I respect your priorities,
Apprenticeships are already a popular choice with young people (a lot of my friends did apprenticeships).
However graduates ARE a vital part of the GLOBAL economy not just the UK a world without graduates would not function. the future generation needs engineers and academics, would you trust a surgeon with only basic levels of education? of course not. A lot of countries in the EU have FREE higher education, and theyre doing better than us eg: Denmark...