When I opened The MTA back in 2009, I consciously set out to run a vocational drama college where experiential training was the entire focus. There would be no tokenistic essays to secure a government funding stream for a qualification that would never help you get a job in the sector. I spoke out about the fact that degrees were irrelevant to our industry, and my bemusement that performers were sitting in libraries writing essays when they should have been in the rehearsal/performance space, honing their skills.

As various colleges moved from the diploma to the degree model, I highlighted how the degree just wasn’t fit for purpose. While the government funding stream offered financial security, it was never enough to support the high contact hours that vocational training demands.

When auditioning students for The MTA, I was appalled to discover how little contact time students were receiving on courses claiming to make them “industry-ready.” Admittedly, we ran an accelerated two-year model, but 40-hour weeks were, at one time, the norm for all vocational colleges. Some of these degree courses were operating on as little as 12 hours a week.

Sure enough, over the next decade, vocational colleges gradually began cutting back hours, driven by university partners focused more on financial bottom lines than the student experience, or the validity of their training. At the same time, universities started capitalising on the overflow of applicants, creating their own courses, sometimes multiple, to cater to the abundance of students chasing a dream career.

The number of students increased as the talent in those students decreased, in an industry that was already oversubscribed. They were no longer being trained for the industry; they were simply being given some skills, many of which might be transferable—so no real harm done… except to the students, staff morale, and the industry as a whole.

This year alone, I’ve had several meetings with leaders in universities who now find themselves with substandard courses, desperately trying to recruit enough students to survive. Seemingly, the Golden Goose itself is about to get eaten. How do you attract students to a course that has more college holidays than study days? So many universities end their academic teaching year in April, leaving students (all paying at least £9,500 a year) with zero training for four to five months. And when they are in college, so much of their time is spent on “independent study” (AKA: colleges saving money on tuition costs).

Having recently written a dissertation on the state of vocational training, it transpires that the university sector is equally in a mess. What’s struck me most from my conversations (which have spanned both sectors) is just how demoralised the faculty are. They know their students aren’t talented enough to work. They know they’re not training them enough for those skill sets to improve. And yet they all seem to wonder why they’re unable to attract higher-quality applicants.

The sentiment of “who are we to dash their hopes?” never seems to stretch to: “who are we to rob them blind, exploit their dream, and give them so little for their money?”

Right now, social media is full of shout-outs from faculty members brainstorming solutions—yet failing to note that, unwittingly, they’re a part of the problem. Until the people working in the sector come to terms with the Faustian pact they appear to have made, and start prioritising actual, effective training over institutional survival, nothing will change.