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Originally Posted by ianch99
Really good points esp. about societal respect for non-academic careers. As I mentioned before, this country is not structured for the same career journey an Electrician might have in Germany for example. The class system we have here demands that people like Electricians, Builders, Plumbers, etc are labelled as "Working Class" and should be treated as such.
The high profit, low wage economy we are moving further towards is inconsistent with the high wage, high skill PR pitch. You look at the graduates leaving Uni and trying to find jobs and tell me most get high wage jobs. Not in my experience they don't esp. if they are not skilled in the "right" ones. Got an Arts degree? Good luck ..[COLOR="Silver"]
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There was of course a very different appreciation in the last couple of years as a lot of the people we are talking about here were key workers, keeping the country running. The applause didn't really last long did it...
That is a good point about degrees but I guess it depends on what you class the degree as being for. You could argue that degrees with an obvious end point such as medicine and law are almost vocational courses in their own right while other are education for the sake of learning. It doesn't mean that those degrees are worthless unless you want to work directly in the field of art history for example as they show that the graduate has the drive to learn independently. I mean, if someone who studies classics can get to the top spot, there must be some value..
In Ireland, non-'vocational' degrees do not get much funding these days as there is a continuing drive to boost the skills of the Irish population. The country of James Joyce and Brendan Behan has no one studying their works at a high level