*The majority of kids (who are not academic) go through one of the best vocational training regimes in the world.*

You are quite correct there, Dane. Its why the Swiss and German
economies are doing so well. Those workers at Roche and similar
companies, did not qualify in arts degrees, when they design new
and expensive anti cancer drugs, for instance.

The above reflects around the world, when you see who is doing the
qualified work, from running hotels to complicated construction sites.
Commonly Swiss or Germans, they get paid accordingly.

Our vocational training system is a bit of a shambles and just
throwing more Tafe money at it, is not going to fix it.

Yabby.

...TAFE's were de-funded by three percent PA under the Howard regime; in real terms that is a de-funding of 30% over that period. The purpose? to force privatization! This innovation forced Tafe's to introduce a fee system and a raft of "Mickey Mouse" courses, and directed the institution away from its primary goal of vocational education.

Credentialism high
Brian Holden,
This is what the silent majority has been saying for decades. It's past high time that this gets the exposure needed. If these people were to create their own support it wouldn't matter but because they're 95% taxpayer funded & contribute hardly anything is what makes them parasitical by default. Now that is a harsh term but is there an alternative one for one who does not contribute ?

DD, I think our whole vocational training system needs examination
and an overhaul. The number of kids dropping out of apprenticeships,
is quite startling, for instance. Teenagers who attend Tafe courses,
tell me a huge amount of time is wasted and courses could be
dramatically improved.

Perhaps we need to examine why systems in countries like Germany
and Switzerland have worked so well and start learning from them.

Its very difficult to expect a 17 year old to clearly know what they
want to spend the rest of their life doing. At that age, most of
us had very different thoughts on our minds, I certainly did.
Perhaps more effort should be placed on finding out what each kid
has a natural aptitude for and enjoys doing. Lets face it, if we
enjoy what we do, life is far easier, yet its pretty easy to get
stuck in the wrong career path at that age.

Part of Swiss vocational training is showing kids what the various
options are, not just shoving them into the next apprenticeship
that comes along, whatever it may be.

Yabby,

It used to be the case in Europe (perhaps it still is in some countries) that somebody finishing secondary school could not go straight on to university, but had to do two years on a farm, or in a factory, or in the armed forces, or voluntary work. The philosopher Karl Popper, for instance, worked and trained as a cabinet-maker - in fact, he made and repaired his own furniture all his life. And his wife's too.

So young people got something of a taste of real-life work, of what most people had to put up with all their working lives, before they tripped off to uni, at a more mature age.

As you say, most of us don't have a clear idea at seventeen of what we would like to do. But getting a clearer idea of what some people HAVE to do all their lives probably concentrates the mind a little. The problem these days is that the sorts of employment that this apprenticeship would require are not as readily available, except perhaps in the mining industry. But even there, the great majority of workers need high levels of skills.

Maybe two compulsory years of flipping burgers and cleaning tables might be the only sorts of options: they would surely focus attention on alternatives.

I couldn't agree more with the article. Indeed there was a time when successful academics were more like skilled tradespersons, but these master-crafts men and women are increasingly swamped by the "lettered unlettered". It's rare these days to find a brilliant and regularly published academic who's actually teaching, whereas once it was his bread and butter; this is more and more carried out by half-arsed underlings with little or no grasp of the concepts that roll so easily off their tongues. Academia is no longer a workplace with limited vacancies, it's a marketplace with sinecures and unlimited places for those who want increasingly worthless degrees.
And this is my only demur against Mr Holden's position; our universities are an expression of late, or decadent, capitalism, the hybrid product of free-market ideology and government intervention/assistance/incentives, calculated to mask real unemployment rates, though rationalised as supplying voracious demand. That "demand" is obviously cultivated rather than genuine or developmental in any positivist sense, driven as it is both by consumer manipulation (government and private advertising) and labour attrition.
Universities are becoming more like Big Mac chains, and the whole phenomenon is predicated on projected demand. It has nothing to do with learning for its own sake.