20: Tertiary Education

Page 28

28

Salient Vol. 74

attempt to provide you with some food for thought. It will look at why, in 2011, we have begun to question the value of university degrees. Sticky questions inevitably result. Will a degree get me a decent job? Will I earn more with a degree than without? Is a BA a joke? Are the non-financial benefits of university an important consideration? Firstly, many have come to question the value of degrees because there are simply so many graduates who have them. Arguably, the more people who have degrees, the less value they have. The number of university students and graduates has skyrocketed because of the recession and there is a strong expectation on young people to go to university upon leaving high school. It has effectively become the default option for many high school leavers who choose university because all their friends are going, or their parents expect them to, or both. In addition, there seems to be a continuing unjustified stigma of failure if you don’t go to university and instead go to a polytech or go straight into the workforce. This forces many people into universities who aren’t suited to academic study or simply aren’t interested in university but have gone because it seemed like the right or only path to take. In addition to the vast numbers of students, there are vast numbers of students doing the same degree—Bachelor of Arts students take note. This begs the question, are universities under a moral obligation to significantly cap the number of students in certain degree types that currently have a large number of students and that lead to very few jobs? Or give the students the choice, but at least warn them that they may be unlikely if not very unlikely to get a job relating to their degree? Without entering into a debate on which topics are ‘better’ or more ‘useful’ than others there is a strong argument for universities to be obliged to educate students about the ‘value’ of their degrees and encourage students into degrees where there are skills shortages but also to warn them of degrees where there are not. As students are effectively paying customers of universities, they are arguably entitled to ask how much bang they are going to get for their buck. Another reason why the value of a university degree is being questioned is that job prospects for graduates are undoubtedly not as promising as they once were. There are far fewer graduate jobs than there are graduates. While there is are conclusive statistics on the number of graduates compared to the number of graduate jobs, a simple (though admittedly somewhat crude) analysis of the number of graduate jobs on seek.co.nz provide a snapshot of the

current situation. A search of ‘graduate’ in the job title and job description revealed there are at present, approximately 560 graduate jobs in the whole of New Zealand. Compare this with the number of students at the five major universities in New Zealand in 2010—roughly 123,000. Using a conservative estimate, roughly 15 per cent of those students will be graduates. In the job market this year, that’s 18,450. Taking into account the limits of this rough estimate, being that many graduates will already be employed, some may have gone overseas and not every single job ad for graduates will necessarily contain the word graduate, the difference between the number of ‘graduate’ jobs and the number of graduates is still staggering—18,450 graduates for 560 jobs. One has to ask—are universities setting up graduates for a promising future or the dole queue? While the number of jobs may be low at present, those graduates who do manage to get degree related jobs are enjoying positive financial benefits from their degree. In 2009, the Ministry of Education and Statistics New Zealand jointly Those graduates who do published a study that examined the manage to get degree influence of graduate’s related jobs are enjoying education positive financial benefits tertiary on their one-year and three-year post study earnings. The research reassuringly demonstrated that in general, income rises the more qualified you are. The study concluded that young domestic student’s median annual three-year post-study earnings were 51 percent higher for those with a bachelor’s degree compared with those with a level 1 to 3 (upper-secondary level equivalent) certificate and 30 percent higher for those with a bachelor’s degree compared with those with a diploma. The study also highlighted that completing a bachelor’s degree also matters. Young students who completed their degree earned 29 per cent more than those young students who left without completing their degree. So if you’re in your final year and hating university so much that you would rather walk over burning coals than graduate, don’t choose the hot coals. While this research shows that the more qualified a person is the more they will earn, this may not demonstrate that in all cases a degree is value for money. It may be a reflection of the fact that many employers only hire people with degrees, even for relatively mundane jobs, or jobs that are challenging but could be done by someone who doesn’t have a degree but on the job experience who is


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