The Valueless Degree
Education Reform, In The News Friday, September 21st, 2007
The recent OECD report on Higher Degree Earning Power highlights a number of things.
There is clearly a link between having an education and boosting your earning potential and this is something that Flash Gordon and his mob would have us believe unequivocally. However if you look a little deeper into the subject you will notice that the foremost economic powerhouse in Europe, Germany, has a comparatively low number of graduates and all the rest seem to have opted out of the ‘knowledge economy.’ Why? They make things, that’s why. In the UK, manufacturing does not figure in Government thinking and you can just imagine them wanting it to go away. Not such a need for a degree in the third most affluent country in the world then. Why do we bother? Because there are no manufacturing jobs anymore. The Tories began selling them off. New Tories, sorry, Labour have continued to favour the service sector and as a result the only jobs youngsters can get are in service industries. Great when times are good; bad when times are not so good. What is needed is not a degree but a job with prospects and no degree is going to get you that job if every other person your age has the same academic background. Doesn’t anyone in Government heed the old adage of not putting all your eggs in one basket?
What does the future hold? Greater job insecurity as more and more graduate are churned out with exactly the same skills as the ones before. Inflationary pressure on wages subsides but the individual worker is faced with either doing as he/she is told or quitting. This is already starting to affect professionals such as doctors who are struggling to find work; and the other professions are next.