Some job activities do require training. Would you like to be cut up by a surgeon who learnt his trade by trial and error on the job?

George Stevenson´s Rocket was partly designed by his son Robert who George had insisted do an Engineering degree. Why? Because Locomotion was running out of steam on the hills and George realised that the design of these new railways needed the assistance of maths and physics.

Perhaps what we need is a bigger range of choices. The old CAEs provided an alternative form of education for those who thought differently from the conventional academic stream. Also the traditional trades have become more complex with new knowledge. What we need is variety in education. I don´t care whether you call them Schools, Universities whatever. Or what you call the qualifications. What matters is that we educate our people in ways that will help them improve their lives.

Anyway the middle class will always find something to be snobbish about and will always be ambitios for their children. So what?

Sorry. I incorrectly spelt George Stephenson. Stevenson was the spelling of the family of lighthouse engineers who trained as engineers with degrees from Edinburgh.

You simply cannot get a job these days without either a degree, an apprenticeship or the appropriate experience. Not many employers are willing to train unless they can be assured that the person they are training will commit to the job for a number of years. In the meantime, they want experienced personell who are ready to do the job (under a Howard government, that means importing workers rather than provide the training).

Alternatively you can run your own business, but without the necessary qualifications or experience it is doomed to failure like the 9 out of ten businesses that do fail.

While qualifications are important, people need to also make sure there is a demand for what they are training in. For instance don't get into an industry that is full of cowboys like graphic design.

Most people with limited education don't get well paid jobs, and struggle all their lives. A degree (or an apprenticeship) opens up doors.

when society has more people than jobs, parents give their children whatever edge they can. when employers are overwhelmed with applicants, why not chose from the otherwise apparently equal the person with the best initials after their name?

society has deep structural problems, the heritage of our history and our genes. 'creeping credentialism' is just a superficial manifestation of these problems.

Instead, we have bloated, notionally egalitarian degree-mills that try to make modern-day philosophers out of gormless middle-class children.

Yes, and those who want to become teachers after failing marketing and PR.

I believe Mercurius Goldstein [what a brilliantly stunning name] is completely correct.

Anecdote - I recall discussing with a high school maths teacher a few years back, how I had read an employment advertisement for a junior forklift driver - "must have Higher School Certificate"! I thought it was the most ludicrous thing I'd ever read. Why would a forklift driver need a Higher School Certificate? Particularly at the time there was a glut of youth unemployed. However, the teacher thought that it was very right and proper. I was aghast.

Any half-smart kid can drive a forklift and very well too, there really isn't much to it. I know, because I've had occasion to use one. But now you need a licence to do it. That's over-qualification.

This is the price we have to pay, for the recession we had to have and the instigator of this nonsense, Paul Keating, his Labor Party and his "Clever Country" or whatever it was all called. Space restricts a fuller essay on the whys and wherefores of the matter but Mr Goldstein's article correctly identifies the silly results. A nation full of mediocre clerks, administrators and middle managers with graduate degrees in attendance, even some with honours - they showed up more than the others.

Meanwhile, there's lots and lots of very clever, skillful people, who are now unemployed because they don't have qualifications to do the most simple and basic tasks that they used to do without them, like house painting and bookkeeping and cooking. Now everyone's got to be "qualified". And now nothing's as good or reliable as it used to be when people without qualifications used to do them.

Australia doesn't have a skills shortage at all. It has a shortage of people with rubber-stamped paper credentials - so-called qualifications that aren't worth the paper they're written on.