The Pointlessness of a Degree

Not me at the foot of Mammon
Just some other (better-looking)
supplicant

When I worshipped at the Temple of Mammon in the first few years of this century, I used to employ people. Quite a lot of people, as it happened: on average, about a hundred new posts each year as the workforce turned over. The work was quite basic - filling in forms, data entry, taking some calls; that kind of thing. I paid around 20% over than the minimum wage and we were located in West Yorkshire, so commutes weren't as tortuous, soul-destroying or expensive as they can be around London. I never had any shortage of applicants, either.

My ideal profile for an employee was - and I'm not asking for any forgiveness here, just understanding - a 30-50 year old woman in a relationship, with kids, looking for permanent or part-time work as a second income earner. This small, but perfectly formed demographic always provided me with a fantastic work ethic, great quality and a negligible level of sickness absence. Regrettably, only about ten per cent of my employees were thus blessed. Of course, I wasn't permitted to advertise vacancies based upon my politically incorrect ideal. I think I might have been imprisoned had I done so, or just horse-whipped by Shami Chakrabarti. I'd probably have paid for that, anyway. Isn't she lovely, and always acquits herself so well on Question Time, despite (or because of)  Dimblebore's chauvinistic condescension?

Anyway, the rest of my employees tended to be younger people who hadn't quite worked out whom it was that owed who a living. About half of them were graduates and I had sympathy for almost all of them. They had bought a dream; Blair's dream. "Education, Education, Education", as the mantra offered. Go to university (or a former Polytechnic, really) and get your degree. Employers will be queueing up. You will be rich, beyond the dreams of Croesus. What total bollocks. But, bless their hearts, they believed it, and why shouldn't they have done, such was the spin across all media?

Yeah...throw these things away.
They're fucking meaningless, except
for bricklayers

Failure upon failure to get on the graduate schemes of KPMG or some other "Major Global Corporate" followed, while they filled in time and the holes in their bank balances working in bars or flipping McShit burgers. Gradually, a very rude dawn began to awaken in them. A "Desmond" in Natural Sciences or Sociology from the "University" of Huddersfield just didn't quite have the cachet of a first from Oxbridge, Durham or Edinburgh; those having been secured by the Tobys and Jocastas, whose mummy and daddy had managed their transitions (and their funds) from Winchester or St Paul's to Corpus Christi or Gonville & Caius. Apologies to Huddersfield, by the way. It is an excellent institution in all but the perception of its name, but you'll get my point.  Oh, and by the way, why is it that Caius is pronounced "Keys" and Magdelen, "Maudlin"? And is it just me, or does Paxman sneer at contestants on University Challenge if they're not from Oxbridge colleges, and is just downright patronising over their inevitabe defeat if they're from former Polys or, God forbid, the OU? Righteous indignation it is not, Paxo; just ill-judged pomposity. Of course, one mustn't forget that Paxman went to Charterhouse and then to St Catharine's, Cambridge, (note the affectation of the second "a") where he edited the magazine, "Varsity". This is a toff term for University but Varsity is also the name of a lower-middle class 'burb of Calgary in Canada - what were they thinking?

So, these poor souls (not from All Souls, Oxford, of course - and should that be pronounced "arseholes, I wonder?) ended up with me, in an office in Leeds filling out forms and tapping into a PC. And they were, largely, so terribly disappointed with their lot. Until the penny dropped. The transition issues that affect so many people moving from the academic world (and I really do use that term loosely these days) to the world of work can be shattering. Especially if you had expected so much more, as they did. Although these young graduates didn't fit my ideal employee profile and tended to take quite a few Mondays off due to...well..."living life to the fullness they could afford"...they were, on the whole, an absolute delight. And they eventually realised that they'd been sold a pup by Government.

John Belushi - Student
Role Model? Probably not....

Sure, most of them had had a great time at Uni. (I hate that abbreviation, don't you? Even worse, is the use of the word "Up", to suggest one has achieved a place at University among the great and good, along with its antonym in being sent "Down" for having been dismissed from some hallowed college hall for farting in the quad, no doubt, but still getting a job in the City - the upper class equivalent of an ASBO).


And whilst some might begrudge students for having had this alleged "great time", it is mostly those who didn't have a similar "great time" back in the day, that so begrudge. There's also the little issue that Universities, having now become corporate entities in their own right, are milking whatever systems of Government pervade. This has, inevitably, led to criticisms of the changes in the old faculty approaches, especially when under- and post-graduates' vox-pops suggest that the educators themselves are driven by anything other than actually teaching. What a fucking mess. We, the Baby-Boom generation have let our children down, monumentally.

