A university degree proves three things:
1. That your family was not born into poverty. Poor people can’t afford university, and employers desire to exclude people born into poor families. University has traditionally been the way the middle class has been permitted to buy a free ticket into the middle class for their families and keep the poor with their faces pushed into the mud. *
2. That you are capable of following pointless, meaningless, and often degrading orders for years at a time without complaint. Employers need to filter out anyone capable of independent thought or rebellion. **
3. That you are not creative or imaginative or resourceful. Imaginative and unorthodox thinkers do not deal well with the regimented conformity of the educational system. Employers are looking for utterly predictable drones who will do the work assigned to them without complaint or creative thought. Spending years sitting in a room and paying huge sums of money for the privilege of being taught the same material you could get free at any library in the world in a tiny fraction of that time proves that you are probably an imaginationless clod who doesn’t take risks or react in unexpected ways or challenge the status quo. ***
* “Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun.” – Kurt Vonnegut
** “The achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of diminution of personality.” – Carl Jung
*** “And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.” – H.L. Mencken