Peak Degree

Testamur

Over the years, I have written a couple of pieces explicitly about higher education. As with many elements of our daily lives, things have gotten weird. And when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. So let me say: We have hit peak degree. Lets start with the background and then play a game of Consequences.

• In living memory, a university education has gone from being a luxury for a tiny minority to both an entry ticket into middle class life and a badge validating your place in that life. 43% of Australians aged 25-34 have a degree. Education is Australia’s third biggest export after coal and iron ore and its universities employ over a quarter of a million people. Degrees are big business. [Source]

• Who pays for this $40bn industry? Looking at all university income:

  • A third comes from government grants (tax payers).

  • A quarter comes from overseas students.

  • A sixth comes from government-underwritten student debt.

• University graduates tend to vote for left of center parties. While nearly all right wing politicians are university educated, they increasingly see universities are ideological enemies rather than neutral civic institutions. Some of the more florid examples of left-wing ideology in universities has given their opponents easy ammunition.

• For the 20th century, automation technologies were focused on manufacturing while computers enabled white collar work and created new professions (programmers, business analysts, web developers, social media managers, etc). In short, technology favoured people with degrees.

Universities have grown in an environment where technological, economic and social change effectively sold their product for them domestically and where reduced international regulation opened up new markets of those hungry for their product. As much as they are positioned as dens of Marxism, modern universities are quintessentially neoliberal institutions that thrived in a neoliberal world. We left that world some time ago but sometimes reactions are delayed.

So what happened?

• A victim of their own success. Degrees used to be rare. Now they are common (and getting more so). While many degrees have intrinsic value, the blanket status value of a degree has declined over time. While this has led to an education arms race (e.g. people getting a Masters degree to gain an edge with those over a Batchelors), this arms race has proved to be unsustainable.

• Immigration has become a hot button issue in Western societies. A major immigrant channel is education (universities are the original people smugglers). So governments can score easy political wins by reducing student visas, which is a problem if your finances are built on them.

• Meanwhile right-wing governments can bolster their standing with their anti-university constituents by attacking their perceived ideological enemies.

• Technology is now coming for the jobs of white collar, college degree workers. Not only that but LLMs undermine many of the traditional assessment approaches of higher education. In the predator-prey arms race between teachers and cheats, ChatGPT is as disruptive as cheap drones are to the real world battlefield.

So what does this mean?

• Some professions will remain degree-based - e.g. Medicine, Law, probably Engineering. But many professions do not require a degree. They require an initial short-course knowledge base and then periodic upgrades of continuous professional development. The degree will be replaced by the Microcredential swarm.

• Employers will no longer require a degree as a gatekeeping credential for many roles.

• A significant number of universities will either go bust or radically downsize their operations. Savvy employers will be able to pick up smart people cheap.

• Universities will get dragged further into the Culture Wars - esp. in the USA where these Wars are more intense. Ideological entrepreneurs of many stripes may seek to take over institutions on the edge of collapse.

• AI and LLMs will need to be incorporated into pedagogy at break neck speed. Unfakeable demonstrations of ability will be preferred. Handwritten exams will make a come back.

• [EDIT] Skilled manual labour (the trades) will return to middle class respectability given their resistance to easy automation, decent salaries, and affordable training. The VET sector will need to respond in kind. Vocational institutions may rescue academic ones.

Tell me where I am wrong.