Dropping the degree requirement for lawyers

This is obviously a good idea:

School leavers will no longer need to go to university if they want to become lawyers after regulators approved the biggest reform of legal education for a generation.

Under the changes, which take effect from next September, people can join law firms as apprentices under the government’s “trailblazer” scheme. Then, after gaining mandatory work experience, they will be able to sit a new two-part solicitors’ qualifying exam to become fully qualified.

As the article goes on to point out this is rather a return to the past. It used to be possible to do articles without having a degree. Instead something akin to an apprenticeship was done followed by the exam. Licensure still existed - you had to have the chitty to be a lawyer - but the degree wasn’t necessary to gain the licence. This was also true of accounting and indeed many other of the professions.

The importance of this being that we societally tried insisting on the degree and now won;t. This idea having much wider application.

For example, there’s no obvious reason why a schoolteacher should have a degree. Certainly at the lower age levels where crowd control is rather more of what is being done. This is before we even consider that post-degree teacher training so often required. It seems to us obvious that the degree requirement for nursing was and is a bad idea - we speak as people who have watched family members go through the system both old and new. There are benefits to the members of both occupations in that the degree requirement engenders status - or did before 50% of all got degrees - and thus claims for higher incomes. But to the rest of us not so much.

Another way to put this is that if the traditional professions are no longer to require a degree upon entry then perhaps we should stop loading the degree requirement onto what were not and are not professions?