What’s the point of a university education? As a lecturer, you’d expect me to say there’s every point and I’m not going to disappoint.

It’s easy to think of students as feckless and lazy or radicals, more interested in pints and protest than Plato.

Are university lecturers aloof, nutty professors, with no idea about “real life”?

Well, come to the Sussex University Community Festival and find out. It’s free and it’s for all ages.

A university can be a powerful force for good. Good for individuals, good for the economy and good for the community.

Our community festival is an open invitation to stroll around our beautiful campus and find out about the amazing research and work we do.

The festival coincides with Sussex being recognised nationally for its excellent teaching and an ‘outstanding’ employment rate for its graduates.

The university has been given a Silver Award from the government’s new Teaching Excellence Framework.

Sussex graduates are among the most employable in the country, official figures show.

But it is the performance of under-represented groups, however, that really sets Sussex apart – disadvantaged students outperform the benchmark by 16 per cent, mature students are 15.5 per cent higher, while the gain is 14.5 per cent for black and minority ethnic graduates.

Yet the question remains – what’s the point of a university education?

Is it just about spending three years learning about something useless – accruing a lot of student debt – in the hope of getting a better job?

I don’t think so. I was the first in my family to attend university.

My mother told me that “university’s not for the likes of us” when I first mentioned going.

My father was a fishmonger, as was his father and grandfather.

What appealed to me (apart from postponing having to work for a living) was the study of rocks and fossils.

It was fascinating to me to learn about how life had diversified and evolved and to learn about earthquakes, volcanoes and dinosaurs – what’s not to like?

At that point, I had no “career” in mind other than, possibly, acting (I was into amateur dramatics and many of my friends were, and still are, professional actors).

But I needed something more than a pipe dream.

Geology can lead to many good jobs and careers, but what if I had loved medieval poetry or philosophy? What sort of a job requires those as “essential skills”?

While university prepares students for a wide range of careers, it also enhances social mobility.

When I attended university, I met people, from many walks of life, from many different countries.

In the late 70s, fewer than 10% of 18-year-olds attended university. In 2015, it was 31 per cent.

At Sussex, interventions such as “contextualised admissions” – where a student from a less-good school might be accepted with lower grades – have contributed to an increasingly diverse student body.

In the past five years the proportion of students from state schools has increased from 81 per cent to 88 per cent, there has been a 51 per cent rise in the number of students from the most disadvantaged areas and a 74 per cent increase in black and minority ethnic students.

No longer, I hope, are people being told “university’s not for the likes of us”.

The university teaching I received in the 1970s was good, but one lecturer stood out, Derek Briggs, a palaeontologist, currently at Yale University in the USA.

He discovered fossilised lifeforms nobody had ever seen before.

Life that’s now extinct but which existed hundreds of millions of years ago, living in a world I could barely imagine, with bodies that almost defied logical explanation.

He taught me to think, to apply logic, to seek evidence and he taught me how to explain complex ideas simply.

These skills helped make me a science teacher – I hope a good one.

Another lecturer during my teacher training, Bob Fairbrother, encouraged me to write, spotting a talent for communication.

You could argue that it’s not the subject that’s the most important aspect of a university education. The subject is the hook upon which many diverse skills hang.

Our graduates apply these skills in the various jobs they do.

Sussex’s Silver award praised our “outstanding employment strategy” and the development of “transferable employment skills” in our students – something my lecturers did for me and that I hope I do for all my students.

If you’re free, why not come along to our community day and see what’s going on behind the scenes, sample our excellent teaching with some fantastic fun activities, from the teddy bear hospital to the life of bees.

But most of all, join us in celebrating learning in all its forms – become part of our community for a day, just as we are part of yours.

  • James D Williams is a science lecturer at the University of Sussex.