The college epidemic of the last 15 years?

Such unhappiness from people who wish they went to/stayed in college.

I'm all for people being encouraged to go on to third level if they want to do so. I don't agree with the pressure on some school leavers to have their life mapped out by the time they're 18.

It's not really the done thing to take time out after the Leaving Cert to try get experience/insight into the area they think they might be interested in, which is a shame. It would prevent people going into unsuitable courses or directions. Gap years do have their uses if they're done right.

If gap years were more prevalent, student numbers might fall but so would drop out rates.

Don't feed the troll!

There are a few driving forces at play pushing people into 3rd level education. One is the decline of manual jobs, more and more jobs are being automated. Farming no longer requires the man power it used too, mining/quarrying now uses a lot of machinery that reduces labour needs, craft jobs (clothes, furniture, household appliances, building materials etc.) are now produced by factories requiring very few people. There are still jobs that require manual labor but there are a lot less than there used to be.

Competition for better jobs is pretty big. In the 80's you could get a really good job having just finished your leaving cert. My dad got a job in the 80's having just done the leaving cert, the same job now requires a specific 4 year degree. There are more people that want to do that job than there are positions available. The only way to choose when someone has no working experience is how much education they have. In the 80's so few people made it to the leaving cert because they needed to get jobs at a much younger age that it was a sufficient qualification to make my dad stand out for the job while now days everybody has the leaving cert so someone needs a 4 year degree to make themselves stand out. We can already see this getting worse with some jobs now requiring a masters or phd where the actual subject matter needed for the job could have been learned in a year or two.

The economy plays a big role in this too. People don't need to get a job at a young age to contribute to the household. They have the luxury of being able to stay in school for a lot longer than their parents would have been able too. A better economy also means cheaper more accessible education.

There has also been a rise in jobs that genuinely require a tonne of information in order to be able to do the job. Software engineering and some other aspects of IT, scientific R&D etc. Someone who hasn't spent a few years studying the subject matter will struggle to get by in these positions.

TLDR: It's not just one thing but a bunch of things that are causing the increase in the need for 3rd level education.

flas wrote: »

this is the problem and will be why our country will go from boom to bust,we need more industry in the country,more manufacturing, and until this is realised you will still have people leaving school at 17/18,starting a course in college only to realise that they have no interest in doing it for the rest of their lives. degres are worth sweet **** all now.

we are creating a generation of pencil pushers.

That's very easy to say "we need more manufacturing" but how do you actually propose we make that happen?

Ireland is not an attractive place to manufacture stuff, there is no practical way for us to compete with Asian countries. The cost is way too high and there is no way to bring that down without doing stuff that really hurts the population like reducing/abolishing minimum wage and all social welfare options so that people are forced to take these jobs that pay almost nothing.