Sponsored degrees may only churn out corporate clones | Alex Aldridge | Law | guardian.co.uk

Durham University, where KPMG's 75 students will study. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

"What use are memories of the sun rising over Ayers Rock to a lawyer?" asked the comedian David Mitchell last week, as he reflected on changing attitudes to non-vocational pursuits following government plans to overhaul university funding.

The new utilitarian mood doesn't stop at gap years: earlier this month, accountancy firm KPMG struck a blow against afternoons spent in the student union bar with the announcement that it is to sponsor a university degree. Supermarkets Morrisons and Tesco, and Harrods, have launched similar schemes.

The KPMG-Durham University accountancy BSc will host 75 students – selected on the basis of having achieved at least an A and two Bs at A level – spend their undergraduate days in a deeply unromantic blur of accountancy lectures and part-time work for the firm. In return, KPMG will cover tuition fees, pay students a salary during the course and give them a job. The firm says such schemes could come to account for the majority of its trainee intake.

Already the large corporate law firms – which hire graduates two years in advance – pay their recruits' postgraduate legal practice course fees (up to £12,500). Where the recruit is converting to law from another subject, it pays their law conversion course fees (up to £8,730). They do this because the competition for the best talent is fierce.

In order for the likes of Clifford Chance and Linklaters to avoid losing out to KPMG and other employers in the future, the likelihood is that they will start sponsoring undergraduate degrees, too.

Although KPMG's generosity is motivated primarily by self interest, there is little doubt that sponsored degrees are good news for students from less well-off backgrounds.

As it stands, with law degrees likely to fall under the highest fee bracket of £9,000 under the new regime, wannabe lawyers who are not from wealthy families will be forced to take out tens of thousands pounds in loans.

This could lead to a recreation of the situation in the US, where high law school fees have spawned a generation of spectacularly indebted law graduates. A culture where private organisations absorb some of the hit from the fee rises would help to limit the possibility of this happening over here.

Still, it is hard to get too excited about replacing the carefree undergraduate approach of old with what Nick Clegg may well be excitedly preparing to christen "Junior Alarm Clock Britain".

Not only will sponsored degrees remove the unhurried quirkiness – and associated unexpected tangential learning opportunities – from higher education, but they risk producing a group of corporate clones with a weirdly narrow educational focus (why bother with constitutional law when you're headed for a lifetime of mergers and acquisitions?), honed at a weirdly early age.

Already there is concern that studying law at undergraduate level, rather than via a postgraduate conversion course following a non-law degree, requires specialisation too early on. So is it really a good idea to ask students to sign up to an employer before they are even out of their teens?

Then again, what do students actually gain from unhurried undergraduate degrees? It is easy to romanticise university, but, if I am honest, the unexpected tangential learning opportunities I experienced during my degree revolved almost exclusively around Richard & Judy and recreational drugs.

If only by virtue of getting dressed each day and leaving the house, I have acquired far more skills and knowledge since entering the workforce. Unwelcome as the tuition fee hike is, a rethink about what higher education means may not be such a bad thing.

Alex Aldridge is contributing editor of Legal Week

via guardian.co.uk