The True Value of a Degree

I am sorry, your degree is worthless to me. I would pay a high school drop out much more than the holder of a university doctorate degree if that dropout meets deadlines and produces exceptional work. Ability and the use of it is all that matters to me and my peers.

As a boy I was told that having a degree in a certain field would be like the ability to write your own cheque. Parents now invest in it and educational institutions now promise it. Fortunately I did not believe a word of it. The idea of almost guaranteed success for nothing more than attending classes never sat well for me, the same way that breaking the bank at a casino, fortunes through pyramid selling and forwarding a magical email from Bill Gates don't get past my BS filter either.

Today our children are told that if they don't have a degree they will endure the equivalent of banishment to damnation. Nobody encourages their kids to grow up to be artists, boat builders, or metal workers. Today a child is taught that unless he is doctor, architect or 3D animator then life will be dull and penniless. This, of course, created a whole new range of opportunities for the educational system.

Education is now a business and a degree is practically guaranteed with your attendance and accompanying cheque or student loan. People pay big money for a degree now so the possibility of non-acceptance or failure to pass is incomprehensible. People can no longer fail, all university attendees pass and employers can no longer weed out the good from the bad by any means other than trialling them for a while. Unfortunately I feel the resultant dumbing down of the higher education “gene pool” to be detrimental to the the truly brilliant students that attend.

College, TAFE, Tech and Universities are supposed to be a place to learn and prove yourself, not a place to hang out so you can then demand a huge paycheck. As an employer I expect that if someone has spent years studying that they would come out ready to work, achieve and succeed. Unfortunately what I experience is a quality of work that I would not even give a “D” for if it was an exam, and staff that are more interested in discussing health care, benefits, parking spaces, superannuation, 401Ks and pay rises than what they need to do to produce an acceptable, let along high-quality, piece of work. Don't get me wrong, I have had some brilliant staff, but they would now only be what I estimate as 10% of the workforce in my game.

There were no degrees, courses or any education in 3D when I got into it. There wasn't even much on the internet - no youtube tutorials, pirate downloads or model libraries that the learners of today use. The most we had were some online forums where guys like me exchanged notes, ideas and experiences. We each invested a fortune in hardware and software that, in todays terms, was primitive and underpowered. Before that I was designing homes, drawing plans and tendering contracts with nothing more than high school, perseverance, personal study and charisma. I actually started formal studies after I was quite successful in my field because everyone told me I should have a degree for what I do - I wasted a lot of time but it did reinforce my opinion of today’s system while I was being lectured by people that would have been lucky to have even 20% of my experience and knowledge in the trade. In hindsight an apprenticeship would have been the best thing for me out of school as it was very obvious that my drive was found in working and achieving, not sitting in a classroom.

Some people are not cut out of higher education. Why do so many graduates work at McDonalds, as telemarketers or other jobs that they consider temporary until they get that magical job offer? What happened to the people that used to build houses and roads? Doesn't anyone want to get their hands dirty? Do we not see value in this? There are too many graduates out there now and not enough tradesmen.

This can be seen in the early explosion of “IT” graduates. For a while everyone decided that working with your hands, apart from using them to push a keyboard around, was menial and that the money was now in IT and computers. Millions of people left what should have been their real vocations and studied IT. The workplace was flooded with this new breed of worker that wore a tie and cheap business clothes. They spoke language that most people didn't understand and that they guarded closely for fear of their newly acquired knowledge spreading to rest of the world and therefore devaluing them.

But computers got easier and the general population got smarter. There were also way too many IT people out there. Within only a few years the IT trade got very difficult, wages dropped and the number of qualified IT workers in the unemployment line grew exponentially. At the same time the shortage of skilled manual labour began and anyone left in the construction industry, most with no degree of any kind, were making more money then they had ever seen before.

So what was the value of that IT degree? To the people that really have a skill for it and a strong desire to succeed in that field, for the sake of the challenges it presents and not just the size of the pay packet, there are still fantastic opportunities. For the people who ignored fields such as carpentry, plumbing, hydraulics, foreman, landscape and road building because they were taught they were dead ends, too laborious of too “dirty” the degrees has been very costly not just in cash but lost opportunities.

In my field, 3D, the same has happened. The job market is flooded with graduates that simply should not be in this game. They feel they now deserve a six figure paycheck because they heard that is what people at Pixar get, but they lack the ability to do what a six figure employee can. OK, I admit, 3D can be very cool so I cant blame people for being attracted to it, but it also requires a great deal of perseverance, ability and knowledge to be at the top of this game. It suits me, I get it, and my brain seems to work well in this complex mesh of design, physics, mathematics, art and animation. But I have to admit that there some things that I will never be good at, like medicine, accounting, agriculture, retail, in fact many things.

I pay someone to fix my air conditioner because I still have no idea why it would stop working. I am prepared to pay well to have it taken care of, and I expect that what I pay for that hour of work is going to exceed what I may have personally billed out that hour. But people don't want to be air conditioner technicians anymore so I guess I am going to pay more and more every year to a trade that is unable to find people to join it. This world not getting any cooler so I hope that changes.