What is a university degree worth?

Handing over a useless paper degree condemns the rural youth for life to look for a job — however lowly or demeaning — in an urban area. With hundreds and thousands in the same predicament, all competing for the few decent jobs available, it is not suprising that the unemployables finally become drug addicts, anti-social elements and even terrorists with a massive gru-dge against society. In the rural areas the degrees mean nothing because the worth of a person is judged by the practical skills they have.

So how does Tilonia’s The Barefoot College in India tackle the massive problem of containing migration? By training the very poor rural youth in basic, practical skills of preventive health, running schools, installing hand pumps, constructing rainwater harvesting tanks, laying piped water supply schemes, installing solar systems and fabricating solar lanterns, conducting pathology tests and delivering babies.

But after the training is over, no degree, diploma or certificate is handed out. That is hardly a way of certifying competence. Why give them the first opportunity to leave the village and use it as a leverage to get any job in the city? If they have no certificate, they will not leave. In any case, their best certification and endorsement come from the services they provide to the community, certainly not from a university miles away with no feel for rural realities.

It’s the ‘barefoot’ engineers, doctors, teachers, architects, with no certificates or diplomas, who have set the example and expose the incompetence/irrelevance of the urban trained professionals in the rural areas. Semi-literate rural women have solar electrified their own villages; fed in valuable data in computers; built rainwater harvesting tanks in schools; drastically brought down the infant mortality rates; built their own houses; so why do we need these fresh, arrogant university degree holders in the rural areas at all?

They have no trust or faith in the capacity and competence of the poor to identify their problem and find a low cost solution themselves. The interference of highly-paid consultants descending on poor communities, disrupting their lives, making false promises and considering and acting as if they are indispensable to improving the quality of local lives, is the singular, most costly and criminal act of deception and deceit. They have much to answer for.

If the university degree and a course on development is so important to be an “expert”, how come their track record in innovation is so dismal; their ability to work with, and listen to. poor communities so pathetic; their communication tools so poor? They fit Einstein’s definition of insanity: “Endlessly repeating the same process hoping for a different result.”

The writer, an educationist, founded The Barefoot College in Tilonia