Higher qualifications a ‘hoax’

Press, 5 July 1983, Page 8

Higher qualifications a ‘hoax’

PA Auckland A professor of education says higher qualifications are used as a hoax to promise young people better job opportunities. Professor I. A. Snook, of Massey University, said that the employment situation was forcing more young people to return to school for better qualifications. Speaking at the nifional secondary schools princi-

pals’ conference in Auckland, he criticised the emphasis put on higher examination qualifications as vital for better job prospects. Referring to the suggestion that the University Entrance examination should be moved from the sixth form to the seventh form, Professor Snook said the proposal was the wrong answer to the right question. “It is wrong because it

would perpetuate the cruel hoax we continue to perpetrate on our children by making them the increasingly dubious promise that higher qualifications mean greater opportunties for better jobs,” he said. Professor Snook said that in the years ahead young people would stay at school longer and gain increasingly higher qualifications. “These higher qualifications -will be of progres-

sively less use in getting a job and even less use in the performance of their job. “This begins to demonstrate not the increased relevance of qualifications but their increased irrelevance. School tickets have been used not as qualifications but as quick and easy screening devices and as some indication of a certain strength of character,” he said. Pupils were encouraged

to seek higher certificates at the time when employers were realising they were not real qualifications and were not very effective as screening devices. “These pupils are being conned to keep unemployment figures down,” he said. Professor Snook said that 69.3 per cent of the unemployed had no formal qualifications, but 69.2 per cent of the work-force had no such qualifications either.