Education. Education. Education.

We don’t need no education
We don’t need no thought control

Rub your hands in glee. With a topic like education, you know it’s going to be controversial. So let’s dive right in. Education. It’s important right? You’ve heard it all your life; go to school, you’ll get a nice job and you’ll be just fine.

But everytime you sit in class listening to the lecturer read out of a textbook that you’re convinced he doesn’t understand. You’re sure, deep down inside, education just isn’t right for you. After all; Bill Gates dropped out, Mark Zuckerberg dropped out, Steve Jobs dropped out, Jack Dorsey dropped out, Rachel Ray dropped out and Orji Uzor Kalu dropped out. And they’re much better off for it.

After all, University is really just you paying for the right to teach yourself. So you conclude (for better or for worse) that education isn’t the way to success. But are you right or not? Let’s review. After all, the rebellion against education isn’t something new as Pink Floyd sang ‘We don’t need no education. We don’t need no thought control. No dark sarcasm in the classroom. Teacher, leave them kids alone'

Diminisng Returns.

All things in Moderation — Socrates

The problem with the go-to-school-get-a-job rhetoric is that jobs are not being created at the same rate as graduates are being produced. Nairametrics estimates that 422,135 jobs were created in 2017 and rough estimates place about 500,000 graduates produced yearly in Nigeria, add that to the fact that you have to contend with 2 generations of workers with more experience than you. It’s an uphill battle.

So should the teachers really leave these kids alone? The numbers say, yes.

The Law of Diminishing returns is a standard of Economic transactions and it’s something that you’d have learnt (if you got an Education). If you’re not familiar with it or you’re too busy building Fortune 500 companies to worry about it let me refresh your memory.

To put it simply: The Law of Diminishing returns states that there is a point at which the level of profits or benefits gained is less than the amount of money or energy invested.

To put it even more simply, there’s an optimum amount to put in and there’s an optimum amount to produce. That’s the same thing for an economy. There’s an optimum amount of University graduates that should be in the workforce.

Here are the percentages for different top OECD countries; United States 44%, United Kingdom 42%, Switzerland 40%, Germany 27% and bringing it to Africa; South Africa has 7%.

However, statistics show that Nigeria has a University Enrollment rate of 10.2% a literacy rate of 61%. So are we within the sweet spot for graduates to economic growth? Unfortunately, we are not because the jobs available are far beneath the number of graduates in the work place.

Education! What is it good for?

In economic theory, when supply is greater than demand that leads to inflation. It’s no different in the world of Education. There’s Degree Inflation.

So what is the point of education?

Education that prepares you for the job market (as we’ve been referring to it here) isn’t particularly about specialist skills like say the ability to write code, repair a generator or distill. We like to laugh and blame the Nigerian education system (which is pretty awful) but it’s a common story world-wide. Most education in tertiary institutions is focused on general skills.

Specialist education on the other hand focuses on job ready skills like the ability to sew, code, paint or work a production line.

So why do Universities focus on general skills? Surely, it’s better to teach us what we need to know.

And that’s because of the Sorting Function and it’s the foundation of (general) education. Universities teach us certain productivity related knowledge but the main function of it is to establish each individual’s ranking in terms of employability.

It’s not called ‘First Class' for nothing.

In many lines of work, what counts is general intelligence, discipline and the ability to comport yourself, rather than specialist knowledge (which most of the time you actually have to pick up on-the-job). So, even if what you learn in university as a Philosophy student or a Mechanical Engineering student may not be relevant to your work as a prospective manager in a Bank or as a Civil servant, the fact that you’ve graduated from University tells your potential employers that you are likely to be smarter, more self-disciplined and better organized than those who have not.

By hiring you as a university graduate, your employer is hiring you for those general qualities, not exactly for the specialist knowledge you learned in school, which is more often than not irrelevant to the job you will be performing.

Too Much of Good Thing.

By now you see why having an education is generally considered a good thing. 90% of the general population is better off having these general skills impacted into us but then once the supply goes up. The value comes down.

Here’s how.

Once the proportion of people going to university goes over a critical threshold, people have to go to university in order to get a decent job (remember the sorting function?). When, say, 50 per cent of the population goes to university, not going to university is basically declaring that you are in the bottom half in terms of employability, which is not the best way to start your career.

So, people then start going to university in order to get ahead. With everyone wanting to go to university, the demand for higher education increases, which then leads to the supply of more university places, which raises university enrolment rate further, increasing the pressure to go to university even more. Over time, this leads to a process of degree inflation. Now that ‘everyone’ has a university degree, you have to do a master’s, or even a PhD, in order to stand out.

In conclusion,

The main essence for the education you receive is to; prepare you for the job market and establish your position in relation to other candidates. Of course, universities also try to teach students specialist skills through practical classes (and your final thesis is a measurement of this).

While, a healthy GPA sets you apart from the other applicants. It’s your skills that set you apart from other employees. And that is vital.

Both general and specialist skills are important. So my advice is, stay in school and teach yourself the skills that you need to thrive. So when you go out into the world, you can kick ass.