Undergraduate degrees matter more and mean less every year
Last year I had a hypothesis: less education leads to less-secure employment, and that is a serious problem for Chatham-Kent. I wasn’t wrong. Chatham-Kent has one of the lowest levels of educational attainment in the province, mostly resulting from an emphasis on manufacturing and agriculture – jobs that decades ago rarely required education past high school, if that.
That was when manufacturing was on the upswing. But when it fell off – and then disappeared – the workers it left behind found themselves in an unstable job economy demanding more education than they had.
Without post-secondary education the likelihood of getting a decent job slips significantly, making it virtually a job requirement. Schools are taking advantage of that by increasing tuition and class sizes and, in doing so, I imagine, sacrificing quality of education.
I graduated not long ago with a bachelor’s degree in Broadcast Journalism, a joint course at the University of Toronto and Centennial College. Most people I knew left university with a not-unmanageable debt, but enough to keep them firmly grounded for quite some time. I was incredibly lucky, dealt a winning hand in the genetic lottery and ending up with parents who put away money for post-secondary education. I worked every summer, less while in school, and made it out with a little less than $10,000 in debt. I was incredibly, incredibly lucky. What discouraged me was the attitude at university. I would estimate that more than 90 per cent of effort was focused on attaining grades rather than learning material. Students bartered for higher grades, often easier to do than to legitimately attain them. Many of my teachers were visibly worn down by it.
No one deserves more blame than the school system itself.
Most universities, including mine, prescribed obligatory “breadth requirements”, courses not pertinent to your discipline but assuredly important for development. The University of Toronto, for instance, has five breadth requirements. It makes some degree of sense on the surface, as university degrees imply versatility. It makes less sense when you see a biology student pulling out their hair over a bad history grade.
The bigger issue is broader. Schools do not teach how to think, but rather, what to think about. Students are given higher grades for memory recall than cognitive thinking. It’s a system where grades are inflated, university enrolment is higher than ever, students swim in debt, and no one really goes to university to learn anything any more. They go to get employment prerequisites.
It’s like art. If everything is art, nothing is really art. Similarly if everyone has university degrees, what good will a university degree do for you?
Employers will get wise to this eventually. There will be better qualifiers for job preparedness. I imagine a number of people will find it easier to skip the process entirely and create a small business or find employment straight out of high school. Call it natural fluctuation.