stevenlmeyer,
As is easily deduced from my style of posting I am not an educated person. I have always wanted it explained how many graduates emerged from say Melbourne University say in the year 2000 & how many of them are now in useful positions where they're actually pulling their own weight rather than hold out for Government funding. Can you cite some example or provide some links where this kind of information is shown ? What have some of the high-achievers contributed to our society in the private sector ? How many graduates since 2000 & where are they making their mark in value for money ? All I get to see is trades people keeping it all going going you know those with no degrees. All I get to see from educated people is public money wasted, bad decisions being made & a huge rise in emission from the huge amount of travel they do at our expense & all the air conditioners going full blast in their offices.

Yes Individual, there are a lot of them, & not all in the public sector. I am a degree qualified engineer, but also a practical mechanic, having been taught by one of the best motor racing engineers, an amateur, in the country. As I had a bit of a clue, I was often lectured by an aging uncle of this very fact. That he bothered with me was high praise.

In his 70s or 80s, he was a Scottish trained fitter & turner. He had run the factory, with about 400 staff, of a company manufacturing some of the higher tech equipment used in service station, for many years.

When he was nearing retirement the company had hired 2 recent graduates, an engineer & a production planning engineer to take over from him. In Jock's words, one didn't know Sh## from clay, but knew this & was willing to learn. This one was almost useful after a couple of years according to Jock. He must have been good.

They went through 4 others, before Jock prevailed, & brought a factory foreman in to the office to fill the other place.

Jock had stayed 18 months after he was supposed to retire, & much later was still being called in to sort out some problems a few times a year.

I used to wonder if he was just a cranky old bugger, who did not want to let go, but from people in the trade, the products were less good after his going.

Like many of our companies, it is now part of a huge US corporation, bought out more because of their patents, than because of profits

Individual,

In western countries most graduates work in the private sector. In Australia the big exception is scientists. Australian companies do not have an R & D culture so if you want to do serious research you need government funding.

The US has a very lavishly funded public R&D sector which acts like a magnet drawing the brightest and best from all over the world. Almost every private sector technological innovation is based on some publicly funded basic research.

In most western countries doctors do, to a greater or lesser extent, work indirectly for the government.

All this being said it is a sad fact that for many entry level jobs you won't even get an interview unless you have a degree. I think this is terrible. It forces many people to spend a few years doing boring and worthless commerce degrees.

After due consideration I have come to the conclusion, albeit with some reservations, that in at some point in time into the future going forward there's a sense in which this article may possibly find itself in the ranks of the minor classics, or, to rephrase it: bloody marvelous!

Ignoring those posts that got way off topic onto "my uni is better than your uni", it is clear that very few posters can see that Peter's tongue is firmly in his cheek, and that as a consequence there is a great deal of self-righteous bumf. There have been lists like this around for many years - I first saw such a list at Auckland University when Peter and I were both there, and suspect that Peter found a yellowing copy of it recently and decided to try OLO. Good on you Peter!

There's more beating around the bush in bureaucracy than there is in the Bush.