I come from an Asian country where everybody strive to go to uni and get a good job. But here in Australia seems like people who don't go to uni, even one who dont complete year 12 are doing pretty well or some even better than those who attend uni.
Is Going to Uni Really Better?
Chrotzo on 22/04/2015 - 12:52
Last edited 22/04/2015 - 12:55
Last edited 22/04/2015 - 12:55
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What country? Also when you say 'involuntary work', are you saying people actually PAY to get work experience ?
I think he is Korean.
South Korea. Voluntary work as in, doing a community work. Everyone have to seek out to improve their resume so they do things that they wouldn't do just to make their resume prettier.
Also slightly relating to that, one of the social problems that constantly rises is internship not paying anything/paying below the minimum wage ("If you really love doing it, you should not be paid to do it, so don't expect me to pay for your work fully, you should be thanking me for giving you a job")
I've been vague about the country, since the reason I know these things is that it's from my home country. I didn't want to give that image that this is a problem in Korea and Korea alone.
Also when you say 'involuntary work',are you saying people actually PAY to get work experience …
thats right means you have no choice, you have to do it. :)
I think I've made a mistake in word choice :(
Though, I think even though the students have choice not to partake in voluntary works or get work experiences (that pays less than the minimum wage), looking at what I've seen, I think the choices are almost non-existent for many students since it's either, you do it or get left behind. In other words, the choice is there but it's obvious which is the one you have to make.
Depends. I left school at the end of Year 10 and in my late 20s I am earning considerably more (double and almost triple of some) than any of University educated friends.
I work in enterprise IT sales, frankly my experience is far more valuable than anything I could get at university.
On the flip side it has not been an easy path and I have had to fight tooth and nail to get to where I am today.Having said that, I still rent and drive a 2008 Toyota Yaris. I'd rather have the money in my bank than tied up in some piece of metal with plastic bits inside it.
My ex girlfriend used to splurge on material possession all the time, think hard bags from LV, Harrods; watches, shit like that. Always used to give me crap about my car, I eventually showed her the door.Money isn't everything either, I absolutely love my work and much more so than the money I get from it.
I'm really chuffed with the $9 scales I got from the Harvey Norman deal last week.
I think what Drew22 says is true, in that you can prosper without a degree, and three years studying is three years not earning.
However, the range of jobs available where you can do well is smaller, and even in those a degree is often viewed favourably.
I work with IT enterprise sales teams as well, and the default job requirements spec includes a bachelors degree or equivalent. If you have a degree, this is not an issue, but I know some who don't who are always defensive about this, and it clearly is something they think about when they consider their opportunities for career progression. I imagine there are some job openings where they wouldn't make the first cut due to over zealous recruitment or HR people weeding them out for failing the qualifications hurdle.
To be clear, I don't think a degree is necessary to do that job, but some people doing the hiring might.
It depends if you want to do skilled or unskilled work. There are plenty of unskilled jobs (i.e. sales) that can earn decent money but it depends what you want to strive for and do with your life. I used to work in sales, earning decent coin but was miserable. Went to uni, got a degree and now doing what I love.
There is actually such thing as a job you love? :p
So you are happier doing this job even though you don't earn as much?I enjoy what I do and my quality of life is infinitely higher. I am only earning slightly less than what I was previously but the potential to earn higher is far greater as I become a more skilled and senior clinician. If you can find something that you are interested in, enjoy doing and that fulfills your professional desires, the money is a bonus.
Agree totally. It depends on what you want to/like to do. Some jobs you cannot possibly get without a degree.
2pro4sho I did something similar too. Now earning lesser but enjoy it much more.
