Warning! Incredibly long off topic post! But at least I spam my own thread
[QUOTE=giles337]I belive that what I would find most useful, is to finish secondary school, with good A level results, and get myself a decent job, possibly after some training (because, to be honest, how many jobs need degrees nowdays?) Then, later in life, I would attend university, get a degree, and enhance my carreer. I figure this would set me in good stead, and help be bypass student debt etc.[/QUOTE]
First, let me state that I'm actually principally against the idea of being a student all your young life and then start working, but unfortunately in many countries, it severely decrease your value at the job market to take breaks in between edcuational steps and thus the cost of doing this is simply to big. In all Scandinavian countries though, the urban job market in well adjusted to an eduational system that allows breaks of several years, and to the increased demand for a flexible work force. So what I will say below is based on a job market that allows for this.
No matter how good your education is, being a student is still acting in a "training ground"-world. What you do have no real consquences; if you fail an exam you may be able to retake it later, and even if you don't, it still only has consequences for yourself, since your responsibilities are limited to yourself and possible a few fellow students. Also, university is excellent for basic knowledge and learning of strategies, but it is not the optimal environment for development of independent thinking. In short, what you learn at uni is quite limited. And aspects like personality development, multicultural experience and general widening of perspective, is outside the main scope for what uni teach you.
Choosing career and profession is a fundamental choice. We are going to spend half of our waking hours, all our adult life until old age, with working. It's as important as choice of partner, perhaps even more important, because a partner can be ditched if the relationship doesn't work out, it may have worse consequences to ditch your job. You can survive just fine being single, but you can't survive without a job. Besides, if you have a higher education you may have spend many years and a lot of money all in vain if you are not happy with your job. You very rarely find the optimal partner that will last you a lifetime, have only met people from your hometown and are 18-19 years old. In the same manner as broadning our frames of reference, life experience and trial-and-error will help us choose a better parter, it will also help us choose a better career. Work experience is crucial for our ability to decide what we want to spent our life doing. Socialisation and cooperation with people in different age groups and different backgrounds also helps. Developing personal integrity is crucial - it's not a coincidence that big corporations have made it a strategy to pick up young talented students and make them sign contracts before they have any other experience. Travelling to other cultures is the best eduation a young person can get, for those who can affort it, and it can also be combined with studying. We should remind ourselves that what we, as human beings, want to get out of our lives, is not necessarily 100% coinciding with being the totally perfect work unit for soceity.
So my advice for you is: unless you plan to work in some highly specific area where a couple of years "loss" makes your value at the job market decrease significantly, you should definitely take a break in your studies and start working if that is what you want to do. Just be sure that you use the experience well, learn and analyse what you think about things, and don't get yourself into the nasty trap of being dependant on a high income. Instead, live simple at about the same standard as you would as a student, and save money for travelling and/or future educational costs.
Let me tell you what I did: I had skipped one year of primary school, so I was 15 instead of 16 when I quit the mandatory education (and throughly fed up with school because I found it developed only my ability to behave like a foolish sheep, but that's another story). I wanted to become an artist. My grandfather who died when I was 12 and was the most important person in my childhood, was an artist. He taught me paint my first oil on canvas when I was 4. So I wanted to start art school. First however, I wanted to work for a while because I needed to be able to pay for a flat of my own (long story, family conflicts), so I managed to get a job as a costume designer for a theatre group. Excellent, I thought. The job was very flexible and allowed me to travel since work load was extremely uneven from period to period. After a little more than a year, I started art school. It took only one term before I realised that I was not meant to an artist at all. My committment was lacking and I felt no real drive - I was quite technically skilled as a painter and drawer since I was brought up with that, but technicall skill without content, even without feeling an urge to put a content there, is quite useless.
So I quit after 1 year and didn't know what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I had got the taste of travelling, so I started taking lousy but well paid job in order to save money. I could have 2 or 3 jobs simultaneously for a few months in order to save up for my trips. I lived like a total bum, mixing travelling around the world with lousy jobs, ballet classes and reading everything I could find from porn novels to
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Successively, my childhood dreams of becoming a scientist returned to me stronger and stronger, clearly reinforced by my travelling and my alpine climbing - like an urge for exploring the not known, that grew to a louder and louder noise in my ears. It only became silent as a struggled my way up on rocky walls and icy peaks, when life was reduced to merely surviving. I grew increasingly restless and I started taking greater and greater risks in my climbing.
When I was 21, I fell off a wall free climbing. I hurt my knees so I eventually had to quit both climbing and dancing. I thought "this is the point where I should start studying". I had already figured out I wanted to do physics, medicine or psychology. Since I hadn't gone through secondary school, I had to take exams as a privatist to get access to university edcuation. (In Sweden you can either take evening courses, or exams in order to become eligable to apply to uni if you missed secondary school). I ruled out physics because I wanted a combination between something that could give me ultimate satisfaction, and at the same time be of significant humanitarian value.
I took exams in 23 subjects and got the highest degree in everything (which I had to if I wanted to study medicine or psychology, doctor and psychologist are the most popular educations in Sweden.) The exams took 1,5 years, and in between the exam periods I continued to travel but I had to quit the serious climbing and start a softer variant. When I was finished I was 22 and still indecisive between psychology and medicine, so I started to visit people I knew (friend's parents and their workmates) who were kind enough to let me interview them and show me around at their workplaces

I decided upon psychology because the focus of my interest was the brain, not the rest of the body (I took some medicine too, later).
Still, I feared the prospect of being tied to an education every day (save holidays) for five years, and being unsure of my ability to adapt to this life, I spent one more year on the road. I started uni when I was 24, an age when many people finish. I compressed 7,5 years of studying to 5 years by taking parallell courses, and I started working at a research lab about half-way through my education. Sure, I would have been a professor now I had started uni when I was 19, but I would also have been an entirely different person, a person I would have liked far less. And I am sure I would have been a less good scientist.
So, the aim of this long post is simply to demonstrate: my way from road bum to scientist at a world leading lab may have been long and windling, but I don't regret a second of it and also a less conventional ways may pay off equally good or even better in both life quality and career hierachy. Education is much more than university classes
