If degrees cost nothing they will mean nothing
Economics 101 teaches that the price of a good or a service depends primarily on two factors: scarcity and demand. That is the nature of economics. If something is scarce and sought after it has a greater economic value than if it was plentiful and not wanted by anyone.
That’s why De Beers, for example, spends millions sifting through the debris at the mouth of the Orange River and retains just the diamonds it finds while discarding the rest.
Quality tertiary education in South Africa right now is scarce and expensive. Despite the cost, demand outstrips supply as a university degree is deemed to be a passport to economic success. To prove the point, the University of the Witwatersrand this week claimed bragging rights on a survey that found its graduates to be South Africa’s most employable.
What if you provided tertiary education to more people at no cost to them? As enticing a prospect as it is for power-hungry politicians, its value would drop. It would lose its scarcity on the basis that if everyone were able to get much the same qualification, it would lose its competitive advantage. There is an old Russian proverb which goes something like this: “The only place you will find a free lunch is the cheese on a mousetrap.” Providing something for nothing has consequences.
You can get an education nowadays for very little money. With access to an electronic device and a reliable Wi-Fi network you can download course material from some of the world’s venerable academic institutions for nothing. You won’t get a degree certificate, but you will get an education, and depending on how much effort you put in, will know as much as someone going to daily lectures. The very reason it has little perceived value among those seeking a piece of paper to prove their academic prowess is that it does not deliver the imagined fast track to career success.
Our collective obsession with degree certificates is the problem.
Education is increasingly commoditised. Amid the noise for free tertiary education, the calamitous failure of two-thirds of the kids who started school in 2005 to even sit, never mind pass matric exams, and the fact that not many more than 35 000 got a university level maths pass is the brutal reality of an education system failing the country.
“The world economy no longer pays you for what you know; Google knows everything. The world pays for what you can do with what you know,” says Andreas Schleicher, special adviser on education policy to the secretary-general at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris.
Desperate for a populist legacy, President Jacob Zuma in December saddled his government and party with a commitment that is going to cost you dearly. Every product or service costs someone something and it means that you as a taxpayer will be burdened in perpetuity with the ever-increasing demand of education funding.
You might not pay for your degree certificate today, but the long-term cost of supporting others over your lifetime is bound to far outstrip the short-term pain of gaining a rare, far more valuable qualification today.