My Brother and I went down different paths, end of year 10 he got an apprenticeship as a fitter, finished that and now at 33 works in the mines earning 150k – 200k. I went to University, did an IT degree and now 30 earn in the low $100ks. We both love what we do, it challenges us and enjoy it in the process. Now you might say he is better off but let’s add some perspective. His working environment is tough, I sit in an office. He has to fly in and out each day, I go home to my bed each night. He is senior mgmt, I am maybe 1 step above entry level with plenty of options to surpass him. His industry doesn’t allow people to work late into their career, my industry doesn’t really an age limit due to no physical requirements. No shortage of IT jobs, mining industry goes up and down with little assurance of your next gig. In Summary, right now yes no Uni degree is in front, but in the long run I think having a professionals job that requires a Uni degree is a better option. Obviously what you put in is what you get out and will be plenty of exceptions, but no matter what field you choose (Uni or not) aim big, work hard and enjoy it, you should do just fine.
In my opinion, all that really matters is what you want to achieve. What industry or specific role you want to work in? That will tell you whether university is necessary for you to get there. I have loved my higher education experience, but I don't believe everyone should be expected to go to university. If the job you want doesn't require it, don't do it, unless it will give you personal fulfilment to do so. In most roles, there are ways to succeed without university qualifications, but it can also help you. Everyone is different.
My experience - Uni is just a stepping stone to a job. It will get you in the door, as some jobs won't even consider you if you don't have a relevant degree. But once you get there, all the actual skills I use day to day (I'm in IT) I've picked up either on the job or through specific training courses.
I think the selection of jobs available to those without a degree is smaller, and in general, the working conditions are tougher.
I know tradespeople who earn good money, but work bloody hard. And getting at at 5:00am to work on your feet or knees all day is a lot tougher wen you are 52 rather than 25.
I tell my kids to do what they wish, as long as it is something they are keen on, but if they aren't sure yet, consider going for more education. But I caution them not to be driven by the negative, e.g. they thought of another year at school is hard so I will quit despite having no better plan.But don't the people with degree also have limited job scope? ( only limited to their major)
And for me, it is really hard to know what kind of job you want to do when you just finished high school and no idea on what each profession actually do.
In fact that is still the case even after graduating from uni.University graduate at least can choose to go into other sector with certain industry still being open to them.
i.e. One of my professor has a degree in Engineering and he's teaching cognitive psychology.This is somewhat the case if you do a vocational degree like medicine or architecture, but if you study something more general like arts, science or communications etc. it is not limiting. For the record, my first qualification was as a school teacher, although I never ended up doing that for a living. So even quite vocational degrees "count" when the HR gatekeeper is deciding whether to pass your job application on.
I sympathise with the job question. I'm still not sure what I want to do for a job after 20 years working and degrees and post-grad study.
I used my time at uni to grow up and get a better idea.If you feel you can get the marks to go to uni, and think you can get the results once you are there, I'd suggest it isn't a bad way to go if you don't strongly want to do something else.
There are vocational courses that will almost lead straight to a job, particularly in areas where those jobs are in short supply. However there are some that may seem to be the path to work, but they are not. Law is the best example. It used to be the case that when you qualified in law there was a law job waiting for you, but these days only a small proportion of law graduates find work in law.
Many people don't know what they want to do when they grow up. It's not a big deal. The main thing is to do something and get established then if something else comes along go for it.
Australian unis are going down the postgraduate route, so future graduates will be able to do a first degree, decide what they wanna do with their lives at a later age, and then do their postgrad (specialisation).
e.g. UWA has changed their medical, dental, eng, law (I think) courses to postgrad only.
ANU have been doing that for med at least since 2011.
I met a lot of people who wanted to med in long term but wanted to try psychology that way.
At least for med, I think it is really good, I've seen many people coming to psychology and staying here as well because they liked it (or couldn't fill the requirement, who knows)@AznMitch: Yeah was just using UWA as an example; Australian unis are all going down that route I mean. Yeah I like the idea, students will more likely be more mature on graduation.
Haha me too. Quite a few of my friends are trying to get into medicine.
Are you able to do both? Then u will have both bases covered.
Oh, and some stats.
Currently, about 1/4th of the population has a degree or higher, however, among young people, this is going up, with women aged 30-34 the proportion being 43%. In the USA this effect is even more pronounced, with more than half of young people now attending college (64%, although lots don't graduate). So I think you need to bear in mind that while competition for jobs now includes plenty of people with no degree, over time there will be fewer and having a uni qualification more usual.