So what is to be done?

The first thing is to ban degree courses in subjects that are, frankly, complete bollocks, unless students can find stupid sums of money to fund them and then take an oath never, ever to be employed but just live off daddy's money. We all know the "complete bollocks" degree courses so I won't list them here. And just in case you're wondering, we probably do need some Media Studies graduates, but not several thousands of them.


All degree courses that will end up in the Public Sector should be publicly funded. Teachers, Nurses, Doctors, Social Workers, Planners etc.


Anybody who really wants to work for KPMG and their ilk must get their degree funded by their hoped-for employer and it must be made illegal that anyone with a degree in anything other than accounting can get get a job with a firm of accountants. These global companies employ people on their graduate programmes based upon where they studied and the rating of their degree or university rather than its relevance and then send them all off to get these spurious MBAs so that they can win the "qualification willy measuring contests" and tout their overblown cvs around to people who've been through the same process as them and seek to justify their own pointless existences by employing copies of themselves ad infinitum.

Give people proper incentives to study stuff that actually matters for the Private Sector like making things, discovering stuff and building things that will bring some vitality to our ailing economy.


A maximum of ten per cent of 'A' level students can get a place at university and this must not include any suspiciously pretty girls and boys that are photographed by the Daily Telegraph on results day, open-mouthed at the discovery that they "achieved" four A Stars, given that they knew they would anyway and were 100% confident of their trajectory to corporate stardom.


Degree courses that don't involve a threat to life should only take one year. Course tutors have to get off their arses, turn up and teach instead of hiding behind their laptops and pretending to assess their students while dreaming of the riches and faux-adulation that will follow their elevation to some pointless professorial chair.

Gove - Passionate (or Pob?)

Michael Gove has a chance to make a difference here, along with David "Two Brains" Willetts. The thing is, Willetts is very brainy and Gove is...well...let's say, passionate. Willetts is sort of in charge of the university stuff and Gove is supposed to look after the feed into Willetts's domain. To add an unnecessary complication to all of this, the products of Gove's and Willetts's secretariats feed into that of Mr Barraclough sound-a-likey, Vince Cable, whose portfolio includes "Innovation & Skills", two things that the tango-dancer has shown little evidence of during his brief ministerial career, the highlights of which have been...er....

Willetts - "Both of My Brains are this big"

These three men must report to two Old Etonian toffs and former "Bullers" who believe that, amongst other things, we are all "...in this together...". Well, we would be if we all were about to inherit a wallpaper empire worth several millions, had wives who earned a fortune selling shit to posh people and we all went through a private education system that guaranteed a place at Oxbridge and an opportunity to run the fucking country. Which we didn't. Ergo, we are not "all in this together".

Which brings me nicely back to my original issue of the pointlessness of all these degrees. Our politicians, for the most part, have degrees. Some of them even have degrees in "Politics". But most of them, especially those in Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet, have never had proper jobs. We are creating a system where the people who run things have never previously run things that mattered. We had some heady days in the 60s and 70s when some of our politicians could have honestly said that they'd been there, done some shit and proudly worn t-shirts that had had nothing to do with politics. Even Thatcher had done something useful, working as she did, in an industry related to her qualifications for a while.


But now we have a political elite that have known nothing other than being in the political elite, and would never had got there without their degrees in...


Cameron: First in PPE - Oxford
Osborne: 2:1 in Modern History - Oxford
Clegg: Social Anthropology - Cambridge
May: Geography - Oxford
Hague: First in PPE - Oxford
Clarke: 2:1 in Law - Gonville & "Keys" - Oxford
Cable: Natural Sciences & Economics - Cambridge


Liam Fox, at least, had a proper job as a GP before throwing it all away to be a politician and even Ian Duncan Smith wasn't tainted in his early life with the Oxbridge association, having completed his education through the Scots Guards, but now panders to the academic think-tanks.


For the opposition


Miliband (Ed): PPE - Oxford
Balls (Ed): PPE - Oxford
Cooper (Yvette) - PPE - Oxford

Prescott - Taking a Different View

At least Harriet Harperson went to York University and, of course, Lord Prescott went to the University of Life after slugging it out at the School of Hard Knocks and the College of the High Seas. Gawd bless the man.
These are the people that supposedly run the country. Mostly a privileged few that have no fucking idea why they continue to promote the acquisition of university degrees instead of delivering policies that get people into work. They perpetuate the chasing of a dream that no longer exists other than for the continuation of that privilege that I'm sure they believe will never falter...


...God help us all.