Let’s face it: Not everyone should go to uni

UNIVERSITY students are dedicating years to study only to graduate unable to find work. If your degree doesn’t help you find a job, what’s the point, asks Caleb Bond.

A SIGNIFICANT number of graduates from some of Australia’s most prestigious universities can’t find work.

How’s that for return on investment? These students have given up years of their life to earn degrees and they struggle to find work.

About 30 per cent of Sydney University graduates don’t find full-time employment in the four months after graduating. At Melbourne University it’s almost 40 per cent.

We can debate youth unemployment until the cows come home, but this has nothing to do with there being a lack of jobs overall. It’s a result of soft attitudes towards education and an oversupply of underskilled graduates hitting the market.

At some point, the expectations of education shifted. Rather than ­“higher education”, it became something more akin to further education. Not a higher pursuit for those academically gifted, but an extension of high school.

If your degree doesn’t help you find job, what’s the point. (Pic: Supplied)

Students now have it drummed into them that university graduates earn more money over their lifetimes.

“What do you want to study?” is a common question teachers ask of ­students, and “Nothing, really,” doesn’t exactly cut the mustard as an answer. There is a pressure, albeit veiled, for high school students to move straight to university. This is a recipe for disaster.

Most university students tend to study humanities-type degrees that don’t necessarily have any relation to their future job prospects. Last year, 22.4 per cent of new entrants studied the field of management and commerce. Close behind was society and culture, accounting for 21.7 per cent. Combined, that’s nearly half of all ­entrants studying what are arguably useless degrees.

Numbers get a bit grim when you look at harder fields. Engineering and technology, for instance, accounted for only 6.3 per cent of students. Given the strong emphasis now placed on STEM — science, technology, engineering and maths — in schools, that’s small. Just over 4 per cent studied IT and 2.4 per cent went for architecture.

If your degree doesn’t help you find job, what’s the point?

Practical vocations are a worthwhile and financially rewarding path to take. (Pic: Supplied)

They aren’t even learning to question and think critically. Universities should be havens of debate. But they’re fast turning into PC madhouses. Dare to step out of line and you’ll be driven out of town.

We have to rethink our approach to education and training. A good place to start would be bringing back tech schools.

Australia once had high schools and tech schools. Those academically inclined went to the former and those more tactile went to tech schools.

It’s time to put trades back on the table as a respectable and worthwhile career path. There is no shame in working as a carpenter or an electrician or a plumber.

In fact, many earn significant sums of money much earlier than their uni-student counterparts.

Some people are simply not cut out for university. Not everyone is academically gifted. By opening the floodgates and letting in students with low entry scores, we devalue ­degrees and create false hope.

It is not elitist to say universities should be reserved for the academically gifted. And nor should we look down on people who take up practical vocations. After all, who’s going to fix your toilet when it stops working on the weekend? And consider how much you’ll be paying for it.