uni not necessary
if you're middle class and you like alcohol and your parents are rich, of course you would go to uni.
if like me your parents have no money you are statistically far less likely to see the benefit of taking out a government loan just to party with middle class gap-yah twats. at least, thats the way i saw it. so i didnt go.
Instead I got a job and learned skills. Seems kinda crazy that someone would do that, but I did, and it worked for me.
Learning to program was a long term ambition of mine (since I was 10) but I never truly "got it" until my first job allowed me to understand WHY people would actually sit around and write code. Its not for fun, its for money. And that puts a very different set of constraints on you than if you were just dicking around at uni.
The real world is different, and its getting more different every day. Back in uni-gapyah-land, the same lecturers are giving the same lectures they gave in the 70s and, its tedious, frankly.
They will protest purely to justify their own high salaries and cushy jobs.