What downside, Individual?
Yabby,
Check out the past and ye shall see. Consumerism does not have a safety valve. Whereas supply vs demand doesn't need one.
The downside is the end result, when China & India are no longer exploitable & Australians haven't got three farm labourers to work our produce. When Australians have so much education that they're too qualified to work. That's when the price is too high.
How many more industries do you like to see go to other countries ? I think we would be better off sending our academics over there instead of our work. That way we would be assured continued work after the people in those countries have been dumbed down as much as here.smarter countries.
The downside is an Australia on it's knees bowing to it's overseas owners.

*When Australians have so much education that they're too qualified to work.*

Well Individual, we have exactly the opposite problem. Anyone with
skills is snapped up, the unskilled have a problem as there are
only so many hamburgers to flip.

America has exactly the same problem. American industry is short
of skilled workers, the oversupply is in unskilled labour.

Countries with a skilled labour force, like Germany, Switzerland,
Scandinavia etc, are all still doing pretty well.

Yabby,
I specifically stated "educated" not skilled.
The problem is everyone gets educated but no-one's got the skill to hold a spanner.

Individual, that is purely a question of what is studied. No, we
don't need more philosophers and arts degrees. But we are still
short of engineers, geologists, accountants, doctors, nurses,
agricultural graduates, etc, all taught at universities.

Yabby,
i'm not trying to wind you up by contradicting you but my experience is that we have an excess of those people you mention. Where the real stumbling block is that so many of them aren't competent despite their qualifications.
On top of that we haven't got tradesmen who know how to hold a hammer & even less as to how to swing one.
I'm only a basic tradie crap kicker yet it is I & my fellow crap kickers who regularly modify engineers' designs to make it all work. It is everyday trades who keep it all going not the incompetent conniving bureaucrat hangers-on.
We need to create more hands-on training jobs & less pointless desk jobs. Desk jockeys cost money, workers create it. And please don't tell us how well some internet whiz kids are doing unless you can tell us how cyber whiz can build houses & roads & grow produce.

Yes, that's right Yabby, we need engineers, but as I pointed out in my earlier post, the kids coming out of high school, with excellent results, on the bit of paper they are given, can't even handle an electrical trades course.

Hell, kids coming out of intermediate high school used to have the math & physics to do those. Back then we only went to matriculation to get a university scholarship from someone.

Now the kids out of year 12 no longer have enough math for a trade, let alone a B Sc in something requiring real science. They do environmental science, where regurgitating the course notes will get you a credit, & a nice job warming a seat in a council, or the Dept of Environment.

Yabby a survey at that hamburger joint will probably find more arts graduates than "unskilled", although it is probably reasonable to consider arts grads as unskilled, truth be known.

Once we had a lot of pretty smart tradies. They had gone of to a trade at 15, due to economic the pressures of the day. With a trade, & a high IQ they were very innovative. Most of our graduate engineers don't get the hands on experience, to be practical enough to be innovative, & most tradies today aren't that smart.