Over-educated and unproductive: the reality of third-level today

The Irish Mammy’s greatest pride is no longer a son in the priesthood -  it’s a child with a PhD.

We've been herding students into third-level to the point where Ireland now has the second highest proportion of young people in Europe with a third-level degree.

More than 40 per cent of under-35s here now boast a degree, compared to an average of about 29 per cent.

Official figures show that close to 40,000 students started a course in the higher education system last September. Yet, almost 7,000 will have dropped out of college by the end of the academic year.

It gets worse among individual colleges. In IT Tralee, 80 per cent dropped out of their computing with games development course; at Letterkenny IT some 70 per cent felt digital media design wasn't for them. At Galway-Mayo IT, another 70 per cent opted not to continue studying mechanical engineering.

So how valuable is a third-level degree, considering the Irish graduate unemployment rate is among the highest in Europe?

There are several reasons for our grossly high drop out rates.  Cost is often presented as the primary factor in the case of dropouts. While it is a legitimate reason, a more influential one might be that many students should never have been in college in the first place.

Some might regard this claim as elitist - but that only holds true if you believe a third-level education is the highest accolade that can be achieved.

I don't believe this. While some suggest that college is not for everyone, I would go further. College isn’t for most, at least not in its purest form of true academia.

The truth is that Irish third level institutions have spread themselves too thinly by continuing to offer and develop courses with little or no personal or economic value and courses that have no place in a college setting.

Professions that traditionally employed on-the-job training are now clogging colleges up with unnecessary degree courses to sate the unrealistic Irish appetite for tertiary education.

This has led to ever-increasing wastage within the system by conning unsuitable candidates into believing third-level education is essential.
  
It has become the natural next step for Leaving Cert students and some may view it as the only step.

Secondary school students fail to recognise the potential for travel, apprenticeships and even entrepreneurship feeling that they cannot attempt such things without the supposed security of a degree.

Our economy needs a revitalised manufacturing industry in order to kickstart it once again. Industry does not need several thousand graduates with a masters degree in 20th century US literature.  They need people with practical manufacturing skills.

The solution to our problem of hyper-education involves large investment in vocational education, a societal re-evaluation of our primitive notions of vocational training and a streamlining of our third-level institutions.

There’s no point saying fewer people should go to college if we don’t provide an alternative path.

By investing in vocational education we are actively declaring that we feel students should be provided with a means to acquire actual practical skills that we as a society will value and benefit from.

Being able to write a feminist critique of F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise is admirable — but only in the eyes of a select number of academics. It is ultimately useless to the Irish society and economy as a whole.

However investing in vocational training is moot if we do not tackle the regressive perception of vocational education as being inferior. We need to do this by creating high-class vocational institutions that mirror the prestige of third level institutions.

Finally, we must streamline the colleges.

Access to third-level education should be restricted to no one on the grounds of finance. Admission should be based entirely upon interest in a chosen topic and success in examinations.

Irish colleges should become a hotbed for pure academia and intellectual pursuits, without the distraction of employment opportunities after graduation. Ideally, students would pursue a career in academia. Those not interested in such a career can be catered for by the state’s new vocational schools.

We achieve this by reintroducing fees and adopting the UK tuition fee loan system, whereby students do not start paying back their loan till they have graduated and are earning over stg£21,000 a year — and even at that stage the repayments are miniscule.

The loan scheme mitigates the rich/poor divide by placing every student on a more equal setting. Fees also serve as a deterrence, meaning that only those who are fully and entirely committed to academia will consider progressing to third-level, which will ultimately reduce the level of dropouts and improve efficiency within education.

We've developed an obsession with education in recent years -- and it has come, arguably, to the detriment of our economy and our values.

We have overvalued unproductive education and have thus created a hyper-educated but ultimately useless or perhaps skill-less population.

So we must ask ourselves, "should I really be in college or are there better things I could be doing with my time right now?’