Once upon a time a uni degree was worth something. These days (as it stands) they’re not. 99% of them.
Taught out of books that are 20 years out of date, by lecturers that if they were that good they’d be earning 100’s of K doing it themselves.
The whole uni thing has been devalued, people just want experience now. And reading out of a book doesn’t give you that. You’d be better of starting on the service desk and getting paid and learning.
All it appears to give the current crop is a tonne of debt and a misplaced sense of entitlement. They still start at the bottom anyway. Just with a shed load of debt around their ears and a few sexually transmitted diseases/liver damage.
Back in my day (eee), for a lot of careers, uni was more about demonstrating to employers that you could knuckle down for three years and absorb a s**t-ton of information. The actual information you were absorbing was somewhat irrelevant beyond whether it was vaguely STEM-ey, vaguely literary, or vaguely arty (obvious exceptions for engineers, doctors and vets). Having demonstrated those skills, employers were then prepared to take a punt on you and teach you how to do the actual job.
e.g. in my cohort typical routes were things like a maths degree (often pure) and heading into the city (with virtually zero overlap in learned material), or doing English lit before heading off down the law conversion / bar exam route.
Part of the problem nowadays is that there are ever more technical entry level roles (so the information learned at uni
has to have some relevance), and the entry requirements for those courses are significantly lower (so three years and a degree doesn't prove as much about your learning skills as it used to).
Which is a shame, as I'd always like the idea of uni being a place where you could pursue an academic interest for three years without it having to be 100% career focused.
