SPENDING years at university on quasi-vocational degrees is a waste of time for Gen Y workers tipped to have many separate jobs over their careers, experts have warned.

While graduates of degrees in areas like web design, public relations or management may have some advantage getting their first job, it was coming at a huge cost, Australian National University economist Richard Denniss said.



“Obviously doctors need to be trained as doctors in the same way that plumbers need to be trained to be plumbers,” Mr Denniss, who is also executive director of the Australia Institute think tank, said.



“But most people who are undertaking university study don’t get a professional licence at the end of their degree. We’re spending years training young people not to prepare them for the rest of their career but simply to help them get their first job.”



His comments come with news that growing demand for places has meant almost anyone who applies to university in some states can get in no matter what their academic record.

Mr Denniss said it was very dangerous for students to invest such a large amount of their efforts in preparing themselves simply for their first job.



“Industries and jobs are very cyclical,” he said. “So if 18-year-olds are asking the question: ‘What jobs to people want right now?’ then almost by definition they’re not asking themselves the question ‘What skills will be required in 10 years time?’



“You’ll often hear people say these days that students will have six or eight careers in their lifetime but if that’s the case why would you spend three or four years preparing for your first one?”



Mr Denniss said that while it might seem “a bit old-fashioned” the system would benefit from operating the way it used to be structured - with a generalist undergraduate education followed by specific on-the-job training.



Lisa Barry, head of human capital at global management firm Deloitte, said an “education revolution” was needed because young people were not being given enough information to train for jobs of the future.



“You can certainly take global trends and market trends and imagine the kinds of jobs that are going to be spawned from that,” she said.



“The other option is hedge your bets, do two things, do three things, and that way, the probability of one or two of those things hitting is higher than just having your career banked on the one thing.”



Graduate Careers Australia (GCA) policy advisor Bruce Guthrie said that Gen Y might have a series of related occupations but some degrees like engineering, medicine, teaching and architecture would still need to be highly vocational.



Mr Guthrie said that employers’ expectations of what a university graduate would come to them with were different to most academics’ expectations of the types of students they want to turn out.



“I think it would be a sad day if we saw universities turned into just training academies,” he said.



“Your average academic does not want to see him or herself just training people for workforce.”



GCA’s Beyond Graduation 2011 report, released last month, showed the number of 2007 graduates who said their degree was important was high in fields like health (90.8 per cent), education (93 per cent), architecture and building (87.9 per cent) and engineering (86.4 per cent).



The number of people rating their degree as important was much lower in fields such as creative arts (56.5 per cent), sciences (57 per cent), information technology (68.4 per cent) and management and commerce (73.5 per cent).



Universities Australia chief Belinda Robinson said it was the role of universities to pave the way for the broadest range of opportunities for its graduates, not to act as a substitute for employer-based training.



Ms Robinson said all graduates come out of university with the ability to think critically, research, and communicate, and those skills can be applied across multiple occupations to meet the demands of the workforce.