09/07/2025
Opinion: first work experience, then study!
Soon we will be left with 40 per cent higher education graduates with no work experience, whose only practical experience is having learned to reproduce unusable abstract material at a set time.
It is with a heavy heart that I keep away from WOinAction so far. Despite my sympathy for people standing up against the disastrous workload, I fail to advocate for more money for universities.
The reason is actually quite simple and identical to the reason I was involved in the occupation of the Ministry of Transport and Public Works as a Friend of Amelisweerd over 35 years ago. More asphalt leads to more mobility leads to more cars leads to more traffic jams leads to even more asphalt. That’s a wrong circle you have to break. I see a similar circle in higher education: more money for universities leads to more academic education leads to more students leads to more workload. We don’t get anywhere with that.
Leave it alone
While the solution is simple, just like in traffic. Leave the car. Only use it when you absolutely have to go somewhere so urgently that you are willing to put up with a traffic jam on a two-lane motorway. We should have thought of that years ago. The analogy for higher education is this: don’t go to college. Just go get work experience. After all, entering the job market is always difficult. That hardly has anything to do with the height of your degree. It remains difficult even if you are super highly educated. Or if you are overqualified. You’ll notice it when you apply for a job: they ask for experience. And experience is not something you gain in today’s education system. That’s one more reason to start working as soon as possible. At least then you will gain experience.
Abstract substance
Of course, breaking such a circle does not happen automatically. It will hurt. There will be a lot of resistance. We will have to go through a valley, a valley in which the labour market will not be able to cope with all those early school leavers who do not study.
But I see more benefit in that valley than in the shore that will have to turn the ship around when we will soon be left with 40 per cent higher educated people whose only practical experience is that they have learnt to reproduce unusable abstract material at a fixed time.
And in addition, I see an important benefit to healthy and challenging academic education. Indeed, people will occasionally encounter an embarrassment in their own performance in their work. They will realise that they do not understand something or cannot do something. Such a realisation might just grow into a learning question, their first own authentic learning question. Not a question that has long been waiting for them in so-called problem-driven, student-activated education, but a question that is truly their own, that they are sitting with, outside the lecture halls.
That is what academic education needs: people eager to come to study because they themselves are sitting with their own pressing learning question.
Postgraduate education
These days, we only know such students in postgraduate education, education for people who discover in their work that they actually stopped studying too early and who now learn and work simultaneously in inspiring and demanding dual pathways. For teachers, those are great students. Keep those coming! You never have too many of them. You enjoy working harder and longer for them. Because you also get so much from them, because they bring so much. Such students are sorely missed at university at the moment. Hence my plea for a compulsory mid-term decade. Going to work first. Gain experience. Discover what you don& #39;t understand. And only then enter post-initial education. In a dual track. Because you want it. Really want it. Even if you would have to drive there in a traffic jam on a two-lane road.
This article is writter by Jan Bransen; professor of philosophy of behavioural sciences, Radboud University.
