Look around you & then look in the mirror & then think about what you see.

The workplace is being driven by the need for paperwork and most University qualifications are professionally targeted. It is not sufficient anymore to have general degrees, but industry specific qualifications. Whilst a piece of paper is no guarantee of competence, it is considered a minimum requirement for any job application.

Decades ago, few people went to university, and any degree was considered a sign of achievement and opened doors. Today, tertiary qualifications are common, and someone with purely academic qualification is excluded from most high level jobs.

However, to dismiss professional degrees such as law, medicine and engineering as "corporate driven vocational training" is either snobbery or more likely jealousy.

SM, sadly, with the rise of managerialism and process-defined work practises which are mediated by computerised systems, to a large extent even those professions have become "vocational training", with the majority of practitioners doing what is little more than scut-work and only a few doing anything that requires creativity and exercise of professional judgement.

I work alongside people with engineering degrees & if their level of competence is supposed to be some sort of a benchmark then we should all give up now.
They are hired to do a job yet they spend a large part of the budget on hiring consultants to do their job for them. This is how a huge portion of Government funding is thrown out the window. I just hope that our new conservative leaders can reign in this criminal fort. I'm still waiting for can Campbell to show signs of that here in Qld.

The Education / Political complex is just another way to extract money from workers and give it to the shirkers. The "I did arts and am therefore a great thinker" is the most puerile argument there is, great thinkers don't need to molded by Professorial ideologues, they think for themselves. Unis now do their damnedest to crush real thinkers and produce drivel spouting robots.

Unis now do their damnedest to crush real thinkers and produce drivel spouting robots.
McCackie,
That's a pearler ! It's the most apt description I have heard so-far.