Devaluating Everything. Universities

How technology, feminisation, and immigration, are devaluing universities

In 2023, the Australian Labor government officially recognised Indian university qualifications in Australia as per the Mechanism for the Mutual Recognition of Qualifications between Australia and India.

This comes after two decades of universities financially benefiting from one of the world’s most outsized immigration policies.

It has long been known that the devaluation of universities is taking place. Back in 2018, I wrote this thread about my experience teaching post-graduate economics. Here’s some reporting from 2014.

Last week, the Queensland University of Technology’s (QUT) extraordinary dropout rate from its bulging international student cohort was reported. This rate is suggestive of students using enrolment as a visa status requirement and failing to complete, seeking to stay in the country or shopping around for other degrees to enrol in to prolong their visa. Not exactly conducive to high-quality learning when half your cohort drops out during the semester.

Source: https://apple.news/AQ8WIFz2vQ9iPM0_H1A4PHQ

One defence of the new status quo has been to call universities exports. But that is a statistical trick, one that I explained below, and one that the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has responded to by clarifying why my explanation is correct.

Below is a guest post from a mate returning to study after twenty years. He reflects on the trend of universities as visa factories, amongst other long-term trends.

You don’t have to agree with it. But you might, I hope, sense some of the frustrations of students in the modern university environment who actually have a passion and desire to learn and succeed.

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Guest post by Olger Quincy.

Universities are dead. They just don’t know it yet.

Three forces—technology, feminisation, and immigration—shift the ‘Uni or not?’ choice for young Australian men.

The internet killed knowledge exclusivity. Feminisation killed rigour. Immigration killed integrity.

I know these words trigger emotions—let’s push past that to reason together. From my QUT shock to global trends, here’s why unis are fading.

I recently started a post-graduate degree at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and was quite shocked to discover that of the 200 or so students in the department, 190 of them were Indians, fresh off the boat. I had walked through a portal and been transported to India. I have, in the past, done post-graduate studies in Germany; I learnt German and passed all the required entrance exams, and armed with a first-class honours degree from UQ, they barely, and begrudgingly, let me in. I was the “Indian” in Germany, albeit the only Aussie in the entire university. I will draw on these experiences to illuminate my arguments for you.

Let’s start off easy and tackle technology and why it alone might have the power to devalue universities enough for young Aussies to look elsewhere for their education. Even before the advent of AI, the internet had sown the seeds of universities’ destruction long ago. It was Athens vs. the Wild West. Walled curated knowledge, history, esteem and principles versus free chaos.

My first experience of this was in high school, with the Jolly Rogers Anarchists Cookbook, a guide for hacking, freaking, explosives making, homemade drugs, revenge tactics, etc. all fascinating for a rebellious teen downloaded from the 90s internet. I tried quite a few recipes out; made napalm, crushed up an old flare to burn holes through trees, hacked my internet provider for free internet, and got a Sunday detention at school for trying out my floppy-disk explosive on the library computer. No boom. The collection has subsequently been banned in Australia; that is fair warning to those curious amongst you.

The dark, however, is always accompanied by the light, and the Gutenberg project was already off and running by then. Started in 1971, it is the oldest internet library, with the foundational principle to make knowledge freely available to all. Many have followed in its idealistic path, with the most popular today being annas-archive.org (use a VPN) with over 43 million books.

Not only is technology freeing up knowledge in the traditional form of books, but if you can find information on the web in any form, maybe you can learn it, maybe you can make it. I enjoyed this internet, it taught me how to repair my phone, build computers, fix my car, and developed my love of classic literature amongst other things, but it wasn’t for everyone, and universities still had their place with curated knowledge and experts, and of course the piece of paper received at the end of your purgatory, underwritten by a trusted authority. But for those brave souls who could navigate, knowledge had escaped the walls.

But now, out of this beautiful chaos, emerges something new, an entity of order, a guide, perhaps a ghost, or a ghoul, what it is and what it will be no one can say. It’s difficult to speculate on the future of AI, it is such a dynamic unknown, but I will briefly touch on its power to devalue university. AI will be your tutor in the classical sense, think of the polymath Alexander von Humboldt and his impressive list of tutors, or Aristotle tutoring Alexander the Great; elite, personalised and mentor-driven education. The value of such an education is self-evident; we will be so much better educated, we will understand the world and ourselves to such greater depths than is now possible.

What was it like for an ancient man to feel the rumblings of an earthquake? To see the lightning of a storm striking the sea, or a tree? We think of those people as primitive, inventing gods in vain attempts at mastery. That is the power of education, the power to broaden our horizon of understanding, and in our natural hubris we imagine ourselves to be the pinnacle of such understandings, but certainly we have not reached the limit at all, and it will be spiritually transformative for those who have the faculties to take advantage of it. Weigh that sort of education up against impersonal, visa-chasing, mass-produced degrees, and there is no comparison. But you get a piece of paper. A credential.

If you’ve made it this far, you are a brave navigator, but prepare yourself, the barometer is dropping, and Poseidon has noticed you. What is feminisation, and how does it devalue the credential? What is this lunatic misogynist on about?

