Getting a Degree – Where’s The Point In It All?

Three years, eight terms, four weeks and two days in and I have realised that I chose the wrong degree. What ho. We all make that conclusion from time to time. We think, well I should have done English instead of Politics. Oh how I should have jumped into the world of Theatre and Television studies instead of learning about Macroeconomic theory with the only silver lining of 9am coffee from a vending machine and the possibility getting frisky with someone in the back row. However, with more than three hundred ‘credits’ in and with ten thousand words to go crafting an essay of a chosen topic that I don’t necessarily care about, I have just started to contemplate that the degree as a concept is utterly utterly pointless.

From stating this I am already expecting a reply a whole barrage of BBC or Daily Express ‘Have Your Say’ style bitching more or less following the lines of “Well University is the only way that you can mentally be prepared for the big wide world out there, and it gives you the skills you need to get ahead in life” as well as “It’s the only way to escape from Sunderland where there are ALL THE IMMIGRANTS”. I agree with you *bar the immigrants*. I also agree with the argument that University student life is an amazing step to adulthood with intellectual conversation, cheap newspapers and so much alcoholic debauchery that you can no longer achieve if you have letters of importance before or after your name in the future. If you love English and you want to DIE for English then woop woop for you as you are in the clear too.

In my own personal experience, I have never seen the point of University. Spending hours of writing for a topic to hand in to a guy a girl to mark who obviously believes that you are thicker than they – what’s the point? It’s three years of reading, drafting, writing, editing, checking, staring at a screen for hours at a time, analysing someone who is dead or weird culminating with you handing in a document that somebody would read once or twice, give a mark and then document or burn. Your views on life will never be seeing the light of day again. It’s just pointless.

The main problem that I have found is that if you are not taking a degree which is a requirement for what you actually want to do in life, you now have enough knowledge and absolutely nothing that is applicable with what you are necessarily interested in or what you want to do in life. You’ve spent 350 hours reading about Marx and German philosophy? Great! You can be part of our sales division controlling more than £3 million in pet insurance. You have managed to decode 450 different types of rock erosion. Great! How is managing a shop in Waitrose?

After so many years of learning about these wonderfully boring subjects you now have enough knowledge and absolutely nothing that is applicable with what you are necessarily interested in or what you want to do in life. Before you know it you will be at a friend’s wedding, you will see a rather attractive girl who you want to impress, and before you know you are talking in INTRICATE detail about the process and the transference of the cotton mill industry between Japan and the United Kingdom in the 1870s because YOU CAN, just because she plans to pop over to Tokyo in a few months time.

What is even weirder is the way the world works in employment just after University ends. Businesses normally look down at what is considered to be less ‘academic subjects’ such as vocational subjects, let’s say some stuff in the MEEDJA or construction. Big businesses normally want somebody in their industry with a fluffy and funky 2.1 or a thrilling First in a high-up institution doing a HARDER degree because they believe that the students are smarter and more applicable to their industry. But I find the matter that you can get ahead because you can concentrate your thoughts well in expressive language on paper and you know how 37 different theories about why chameleons can dance is bizarre. Then if there are too many applicants who are trying to get a place in an industry where positions are squeezed, like there is at the moment during the recession, you then have to show some of the key skills that you may show in a vocational topic on top of all of the other work that you have done instead just to emphasise that you are the BESTEST IN THE WORLD. You have to show that you are some sort of bionic super-duper woman who not only raises money for charity, has a part-time job and volunteers eighteen hours a day dog-walking and have an amazing award by doing so but you CAN ALSO recite most of Shakespeare’s sonnets backwards in Jamaican and relate it to Marx’s Theory of Technological Determinism.

To get the biggest leg-up we are told to get to jump on to a high university and get a good degree to be above the rest in the fields we want to be employed, but really we are further away from the actual things we may very well need to be successful, unless of course the subject chosen is EXACTLY what we are interested in and is applicable with the job we want next. But we don’t really know that at 18 now do we? So although university is epic for the social life, epic for the debt, epic for the knowledge of the ideal time to get to a club before the queue gets too long, it is not so epic on learning hours of information that you don’t necessarily need as well as the possibility of enduring long conversations with people who don’t care about North England tin miners in the 1800s and their political beliefs.

One final thought… Mr Politics Marker man can I get a good grade? Thanks x