Text 3 There are plenty of good reasons for a young person to choose to go to university:intellectual growth,career opportunities,having fun.Governments are keen on higher education,seeing it as a means to boost social mobility and economic growth.But they tend to overestimate the benefits and ignore the costs of expanding university education.As more young people seek degrees,the returns both to them and to governments are lower.Employers demand degrees for jobs that never required them in the past and have not become more demanding since.In a desperate attempt to stand out,students are studying even longer,and delaying work,to obtain master"s degrees.Part of the usefulness of a degree is that it gives a graduate jobseeker an advantage at the expense of non-graduates.It is also a signal to employers of general qualities,such as intelligence and diligence,which someone already has in order to get into a universiry.Some professions require qualifications.But a degree is not always the best measure of the skills and knowledge needed for a job.With degrees so common,recruiters are using them as a crude way to screen applicants.Non-graduates are thus increasingly locked out of decent work.In any case,the premium counts only the winners and not the losers.Across the rich world,a third of university entrants never graduate.It is the weakest students who are drawn in as higher education expands and who are most likely to drop out.They pay fees and sacrifice earnings to study,but see little boost in their future incomes.Many school-leavers are being misled about the probable value of universitty.Governments need to offer the young a wider range of options afier school.They should start by rethinking their own hiring practices.School-leavers should be given a wider variety of ways to gain vocational skills and to demonstrate their employability in the private sector.Ifschool qualifications were made more rigorous,recruiters would be more likely to trust them as signals of ability,and less insistent on degrees.Such measures would be more efficient at developing the skills that boost productvity and should save public money.To promote social mobility,govemments would do better to direct funds to early-school education and to helping students who would benefit from university but cannot afford it.Young people,both rich and poor,are ill-served by the arms race in academic qualifications,in which each must study longer because that is what all the rest are doing.It is time to disarm.Students are studying longer to______