ABS source: http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/[email protected]/DetailsPage/6227.0Ma…
USA stats: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_U…Inflation in university degree, having a university degree is no longer a differentiating factor like in older generations time. University in some sense is just becoming an extension of high school (at least in my home country, where this phenomena is very easily observed).
Much of this is the result of commercialisation of universities. They used to be centres of learning. Now they are money making machines concerned only with churning out products. There are still many good, dedicated teachers, but their bottom line is profit, not education.
The biggest scandal though is TAFES. Thousands of people go through TAFE studying completely irrelevant subjects that will never be any good to them, just so the TAFE can grab their government funding.
Im not sure I agree about the TAFE thing. I did what was essentially TAFE in my home country… and then I came here and went to uni (studying the same industry).
I have no doubt that what is going to put me ahead of all my classmates, is my experience prior to uni (in "TAFE"). Uni has given me a better understanding of the underlying topics - but we're provided with very little knowledge that applies to industry. You can ask my classmates shit that I taught myself how to do when I was a teenager and they wouldn't have a clue, let alone anything enterprise related.
Im still doing my Uni degree, nearly finished, and im thinking about doing some TAFE courses to get refreshed and more experience on some of the actual applicable technologies.
Uni is much Much MUCH more than learning and landing a good job later though. I graduated 15-16 years ago and couldn't remember a thing I've learnt. Still some of the greatest time I had :)
Agreed, we were rivals with a nearby campus. We lacked seating near our favourite pool table so we built up the courage to sneak into our nearby foe and stole one of their sofas (the trick is to walk out like you own it). Got it back, cheers and high 5s were bought to a halt when underneath we found our own Uni’s branding …. We stole back our own sofa … good times …
Most degrees will add many thousands to your earning potential, but you need to pick the right degree. No point doing dentistry if you are going to hate staring into people's mouths and pack it in after a few years.
http://www.smh.com.au/national/education/a-matter-of-degrees…
I'm glad I did a degree. I use things I learnt literally every working day.
I agree entirely.
I also use things I learned from my degrees every day. Sometimes we forget how much impact it actually had.
If you look at something like the childcare industry, 5 years ago if you just wanted to work as a floor assitant you didn't need a qualification. Now you need Cert III but most workplaces now want and only hire Diploma students which is a year, to two years of Study depending on the institute. If you're a Director in childcare you have been give x amount years to get a Degree.
So to get back to your question if the government decides to make changes to tradies or other only tafe required workplaces it is possible that more and more people will be forced to retrain. I am only speculating though.Depends on what you want to do. Practically every job in Australia requires some degree of certification (minus casual checkout jobs or burger flipping ones). You need a Diploma in hairdressing to cut someone's hair. Or a Cert III in Training and Certification to teach a skill. Then there are jobs that you need industry-specific skills (not saying that hairdressing skills aren't industry specific, btw. I once tried to cut AznMitch's hair and… yeah that didn't work) that you need to go to uni for. I've been at uni for many years now, and the sector I want to go into really needs PhD as a base. ;_;
I think the thing that makes Australia different from Asian countries is that Australia puts insanely high value on work experience. I remember mentioning to classmates in China that I worked 2 part-time jobs during my degree. They were absolutely shocked that I would consider compromising my grades to get work experience when I would get all that later anyway. Whereas I know many people in jobs that seek graduates that would not even glance at your resume if you didn't have work experience.
It kinda depends on what your university provides you. For me it was the experience and making friends.
Also from a BE Mechanical background. I was able to use CFD and fea softwares ($40,000+ for 1 year subscription per user, $60000+ if you are a small enterprise), acoustic laboratory and free subscription to journal papers (~$30 for each paper).Agree it depends on what you are doing and how far you want to go career wise and how quickly.
Eg I got a decent job after a graduate program which led to a higher job at the age of about 24 or 25. There were others without degrees with the same job about 30 after getting relevant experience but no degree. I beat those people to the next higher position. The youngest colleague on that level is about 5-7 years older than me (without a degree I think).