University graduates have flipped from being 2/3 male to 2/3 female. Young men are now graduating less than young women, and this is naturally accompanied by an increase in female university staff and faculty members, with variations through rank and department, all within a broader societal context of feminisation. We are not new to this; we have seen male-dominated spaces taken over by women in the past.

Teaching was a respected, male-dominated profession with high pay and intellectual prestige; think of 19th-century schoolmasters. However, by the early 20th century, the profession comprised over 70% female teachers, wages stagnated, and societal value began to diminish.

Clerical work in the 1800s was a male domain, often a stepping stone to management and held in high regard. In the post-typewriter era, as women flooded in, reaching an 80% share by the 1950s, the role became low-paid "typing pool" work, stripped of its prior prestige and career mobility.

Librarianship in the 19th century was a male scholarly pursuit, respected for its intellectual curation; by the 1930s, women dominated (over 80% female), it shifted to a service-oriented role, losing prestige and pay compared to academic fields.

Textile work in the early industrial era featured male artisans and skilled craftsmanship; as industrialisation got into swing, the male-dominated guilds made way for factories, dominated by women, and it became low-wage and repetitive labour, devaluing its artisanal heritage.

The Patriarchy! (I can hear your screams so screeching they pierce through time as I write this). There are, of course, many other factors at play here, industrialisation, capitalisation, social upheaval, everything that goes along with modernity. I, however, propose that without allocating cause or blame, we can see feminisation at least as the canary in the coal mine, a harbinger of devaluation: feminisation of male spaces is associated with devaluation, and the same will be true for universities.

To bring it back to my experience, I see feminisation expressed at QUT not only in the traditional points of contention like safe spaces, trigger words, and emotional support activities. But a lack of order. I look hopelessly at the lecturer, willing him through my eyes to tell the Indians to stop babbling, turn their phones on silent, pay attention and pay respect. The classroom is like a train station, people constantly leaving and arriving throughout the lecture, often slamming the door, walking in front of the lecturer; it’s a jungle, and the lion has no claws.

Speaking of the jungle, that brings us to immigration and the Indian problem, and their part in the devaluation of the university. I highly doubt—and judging on the sheer numbers it seems impossible—that any of them went through a vetting process as rigorous as what I went through to get into a German university

Already putting a few cracks in the self-aggrandising propaganda QUT distributes, world-class, perhaps if you select only from the third world.

Burn.

Aside from the catty jabs, strict and rigorous qualifying procedures ensure the value inside the gates and are indeed synonymous with value; a low bar for entry equals devaluation.

Indians often have a different cultural value on cheating, coming from a highly competitive society with limited resources, cheating is a means to an end. QUT gives some performative talks on plagiarism, however, in opposition to their stated position, offer solutions to the students to game the system; they have given us access to the univerisity’s AI checker, we can upload our assignments beforehand, and it will tell us if it passes the ChatGPT check or not, without any consequences. If it fails, we delete the classic GPT dot point formatting, or rewrite a sentence here and there, and zoom, it passes.

ChatGPT gets a W. Your brain and the value of your credential gets a big L. It’s like they want them (us) to pass no matter what.

What happens to the value of money when you print too much? Devaluation of the currency. What happens to your degree when universities print paper with worthless degrees written on them?

I have one foreign-speaking lecturer whose skills I assess as a negative value. A brief casual surveys of my student colleagues suggest we are all less clear and more confused and lost at the end of his lecture than before we started. Partially, it is because we struggle to understand the words coming out of his mouth, but also when we decipher them, the words are still semantically meaningless and confusing.

All my tutors are foreign. I consider myself an adaptive communicator. However, my brain still expended a significant proportion of its resources to merely understand what was being said to me, ostensibly in my own language. I struggled and left that tutorial. I had two other options, both also foreign tutors, butchering their way through the language, so I had to pick the best of a bad bunch.

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The cost of all this? $14,000 for one semester. The cost of my education in Germany (I don’t and never have held a German passport, just an Aussie dude, no scholarships, just normal),

Free.

That is what devaluation looks like. Total annihilation.

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Well, I haven’t checked in on you for a while, we just pushed through those difficult topics, hoping over little logical gaps, leaning on stereotypes a bit, racist, sexist, xenophobic landmines left and right and perhaps in your mind I was turned into red mist on my first (mis-) step, and yet here we are.

I’m glad you came along for the ride, my passenger princess. I don’t expect anything from you, your feminised mind to be changed to a logical Greek philosopher-God, but I, like the chaos, have sown my bitter seeds.

The corrupt, the rigid, the unchanging, the unwilling, the blind, and those who taught themselves to be blind, the stupid, and the desperate, the uneducated, and the lost. They are the screams fading into the fog, and those who hear them are glad that the fog will take them, a problem suitably disposed of, for the ones with life, and love and hope and joy have no energy to give to save the former, for that energy must be given to the future.

Young Aussie men, let universities fail, because they have failed you. They have sold your education for their profit, and hollowed it out, they have beaten you with guilt and shame to gaslight you into not noticing and not speaking, they are telling you that they hate you with their actions, while telling you they love you with their words. But fear not, the god of the sea protects your ship, cut the tow rope, and we will watch with awe and wonder at the new systems which you will build, and they will rise and prosper under our burning sun.

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