To University or not to University.
When I was growing up a university degree was the holy grail of life after school. Basically you went to school to get a degree/diploma to get a good job. If you didn’t get a qualification, then you were, without question, going to end up living in a cardboard box on the street. It really was an all or nothing situation. So that is what many (many) of us did. We got the qualification but we didn’t necessarily get the good job. In fact, we didn’t even get jobs in the industry we studied. But at least, while drowning in debt, we could tell people we had the degree.
Know that I have kids, two of whom have gone through tertiary education, I call bulls*t on it all! In fact even before my kids entered tertiary education, I wasn’t so sure about it.
Education is never wasted, I get that and totally agree and if you want to study, go for it. But it is no longer the holy grail of life. A degree does not mean a good job, in fact it does not mean a job at all – just ask the millions of graduates who are unemployed or working for minimum wage. Studying for 3/4 years, getting into crippling debt does not mean success and it should never ever have been.
The world is not the same place it was 25 years ago when I left school, it is dramatically different. The job market is dramatically different. I worked as a social media manager for 7 years – when I started out, there was no course I could study, this job didn’t exist 10/15 years ago.
There is still no formal qualification for an “influencer” yet people are making 6 figure salaries. Children are are creating YouTube videos, earning more money a month than some people earn in a year.
The world of AI is once again, rapidly changing the landscape. There are certain jobs that will be done by AI shortly once again changing the work place dynamics.
Currently more than half the students at UCT are not able to pay their fees. This means that once they finish their degree, they will not be able to actually graduate until they can pay their fees off. In order to pay the fees, they need a job, but they can’t get a decent job without the degree, so they take a minimum wage job and have to try live and also pay off their fees. This feels like complete madness!
There has to be a better way.
Maybe that better way is encouraging children to be who they want to be and not who we want them to be, or who we think society needs them to be.
