Cont/...

As individual points out, many jobs are now requiring of Degrees when it really is not necessary.

I have two journalist friends now in their late 50s who entered into newspapers from the floor up, one as a cadet requiring good marks in Yr 12 especially for English and the other as a copy boy. Now we have Communications Degrees for aspiring journos and PR people but it has done little to increase the standards of reporting.

Getting a Degree is not essential but the way education is being forced into business models before long a Degree will be needed for many jobs which do not require that level of education. And please note education is very different to intelligence or smarts.

Simply put I think it is about horses for courses ('scuse the cliche') - pushing everything into a tertiary model only devalues higher education and devalues anything that remains in the non-tertiary sector IMO.

I understand that some jobs evolve over time. Nursing is probably one area that moved from work based training to university, due to advances in medical technology and research, but even in that sphere I wonder if a more clinical approach would be best.

Getting back to gender, I think statistics don't tell the whole story and people/groups may manipulate the statistics to their own end. For example there are more women in the Commonwealth APS now than men (only by a few percent) but there are more men represented in senior roles, while more women sit in middle management or lower end roles. So on the face of it some people might say the workforce is 'feminised' but is it really based on the full facts?

Same with university entry statistics which might not reflect the end outcomes considering factors like child rearing.

Employers do require a degree, in the hope that someone can at least add up without a calculator. Year 12 does not cut the mustard. Kids come out of there and can not spell or write, and no life skills. Life skills are the failed part of the education system. They know more about the knights of the round table, than who Australias 5 th prime minister was.
Education has failed, the gen y miserably.

I agree with most posters - my point is that women, Indigenous people and working-class people should not be inhibited from gaining whatever sort of education and training they aspire to, not on any pretext that ' .... not all [insert group here] might want to go to university or get a trade etc. ..... '

Let's face it, the middle class and its children have arrived, they know the score. They have the social and cultural capital. But if the parents of children in 'out-groups', for whatever reason, cannot provide career advice, or actively discourage their choices, then the last thing kids need is somebody in authority obliquely discouraging them as well: to 'know your place'. But social and economic conditions change so much from one generation to the next that that 'place' may no longer exist: poor education thus translates into long-term unemployment for most.

Education is necessary, Individual, but as you note, not sufficient: one still has to have some level of initiative, some get-up-and-go, it's not all going to be dropped in your lap.

Just so long as obstacles are not put in people's way ......

Joe

I have never been anti education, I'm anti education for education's sake. We force young people through a system which has so clearly been & still is an abject failure. How can we expect our young to gain knowledge from teachers who are as ignorant as a two-bob watch.
There is no actual education, there's only compliance conditioning. Most careers nowadays are not merit based but mere memory-based usage of others' knowledge. All knowledge needed does not have to be learnt anymore only remembered. Computers have made the thinking cells literally obsolete. There are instructions & guidelines for any thinkable activity.
Those thinking outside the square face persecution.
If we had a National Service we could insist maths to be performed without calculators & make people use pick & shovel, hammer & saw & carry timber & bricks to get them to learn about basic mechanics & leverage. I work with people who can not hold two multi grips the right way or think it way too hard to dig small holes. It's their education which has indoctrinated them to think they do not have to put in a physical effort for their own benefit if they don't want to. That's education gone bad.

I think it is the universities that keep pushing the issue. An industry has built up to a certain extent, and to preserve their jobs they have to fill the seats. Some kids are clearly not university material. Education starts when your school ends, and all of a sudden you have to get a job.
Tafe is worth it's weight in gold as a learning centre. It gives kids a chance to build a house or put up a brick wall, that way they know what they are looking at as a career path.