When Eggheads Go Sour
1st June 2014
Theodore Dalrymple lays out some inconvenient truth.
In the developed world, our problems are much less acute. And we are fortunate in actually needing large numbers of educated and trained people. Yet we have nevertheless made a similar mistake, and there is now often little connection between the market in education and the market in employment. The economic value of a university degree has correspondingly declined (of its intellectual or cultural value I dare not speak, for the vast majority of students now regard their education merely as a means to an end, and not as an end in itself), and it has become obvious to more and more students that the main purpose of their tertiary education is to lower the rate of youth unemployment for the propaganda benefit of government. In many countries, worse still, students are now being made to pay, by means of indebtedness, for their own unemployment. But while the economic value of a degree has declined, it is something they cannot do without, for without it they have no chance even of a job for which they would have been overqualified a few decades ago. Thus they are on a treadmill from which they cannot alight. Awareness of this accounts for the Indignés in Europe and the Occupy Wall Street movement in America. They are Boko Haram in a minor key; for them, too, the personal is political.