Interested to know opinions on the following idea...

What would you think of giving all 16 year olds a lump sum (say ?30,000) to use as they see fit, rather than the current system of giving school-leavers virtually nothing while the academically minded get a lot more financial assistance with several years of study.

Some people's talents don't lie in academic study. They may be better suited to starting their own business, or just simply learning through working for someone else. Why should these people have to pay for others to study? It seems somewhat unfair.

A fairer system might be to give all 16 year-olds a lump sum with which they could buy further education or training, start up a business, or simply invest for their future. The choice would be up to them to choose the path most beneficial to them.

Personally, I did A-levels and three years at university and I now think they were a colossal waste of time and money. I think I'd leared all I needed by the time I was 16. I hardly learned anything useful in those additional 5 years of study, and I would have been better off (and happier) going straight into work and learning on the job.

I realise that this is not the case for everyone. Obviously a doctor needs to train properly before being allowed to start slicing up patients, and if you want to be a research bioinformatician or something scientific like that, then you might need more than one degree to build up the necessary expertise.

However, I think there are an awful lot of people going to university to study utterly pointless subjects, who would not be studying them if they actually had to choose between paying for it with their own money, or using their money elsewhere. And there are a lot of talented young entrepreneurs who might take the world by storm if they just had a bit of capital to invest.

What do you think of this idea?