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The US grad disease has arrived in Australia. It’s very much like the big degree-or-not status dichotomy in the States. Banks and other boutique businesses pay six digits to some grads. Well, some of them do. To a nanoscopic percentage of grads. A sign-on bonus may be payable and usually isn’t.
This theory doesn’t even survive a paragraph of the coverage. Starting with $180,000, it turns out that the bottom pay is around $30,000. Guess what most people get.
That $180,000 might pay for your student loan. Then you’d be free. Free like a house brick. Don’t bet on it.
It’s a great incentive to get out there and go broke ASAP. This is a racket based on a market image.
I’ve seen an ad in the US for a Master’s degree which paid $20 per hour. It also involved cleaning the place and negotiating with delivery drivers. Go figure.
As PR for fees, it’s OK. Colleges can upvalue their degrees easily:
By market demand. The big colleges can prove it; nobody else can. Ivy means something; nothing else does.
By implied value. You’re now a “college person”. Therefore you can pay for anything, however absurdly overpriced, and you will.
By misreading the market. Genuine big value for degrees is in intellectual property, technologies, and pretending to be an investment market expert. Anything else is basically wallpaper.
By nepotism. There is not, and never has been a meritocracy. If you’re any good at anything, big money is more likely to be accidental than earned. Underpayment is the norm.
Meanwhile, the numbers play on. The median salary in Australia is said to be $94,000. That’s why we have so many people using food banks and unable to pay their rent or mortgages, right? The economics don’t work, either.
Numbers don’t have to lie. People can do that for them. That’s the message.
It’s just that this antiquated self-image of college degrees is now hitting its expiry date. In the same 10 years that every facet of your degree becomes a museum piece, a lot of people with and without degrees will be out of work. Those jobs won’t exist anymore.
The obsolescence of degrees is most visible in IT. If you’re out of IT for over two years, you’re a fossil. You can do “ongoing study”, for an additional price.
So where does this social and skill-based train wreck in progress go, you ask, under your palatial overpriced rock? Like many train wrecks, it goes nowhere, at great expense.
You’re qualifying people with skills nobody will ever need. The actual skills base may or may not be evaporating. It probably is.
Education is now a significant existential threat. We had one lady calculate she’d be able to pay off her student loan at 65. She’s in her 20s now. Value for money? You think?
The result so far is we have a mythologized image and nothing to back it up with. People that heavily indebted don’t really “earn” much if you subtract the net cost of education.
The irony is we actually had free tertiary education. That generation was highly productive. Now we have debt slaves paying for academic “collectibles”.
In the US, college debt defaults are pretty common. We can expect the same. So they don’t pay, they don’t get a degree. How much time and money is wasted in the process?
Animals teach their kids to survive. People, and colleges, teach their kids how to go broke.
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Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.
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