Dropout
Since Tony Blair resided in 10 Downing Street, continuing education into university is considered an obvious pathway. No need to pause and reflect on the decision – just pack your bits in the back of your parents’ car and set off for a life of cheap booze, dirty sinks and GUM clinics.
After all – it’s what your mates will be doing. So why challenge it? Get yourself a juicy big loan, pick a course that vaguely aligns with your interests (or seems like a course of least resistance) and buckle up for the good times.
I did. I went to uni and did all the stuff you’re supposed to. Only one year in, I found myself withdrawing from the course. I was a dropout. A quitter.
Like Victorian contraception, I’d pulled out before I’d finished.
Did this decision limit what I could offer to the world? Was it educational suicide? Did I make a mistake?
Is it the reason my creative ambitions merely resemble a hobby now, some 17 years later?
NO GRADUATION DAY FOR YOU
In 2006, I sat with a friend in a Clerkenwell pub as he proceeded to tell me quitting university was a mistake.
“People who never finish things,” he paused to pontificate before swilling a sip of pinot noir, “have a habit of never finishing things.”
The words struck a chord.
When I was around 12, I had decided I didn’t want to continue karate. It was a weekly commitment and I’d gotten through the belts, all the way to brown belt in fact (just two stripes more and I would’ve been a black belt FYI). My Grandad, who would take me or pick me up from the Southglade village hall in Bestwood, Notts, was noticeably disappointed.
He wanted me to think about it. Was I quitting for the right reasons, or was I being lazy? What else was I going to do? What was the plan?
All excellent questions. He was giving me a perfect lesson in approaching the subject of quitting. He made me really think about it, he challenged me and sought a robust answer before he accepted the decision I was making.
And it was the right decision – I really wasn’t cut out for anymore choreographed katas.
Now, here I was in 2006, floating the idea of dropping out of my performing arts degree just a month into year two.
Crisis talks were immediately arranged, particularly from my friends who were north of 40. The whole thing echoed those karate quitting conversations with my Grandad some ten years prior.
Of course it was thanks to that very conversation that I was sure this was the right decision, even if there were some external influences this time around.
First – I wanted to go to a university that would make the prospect of moving to London a reality.
I’d applied for five universities – all of them being London drama schools except for one, a place at Manchester Met’s popular acting course.
I failed to get into any of my choices bar Manchester. Which I declined. I wanted so badly to be in London. I was 17, I didn’t know why other than it was where actors went to act.
So, I picked my Extra – London Metropolitan University. A friend of mine had already gotten in, so I went for it. And I managed to grab a place. I would be moving to London – hooray.
Second – The course was not up to much, but I was now in London. The student loan helped me get settled until I found a bar job and the subsidised living in halls meant I was well placed to do what I needed to do – network.
The course was dance heavy too, even the acting classes were mainly focused on physical theatre – Commedia dell’arte and such.
And as someone with the rhythm and timing of Theresa May on poppers, none of that was for me.
Even before year one was through, I was itchy (and not just from the scabies going round the halls).
Third – I was ready to actually do something. Through my two years at college and then a further year on the uni course, I’d worked out that I wanted to do comedy. I knew I wanted to write stuff I could act in, and I knew I could do all of that without a degree.
What was I waiting for? What would accruing more debt achieve?
Zilch, I thought.
YOUR FUTURE’S SO UNCLEAR NOW
In 2007, the year I quit, The Guardian reported that some 7.4% of students who had applied for student funding had dropped out. That’s a reasonably high number out of the 2.4 million of us studying at the time.
In 2022-23, the BBC reported that dropout rates were climbing year-on-year – with some 41,630 dropouts, a 28% rise on the number measured in 2018-19, referencing Student Loans Company (SLC) data.
Of course there are myriad reasons behind the dropouts and it would be tremendously difficult to draw parallels between 2007 and 2023. For a start, there had been no pandemic, no cost of living crisis and no 13 years of stable Tory leadership.
Things were very different.
But the one thing that remains the same from then to now is a student’s individual ambition. What do you want? How are you going to do it?
Can you take control?
If going to university is just something everyone simply does now, something that’s been the norm now for 25 years, then the number of us dropouts will inevitably increase.
“Courses aren’t what they used to be” you’ll hear people cry. And they aren’t. If you were off to university in the 1960’s, 70’s or 80’s, there’s a good chance you were the first to do so in your family. It’s also likely that you would’ve been studying one of the core academic areas: Maths, Science, English, Law etc.
Now you can get a degree in anything. Whether it’s a BA in Comedy or Contemporary Circus at the University of Bath, or a degree in Viking and Old Norse Studies from UCL, there’s something for everyone. And that’s not to say there aren’t a host of well-paid jobs to come out of those degrees (themed dining, for example), but it’s unlikely there’s a special little job for all who enrol on such wacky courses.
And that’s where my main argument stemmed, the response to my pinot noir drinking pal or my other friends who staged an intervention – this course would guarantee me nothing but two more years of student loan debt.
It would not guarantee me a job as an actor or as a writer.
It would not guarantee me any hands-on experience in the industry.
It didn’t even guarantee me the skills needed to do a backwards roll, as I was ill the day they taught it and the dance teacher was mean.
I wanted to put my own shows on. Do the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Submit plays to competitions and festivals.
I wanted to just go do it.
It means that now, today, I have no regrets.
It’s proven my choice hasn’t provided a path free of obstruction to success either. Things aren’t what I imagined. But at least I don’t owe anyone anything.
And who knows what will happen tomorrow. That was my hope then. That is my hope now.
Oh, and just one day after dropping out, my play “The Middle Men” was selected for the One-Act festival at the Tabard Theatre in Chiswick. So from then to now I’ve been on the path of just doing it.
YOU THINK YOU’RE SUCH A LOOKER
There was another influence lurking behind my decision though. And on reflection, it shouldn’t have played any part in my decision-making process.
I’d been in London just six months and I was making friends with a whole host of immensely successful people. I didn’t socialise with friends my own age, I was at the Groucho Club. I didn’t puke up in the student union bar, I sipped champagne in Soho’s exclusive Union Club. I was taken to Kettner’s and The Colony Room Club whilst those my own age danced to Liberty X, live at The Astoria.
I’d meet them in Ghetto though. God I miss that place.
In short, I was surrounded by success, celebrity and wealth. People whose names were known by strangers. I assumed, therefore, that it would be easy for me. That my time would obviously come by virtue of osmosis. That it was my destiny, so to speak.
I wrongly expected that the stardust would rub off on me too.
Never assume, eh?
Whilst all of this is another blog for another time – just make sure you’re dropping out for the right reasons. Check that you aren’t just being lazy. Ensure you know what else you’re going to do. What the plan is.
Make sure you can look your Grandad in the eye and answer those questions.
I could.
Even if you still don’t know my name.
DL x
