Today's universities are good only for turning out naive, Left-wing twits who don't know how to think for themselves, let alone perform useful work.

**The problem isn't a lack of highly qualified graduates. The problem is a lack of jobs.Our large universities must take the state's high unemployment rate in to account and start capping undergraduate courses.**

And then what?

If we take a three year old and institutionalise it in an oppressive school system, until the mid twenties, brainless and incapable of personal initiate is the reward.

If we are to create innovation from our own people resources, we need free thinkers.
If we wish to create a crowd mentality for the sake of consumerism, stay on course as we are with education.

"The problem isn't a lack of highly qualified graduates. The problem is a lack of jobs."

Agreed, but capping university places is no solution, for several reasons:

The people who can't easily find work after graduating are likely to have a similar problem (but worse) without a degree.

Even if graduates can't find a job in SA, moving interstate is a possibility.

And who's to say that there'll still be a shortage graduate jobs in SA by the time the next round of university entrants graduate?

The problem is that there is no substitute for experience and that is not obtained in universities.

The old hands have a saying : "If you can't do it, teach it".

In the 50s experience was easy to get because the young person was paid absolute peanuts.

As an Articled Law clerk I was paid four pounds ($8) per week and many of my friends at large firms half that.

We lodged documents at Court and the Land Titles Office, searched titles and company records and even delivered letters as it was cheaper than posting them.

As a Law clerk I dictated letters to a typiste who was paid 13 pounds per week- over 3 times what I was paid.

I learnt more at work than at the university and 5 years after I graduated started my own practice.

In that practice I would not have offered work to half of my law lecturers if they had applied for a job as they were not competent to make a living in the practice of law.

The guts of the problem is that unions have negotiated starting salaries for graduates at such high levels they are a loss making entity for years. They cannot get through the door fees enough to justify the required salaries and heavy cost of supervision in the early years.

It is similar to the manner in which the motor vehicle manufacturing unions have negotiated entitlements which have turned Detroit into a desert.

A dose of reality would be the only cure of the problem.

Old Man, you could do wih a dose of reality yourself — you're greatly overestimating the power unions have. And few graduates are unionised, so how do you imagine the unions are negotiating their starting salaries at all (let alone too high)?

The real problem is that the government and RBA have set fiscal and monetary policy too tight.

I know exactly what you are talking about old man.

In the tourist industry I found that for much of the year staff on award rates, & they were much lower than the ridiculous rates assembly workers in the motor industry enjoyed, could not earn an employer the cost of employing them. The only way to avoid bankruptcy was to close part of an operation for a large part of the year.

There is another side to this of course. That is that employees can not really survive on that award wage. It is barely enough to support a single person, & way short of supporting a family. We have got the whole thing out of balance, compared to 50 years ago. I guess this is a result of trying to compete with Asian wage rates.

It was even worse with graduates. Many of them never progress past being school children. They have spent so much time in school, being hand fed by the time they graduate, that it takes years for them to even start to be self starters & independent workers. You find yourself wasting hours leading them gently into what you require, when they are supposed to be educated & expect professional pay rates.

Purely by force of circumstances I had a 4 year break in the middle of my BSc. This proved very advantages in how I related to the course & the people.

Employing young graduates however, I often found it was better to spend another hour doing the job yourself, than spend 2 in training, & another in correction.