University or Bust?
Teresa Dwight BA
I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m at university because, quite frankly, there’s nothing that I’m good at, and I don’t excel in any area that requires hands on skill and pays money. Actually, I get confused about how to undo seatbelts on aeroplanes (apparently, if you’re having trouble you’re probably not pulling the lever back far enough).
So the ‘smart’ people go off to university and everyone else does a trade or stays in retail. Apparently. In my experience, this seems to be the premise, and society is so concerned about the non-student inferiority complex, that the solution appears to be to put university students down instead. I’m referring particularly to the feel-good ad on the radio encouraging school leavers to do a trade. You know the one, “My cousin did a trade and I did university; now I’m in debt, he’s not, and he owns a multi-million dollar business.”
Wow, let me get this straight. So not only do people who actually do have some kind of skill or talent get full time work and money as soon as they leave school (or soon after), hands-on experience before they’re twenty years old, and no more back aches, blood-shot eyes, and casual thoughts of throwing themselves in front of a bus every exam time, but they also end up having more money and being more successful than the kid who spent three to six years scrubbing floors and not having the latest clothes so they could torment themselves in the library to get a degree!?
That is so not what I remember hearing in economics class. I heard that we get to choose our investment. You sacrifice what you could be earning now and add that the cost of education and hope that when you graduate, you earn so much more than what you would have without the degree that the investment pays off, while the tradesman earns more earlier but not as much later. At the time, it was comforting to know that people from high school who were then starting their six month business degree and telling me that “uni students don’t grow up”, wouldn’t be gloating at me in five to ten years time.
However, Australia is currently facing the worst labour shortage of skilled tradesmen in Australian history (The Gaurdian , 16th of March, 2005). The Howard government’s brilliant solution is to encourage students to leave school at the end of Year 10 and get into a trade. Furthermore, it seems, the government has decided that the country already has enough university students – and apparently there is too much spent on higher education.
The Howard government has decided a society with social classes like 18th Century England is a much better idea. Only people with rich parents should go to university, and the government should structure the system so there is as little social mobility as possible. The advertisement in question does not appear to be encouraging young people to start a trade, it appears to be discouraging young people to invest in further education. It is my argument that the difference is not a matter of semantics. The Howard government seems to react to policy problems by proposing extreme cutbacks. The abolition instead of reform of unfair dismissal laws for small business backed by claims of concern for the financial stability of small business. The abolition, again instead of reform, of penalty rates to reduce the burden on certain industry sectors. Cutbacks in education amid a skills shortage crisis...
Because, it couldn’t be that the very idea of funding cutbacks to TAFE and universities was the “policy solution” that caused the shortage in the first place, could it?
CFMEU Construction Division Secretary John Sutton has pointed out that the shortage will continue as long as a youth can earn more at McDonalds or KFC than on an apprenticeship, a consequence of the Howard government’s funding cutbacks and ‘new apprenticeship’ scheme. The Industrial Relations Society of Queensland presented a guest speaker, Stephen Long at their annual breakfast on the 22nd of February, 2005. Mr Long, a journalist/commentator on financial, economic and industrial relations issues, spoke about the effects that Howard government proposals will have on the nature of employment. Apparently, only about 60% of the working class in Australia are actually ‘employees’. The rest are independent contractors or people who own their own businesses.
It is these ‘non-employees’, the kids who do a trade instead of going to university, that the government is looking to please by such initiatives as the removal of unfair dismissal laws for small business. On the other hand, the nation’s tertiary qualified professionals are all ‘employees’, owned by the government or a private corporation. In this context, funding cuts to universities fits into the entire idea of shifting importance away from professionals and towards people who no longer fit under the traditional industrial relations umbrella – or the control of the government’s industrial relations laws.
The comfort for university students is reality. Most tradesmen are still employees anyway. On average, professionals still earn more than tradesmen. The university investment still makes sense economically, even if we do take account of legislative and structural changes that affect the workforce. Okay, so in the long run the investment in a university education may not always make perfect fiscal sense in all cases, and yes, there will be many cases where some tradesmen will be more successful than some professionals. The question, as the “get into a trade” advertisement seems to suggest, is which direction is, economically or otherwise, more beneficial – university or a trade.
Of course, a general message that suggests one or the other is erroneous. One thing that the road to a trade and the road to university do have in common is that funding cutbacks are the problem and not the solution. These ‘policy solutions’, seem more likely to fuel the problem of skilled labour shortage than lead the nation towards easier relations.
On an individual level, what it all boils down to is that there is no point in getting up to go to work five days a week unless you love your job. No one has anything to gloat about until they’ve got that.
copyright, 2005