I was told that in parts of (Nordic?) Europe, there’s an well-accepted recognition that not every student is suitable or needs such a long academic education. Some vocational training schemes produce valuable and well-paid technicians. (This is unconfirmed –) Someone even said in those countries a top technician’s income can match a doctor’s. I would guess such a technician would be talented enough to earn a degree but not academically inclined and not really relevant. More importantly, his profession doesn’t need the university education. It’s almost an unnecessary waste of his time and educational resources. (Can you imagine half of China’s students born in the same year getting a postgrad education? What a gigantic waste would that be!)
My sister is a similar case. She has no degree. She didn’t finish her 3-year diploma course in a unbranded China university. She had some accountancy (AAT) qualification, probably her highest qualification. She is more successful than me. She used to manage more than 10 professional accountants (all uni graduates presumably) in the #1 property developer firm of Australia. She has since moved up to managing billion-dollar property projects. Apparently, her work doesn’t need a degree and she earns more than most degree holders, because she’s adding more value.
In my very own domain of software engineering, I have seen that many programmers without formal training in comp science or engineering (or without any degree) can do equally well. Remember this is a truly knowledge-intensive domain.
(In fact, I received no formal training in comp science, though I do have a degree.)
Looking beyond my own domain, I have some (Caucasians or Chinese …) acquaintances doing well professionally without a degree not counting the entrepreneurs.
Q: so is it a failure if my kids don’t go to a university?
Above are the facts and first-hand personal observations to support a NO answer. However, answer is Yes in our hearts.
I have seen and read enough to believe that if my kids have no degree, they would face an uphill getting into a professional job. At the entrance to job market, they will benefit from a degree.
However, a prestigious degree may not be so important. The Chinese tradition (up to today) puts an overwhelming (peer) pressure on the parents to provide the very best university education that we can afford. A colleague with college-level children shared with me his feeling that among the Chinese fellow parents, an ivy league university is the one and only badge of honor. He said other universities are considered inferior. Then he said most managers in our companies are not graduates from top universities. I added that I met many prestigious university graduates who didn’t outshine other graduates in the same group. I said in my small sample of 20 to 40 friends and colleagues, the best aren’t from prestigious universities.
So it’s similar to the emperor’s new dress — we all know that some widely held propaganda is false but we still propagate it.
The blunt truth is, a prestigious university degree has, in my view, a low correlation with professional success, but we still sacrifice so much for it. Even in the refined domain of research, where university prestige matters, I see evidence that graduates from unbranded universities have similar, often superior, performance.