University Degrees-The Myth of the Necessary Benefits of University Education.

It's that tedious time of the year again when A-Level results come out and the annual ritual of damning them for being easier or praising students for being more hard working will appear in the media again.

Pictures of banal students jumping for joy with pseudo-ecstatic expressions on their vacuous faces will be splashed on the front pages as they grab those grades which will, it is thought, put them in good stead for the future, as if by emphasising it, it will necessarily become true.

Unfortunately, this con trick is waring thin. But willing self delusion is the order of the day in most aspects of contemporary life in 2010. From ramping up grades or massive levels of debt and spending money on the consumer goods that alone define people's identity and well being.

The fact is that A Levels have become easier in the last two decades, that pupils do work harder and, above all, that ultimately neither trends really matter that much because the nature of British society no longer needs intelligent and sceptical individuals anyway.

It needs those with the ability to channel intelligence towards pre-set agendas, to be a "mental proletarian" in a bland suit who fits his knowledge to the advertising creeds, mission statements and the imperative to manipulate others to buy new goods and new experiences.

For Britain's forte in PR, advertising, selling "heritage", travel and tourism means that arts degrees are themselves hardly worth much in themselves any more. Our civilisation no longer values those willing to ask questions about the way we live.

This is the essence of Bullshit Britain.

J G Ballard had it right when he wrote, "Professional qualifications are worth nothing—an arts degree is like a diploma in origami." In the bland jargon of neoliberal drones, a degree is a "signal" in the labour market that a person has "transferable skills" in analysing data.

Yet without showing the correct consciousness in using higher order skills to rigid and one dimensional lower order ends ( marketing trash nobody really needs and "selling yourself" like a whore in the marketplace ) a person cannot get very far.

Degrees are merely a sop to the middle class opinion that our civilisation is based on liberal values when it is highly dubious that this is the reality or that many liberals who are not blinded by concupiscence can actually believe this without willing self delusion.

Not least when the myth of the advantages of higher education are set against a totalising consumer society where everything and everybody is dehumanised into a pure commodity and set of generic attributes.

The cult of the CV started off that, another import from the USA which reduces a person to a smooth and blandly functional mechanism where sceptical intelligence is feared, and where job applicants are required to answer doltish questions such as "If you could be a fruit what would you choose to be ?".

The "Knowledge Economy" is largely a myth. It consists of people transferring bits of information, exchanging it, and being able to manipulate money supplies, promote think tank thinking for a future of resource wars to prop up consumerism, and getting consumers to consume.

Most students lack any sense of being able to ask searching questions about their own society and the meaninglessness of their lives, as they brag about how pissed and stoned they were last night or else in fetishising the latest lame pop group to grind out banal music and paltry lyrics.

A-Levels have been relentlessly dumbed down and the public life cretinised: to exercise a free and sceptical intelligence that university education once gave is to make yourself a social pariah.

The art of conversation must too be dumbed down to the level of "exchanging" platitudes and attitudes.That is, where conversation still exists as people "connect" through Facebook and as the quality of experience of lived life dwindles and diminishes

Those sickened at British society only need to have the strength of mind to sit out the last declining years of our civilisation by trying to make sense of it, record it and analyse the reasons why.

This needs no degree but just a real degree of personal integrity to sit it out and see it for what it is. Those jumping for joy and tizzy schoolgirls can celebrate whilst they can in light of the fact that even with degrees, they face a more hostile, meaningless and difficult life ahead.

The cruelty and idiocy lies in creating false expectations and turning A Level and university placement in to such a hullaballoo, as if any of it really mattered to anyone but them and their parents obsessed with status

There was none of this fuss in the 1970s and 1980s when A Levels were still a real qualification. In 2010 the only thing that can be said is that the penalty of not having this qualification or a degree sometimes outweighs the effort of getting them.

In itself, however, the attainment of qualifications is meaningless and the need to find meaning in the meaningless accounts for the hysteria as it is intended in a society driven by hype to drown out deeper considerations of why such attainment is considered actually useful.

The more empty the achievement, the more the mind numbing upbeat boosterism, as with so many other aspects of a fake economy driven by nothing but the hallucinogenic qualities of a society dominated by credit fuelled booms and transient candy floss consumer fads.