TEENAGERS in middle-class areas have begun to turn their backs on university, putting at risk the government’s drive to increase the number of graduates. New government figures show that in many affluent areas the proportion of 18-year-olds going to university has dropped.

Statistics have previously been released which showed that the overall proportion of 18-year-olds in England going to university fractionally fell from 22% to 21.7% The new data shows much of the fall is attributable to declines in the numbers going on to higher education in areas which have traditionally supplied the bulk of university students.

The worst affected area was Wokingham, Berkshire, where there was a 5.4% fall in numbers in just one year resulting in 27.3% of 18-year-olds entering higher education. The borough has some of the best-performing secondary schools in the country. The second-worst affected area was North Lincolnshire, where the proportion fell by 4.7%.

Other areas which followed close behind with falls of at least 2% included Bromley in Kent, Brent in Kingston upon Thames, the London boroughs of Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea, Torbay, Suffolk, Bournemouth, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire.

Tony Blair’s target of half the nation’s young people going on to higher education by 2010 has been attacked by many academics as unrealistic.

Experts believe the numbers are being affected by fears over debt and a perception that a “graduate glut” has saturated the market for university-level jobs. The average graduate runs up £12,000 of debt by the time he or she leaves university and often has to accept a low starting salary for a first job.

Those who have decided they would prefer a head start in the labour market to three extra years studying include Rebecca Walker, who left the top-ranked independent St Paul’s girls’ school in London in 2000. She had only intended to take a year off before going to Leeds University.

However, Walker, who has taken a job as a radio broadcast assistant, no longer plans to go to university. She earns £21,000 a year and produces her own shows at weekends.

“I’m not in any debt and I think I’m in a position where I’m probably more employable than I would be with a degree,”she said. “A lot of my friends who went to university are quite jealous of my situation. They spent three or four years doing a degree and now they’re working in a shop.”

Recent research by two economists has backed Walker’s view. Earlier this year a study by Philip Brown of Cardiff University and Anthony Hesketh of Lancaster University found that the starting salaries of graduates was falling and that 40% of recent graduates were in jobs that did not require degree-level skills.

They estimated that only a third of Britain’s 28m jobs were “knowledge-based” and forecast that the largest growth in employment in the next few years would be in low- skill jobs. This may deter increasing numbers of pupils from attending university.

Howard Glennerster, professor of social policy at the London School of Economics, said some of the apparently weakening attraction of university for the middle classes was because of the smaller financial gains they stood to make. Average income for working-class graduates is boosted by 16% compared with non-graduates; for middle-class students, the figure is 12%.

Glennerster said: “Higher education puts people in touch with information and a jobs network. Working-class students get most benefit from this because middle-class people already have access to much of that network and information.”

Students turning their backs on university often have as their role models successful non-graduates such as Sir Richard Branson, the Virgin tycoon, John Major, the former prime minister and Sir Tom Farmer, founder of the Kwik-Fit car repair chain.

Farmer said: “I didn’t go to university but when I joined a small tyre company the management encouraged people like me to go to night school.”

Government figures suggest the financial rewards of a degree may be falling. Previously, the education department has estimated that over a lifetime a graduate could expect to earn £400,000 more than a non-graduate. This has now been cut to £120,000 — about £3,000 a year more than non-graduates.

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