The company i work for tries to take on apprentices from school, but has been finding it increasingly difficult to find anyone who actually wants to work, and its not helped by the policy that nobody at school can be told 'basically you are a stupid and lazy fucker, and you are destined to work in a supermarket for the rest of your life' which makes it very difficult for employers to know if anyone leaving school is a lazy moron or not.
I have been working with a lad who is actually very bright and capable, but didn't do very well at school, but he is now at the stage where is is a very capable engineer and iv'e been training him in the fine art of VHDL and he has come on in leaps and bounds and is a lot more confident in his abilities than he was when he first started with us.
So that kind of shows that you don't have to only take people from university, good or bad, and given the right environment you can take someone and train them to be better than they would have been had they gone through university, and spent 4 years getting pissed and wasting tax payers money.
All the old bollocks about 'oooh you can only employ someone who has been to a good university and has the right background' is outdated. And it has to be said that if you take a graduate, you have got to spend maybe 12-18 months working with them before they are in a position where they can do some useful work

Also I suppose the environment i work in at solid state logic is a bit different to many companies because they actually DO give a shit about the people who work for them.Also i suppose it goes back to the days when i worked in Cambridge with some very strange and delusional people who though that they were special because they had gone to Cambridge then they were in fact a bunch of delusional social indequates.