something is a performance issue — it happens in front of the people who write your review, in an organisation you can't take a term off from. Four years without permission to be visibly rubbish at anything is more constraining than it sounds at seventeen.

Nothing was ever fully off the clock. My colleagues were my classmates were my housemates, which was the making of the first year and a slow tax after that. There is no version of that arrangement where you're completely unguarded, and I spent four years lightly editing myself at my own kitchen table. I've written about it structurally in when your colleagues, classmates and housemates are the same people and honestly in loneliness inside a busy social life, and of everything on this site those two are closest to the actual texture of it.

I chose a career at seventeen. This is the big one. I didn't choose a subject — I chose an industry, an employer and a professional direction, based on about a week of reading and no experience of anything. It happens to have worked out. It very easily might not have, and the honest thing to say is that I got a decision right that I was in no position to make well. A university student choosing a degree is making a much smaller bet than an apprentice choosing an employer, and the sector consistently undersells that difference.

And it was tiring. Not dramatically — just persistently, for four years. Two evenings and a Sunday afternoon, every week in term, plus a chunk of annual leave that wasn't a holiday. A realistic week sets out the arithmetic. The arithmetic is manageable. What the arithmetic doesn't show is what it's like in year three, in February, when you've been doing it for thirty months and there are eighteen to go.

What I'd do differently

Three things, and none of them are "work harder".

I'd join something outside the programme in the first three months. A club, a team, a class — anything with people who didn't know my employer. I did it eventually and it changed everything, and the only criticism I have of the decision is how late I made it. If one piece of advice from this whole site survives, I'd like it to be that one.

I'd have said yes more in year one. I was quietly anxious about money and said no to things I would now pay a good deal to have been at. The savings were recoverable. A weekend in first year isn't.

I'd have stopped pretending to understand things about ten months earlier than I did. Nodding along in meetings cost me more than any question would have. Nobody hires an eighteen-year-old expecting them to know anything, and the only way to waste that is to act as though they do.

Who this is actually for

Here's where I'd push back on my own sector, which has a bad habit of pitching apprenticeships as simply better. They're not better. They're different, and they suit some people enormously and others badly.

It fits you if you'd rather do a thing than study it; if structure suits you better than open time; if you want to be independent early and are prepared for that to be unglamorous; if you're comfortable being the youngest person in the room for a couple of years; and if you have at least a rough sense of the kind of work you want, or you're content to find out by doing it.

It doesn't fit you if you want to study a subject for its own sake — that's a completely legitimate thing to want and this route will not give it to you. Or if the campus experience is genuinely what you're after, in which case be honest with yourself, because three years of that is not something you get a second run at. Or if you have no idea what you want, because choosing an employer at seventeen is a much bigger commitment than choosing a degree, and drifting into the wrong industry is harder to undo than changing course. Or if you need room to fail privately for a while, which most eighteen-year-olds do and which this route simply does not provide.

I'd add one more: it doesn't fit you if you're doing it to avoid debt. Student loans are income-contingent and behave much more like a graduate tax than the terrifying number people quote. If debt aversion is your only reason, it's not a good enough one on its own, and the fuller comparison is in degree apprenticeship vs university.

What I'd tell the seventeen-year-old at the kitchen table

Not "do it". Something more useful than that.

I'd tell him that the decision is more reversible than it feels. Almost everyone treats this as a permanent, life-defining fork, and it isn't — people leave apprenticeships and go to university, and people finish degrees and end up somewhere entirely unrelated. The stakes are genuinely lower than they seem at seventeen, and most of the anguish in that week was about a permanence that doesn't exist.

I'd tell him that the thing that determines whether it goes well isn't the salary or the university's ranking or the prestige of the employer. It's whether the employer has actually thought about what happens to you: protected study time, a manager who's been briefed, other apprentices around you, and a real role at the end. That's the whole difference between a good version of this and a miserable one, and it's almost impossible to see from a careers page. Ask about it directly. Ask what happened to last year's cohort.

And I'd tell him to stop reading about it. I spent that week trying to find someone who'd tell me the answer, and the reason nobody could is that there isn't one — there's just a set of trade-offs, and a person who has to decide which ones they'd rather live with.

The honest ending

I'm twenty-three. I have a degree, no debt, five years of experience, a job I chose to stay in, and a decade in front of me with more room in it than most people my age have.

I also never had the summer, or the term where I was allowed to be bad at something, or a single year in my late teens that wasn't shaped by an employer's calendar. I don't think about those often. But I notice that people who went the other way don't tend to write essays weighing it up, which probably tells you something about which route leaves you with a case to make.

Would I do it again? Yes — and not because it's the better route, because it isn't. Because it was the better route for me, decided badly at seventeen with almost no information, and I got lucky in ways I'd rather admit than dress up as judgement.

Which is, I think, why I built this site. Not to convince anyone. Just so the next person at a kitchen table with eleven tabs open has something to read that isn't a prospectus — and can make the same decision slightly less blindly than I did.