What good is a university education to graduates who can’t get work?

I STRONGLY support the views expressed by Nuala Nolan from Galway (Letters, August 6) in which she asked why there were no adequate job opportunities for graduates?

As millions of euro are being poured into our so-called knowledge economy, why is the value of third-level education not realised in good jobs afterwards?

Thousands of Irish academics with MAs and PhDs are employed in contract university jobs for three months and are told they are lucky to have this work.

While they wait for permanent work to come along, they are 40 years old and unable to get a mortgage.

It is also disturbing that the president of UCD recently stated that up to 80% of academic staff there are from abroad.

What is wrong with the enormous academic lumpen proletariat already here, and for whose education the Irish taxpayer has largely paid?

Both the universities and the Government must be more accountable to the taxpayer and to graduates. If someone doesn’t get good work within a year of graduating, a good part of his or her fees should be returned to local authorities or to the graduates who funded themselves. Few people put themselves through university for the fun of it. They do so in the hope of a viable, independent and dignified future.

Thousands of Irish academics suffer severe personal, and undocumented, trauma because the reality for graduates is so often different from their justified expectations.

Getting an education should not be about making risky choices after which graduates discover that they are unemployable.

No degree should be offered if there is no prospect of getting work out of it.

While people want the polish of a university education, polish alone does not put a roof over your head or food in your mouth.

In the early 1990s, there was an obsessive government drive to get mature people off the dole and into college. When many of them graduated, there was no work, so it was back to life on the dole.

The unemployment problem was being temporarily relocated. Recent Government talk of “re-skilling” is really another case of unemployment and/or unemployability in other but equally frustrating forms.

Ms Nolan also referred to the snobbery towards the institutes of technology (ITs). But it is the ITs that should be looking down on the universities. The ITs at least place people in work, which is more than the universities do.

Dr Florence Craven

Maynooth

Co Kildare