So my point is, I achieved a decent job fairly quickly after graduating, and I'm a fair bit younger than anyone else in the job who don't have degrees, but they got the jobs because they spent more time gaining relevant experience.
It really depends on the job. I'm in a professional career which is not possible without a degree. Now almost 30, I earn more than any of my friends without degrees(including those who do unskilled FIFO work such as cleaning. I don't have any friends who do FIFO work that requires a TAFE qualification which you can also sometimes get with experience only, or who drive trucks on the mines, so not sure how that compares… a lot of those people are losing their jobs anyway now though). My future progression is pretty much guaranteed with some nice pay increases to come if I decide to keep doing this. I did the hard yards to get here though - 5 years of study + then a few years a junior doing long hours on little pay.
Since I got to do so much travel during uni, I definitely think the lack of pay was worth it for those years.
I want to weigh in with my current experience. I'm an engineer, university trained with some experience. When I started engineering, there was a lot of talk about how there's a shortage of engineers. My degree had requirements of doing internships with two 6 month stints. This was, in some ways a bad thing, because there is very little industry in Sydney (and probably Australia) which actually needs such skills. Because of the university structure, it delayed me in completing my degree quite a bit.
There's a lot of talk currently about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics) shortages in skills. There is no shortage, let me most sincerely assure you. How they come up with a 'shortage' is they compare the composition of the Australian work force, to other countries, who appear to be positioned strongly, economically, and see that they have a lot more people working in these sectors. This is a big difference, because we currently have a really large amount of people going to university, being trained with skills which are largely unnecessary, and unwanted for employment. To back this up with some evidence, most of the universities publish employment statistics that they gather. One startling thing is that you can consistently find that bachelor of science is the worst career option; worse than arts. It has one of the lowest average salaries, and one of the lowest rates of employment after graduation.
Engineering tends to do very well, but that's because the engineering degrees have become quite generalised, filled with non-technical content which really trains engineers to be jack of all trades problem solvers. But since we're still numerate, trained in science and have a strong training in problem solving, our skills are rather portable and applicable in a lot of industries. The second largest industry to employ engineers in Australia is the finance industry, yes, banks and financial service companies. They clearly don't do any engineering at all.
After this long preamble, I'll get to the point (consider this the TL;DR point). After having completed a degree, I can confidently say that it's not a meal ticket. It does make certain things a lot easier though when it comes to finding jobs. However, success is probably an equal measure of risk as well as spotting an opportunity. Don't discount the possibility that a better opportunity may arise which requires you to drop university and pursue it. If you think academic pursuits are not your strength, don't delude yourself into thinking that it's the only way, hard work will not be rewarded if only mediocre results are achieved.
I also want to note that everyone's experience is going to be different. What works for one person may not apply to another, and as a result, only you can determine what you want to do or where you want to go. Personally, I'm sick of working in dead end jobs, where my skills are largely wasted, but that's what ultimately happens with a uni degree.
YES. A degree will give you access to higher paying secure job.
However if you have a business mind, then try your luck in a start up.
Depends, if you are talking about my country, 70~80% high school graduates go into university, in other words, if you don't go to a university and get a degree, you are the odd one out (who'd want to hire high school graduate when you can hire an uni graduate). This is worsened by the fact that the work experience in my country is not the major component of the assessment (it's changing but, it's now making it so that university students are doing voluntary works involuntarily to just have those in their resume). This is worsened further by the hierachy of jobs that still exists in the culture. In my country at least, university has became an extension of the high school and you need a degree to get a job.
In Australia, the situation is better. I think the trend might change since the number of university students is increasing. Though, Australia, from my personal experience, still values the work experience a lot. A student just high grade cannot get a job easily as far as I can see. Highly regarded university doesn't automatically grant you a job, so people tend to be more free in that regards (imo). Not to mention. Australian kids are not put off on going to TAFE (at least from my memories of my high school life), since no one thinks one job is worse than the other.