Intelligent employees, not degree holders, secure higher salaries

I am flabbergasted by the comments left by readers on the online article “Singapore wants kids to skip university: Good luck with that” (May 4).

Many of them criticised the Government for trying to fool the people and seemed to suggest, as did the Bloomberg article, that a degree will lead to higher salaries.

Let us distinguish between correlation and causation: A degree correlates with a higher salary, but does not directly cause it.

Instead, intelligent people are more likely to get a degree, and employers want to hire intelligent people, among other things, which is why more graduates get higher salaries.

Conversely, an unintelligent person who sacrifices everything to get a degree, such as an expensive one from a below-average university abroad, is being unintelligent.

As has been said many times even by non-graduates in jest, many university courses do not teach skills employers can use directly. Employers can also tell from this person’s alma mater that he or she does not meet their requirements.

Employers can deduce that if this person had to apply to a private or overseas university, then he or she did not make the cut to local public universities at some point.

What does it say about the person’s pre-university results? How does it affect the employer’s hiring decisions?

Another illustration: Suppose everyone in Singapore spends three to four years to get a degree.

Employers who want to hire from the most intelligent 10 per cent of the cohort will find other ways to identify them.

In the past, one was hired if one had a degree. Now, one must have a degree from a top university and a good grade-point average.

The bottom 90 per cent remain the bottom 90 per cent, whether they have a bachelor’s degree, a master’s or even a doctorate. They would have wasted expensive tuition fees and three to four years of their time.

Life is a bell curve. If one cannot beat the bell curve, one should find ways around it, for example by acquiring skills that people in the bell curve do not have.