Twenty years ago, when walking on the street, college students were rare, and most people on the street only went to primary school or middle school. Now, when walking on the street, college students catch a lot of them, but primary school graduates or illiterates are rare. After more than 20 years of changes, academic qualifications are the fastest depreciating thing in this era.
Do you still remember Ge You's line? The most important thing in the 21st century is talent. But now people have discovered that not all people who have gone to college can be called talents. The principle that rare things are more valuable is also applicable in the field of academic qualifications. What my country is feeling now, its next-door neighbor Japan has felt before.
In the past, people believed that the higher the education, the life will change and rise. But now people have discovered that with the education, you can find a better job than others.
You can receive an invitation before you leave the school gate
In Japan, more than 40 years ago, the Japanese also experienced the phase of prosperity, the economy grew rapidly, all industries were making money, and enterprises were struggling to rob university graduates. At the time, Japanese university students were even known as "golden eggs". Every gold egg was pre-tuned by the enterprise, and university students, especially famous graduates, had not yet left the school door and could receive an invitation to enter.
According to the data, male students can receive an average of 3 copies and female students can receive an average of 2.5 copies. In famous universities like Waseda University and Tokyo University, students who come out of them don't have to worry about finding a job at all, and their salary is three times higher than the average salary of Japanese society.
Japanese automobile companies, in particular, are more willing to spend a lot of money on competing for graduates. In the 1980s, in order to attract highly educated talents, Mitsubishi Motors introduced high benefits of giving cars away after joining the job. These living cases really convince more and more Japanese people that as long as they go to college, they will be able to change their destiny.
As a result, everything went like what my country experienced later. Families in Japan also began to work hard to let their children study hard, and the whole society fell into absolute academic worship. The Japanese primary and secondary school students born in that era were equivalent to the chicken babies that later became popular in China.
According to the data, around 1985, a large number of extracurricular cram schools sprung up all over Japan. The market size of extracurricular cram schools reached an astonishing 1.2 trillion yen, and the number of private cram schools exceeded 20,000, which is said to be more than convenience stores in Japan. The worship of academic qualifications has been alienated to the temptation of academic qualifications.
Many families start to believe that having their children to college is the best investment. Some parents to supplement the cost of tuition, or even mortgage property, is to let their children to a good university. In fact, many things once they become crazy and abnormal, the result will also become abnormal.
Going to school is certainly the best investment in life, but in Japan at that time, people valued more the short-term and practical benefits brought by academic qualifications. The result of this admiration of academic qualifications is that the number of college students has risen sharply, and academic qualifications have begun to depreciate.
Even more unexpected to the Japanese is that by the 1990s, the economic bubble was broken, the economic growth slowed, and the days of enterprises were getting worse and worse. The crazy volume of academic calendar to the end, many Japanese found that even finding an ordinary job opportunity is difficult.
Too many graduates and depreciation.
In 1992, for Japanese university graduates at that time, this was an absolute turning point in life. Previously, the employment rate of college students in Japan was above 80% every year. It was from this year that it fell below 80% and continued to decline. In just a few years, it even fell below 70%. Throughout the 1990s, it was extremely difficult for Japanese college students to find jobs. Even if each graduate submitted 100 resumes, he might not be able to find a job.
China later often discussed many people in Japan everyday home in the house became waste, in fact discussed is this group of people. They were not surprised at the beginning, but only broken by the dreams of the cruel reality, in the year some college students can not find a job, in the end can only rely on zero workers to survive.
This is when people realize that academic qualifications are important, but personal abilities are really important because when people generally have academic qualifications, everyone is actually on the same starting line, and you are not much higher than others.
Simply put, in an era when the number of college students was small, people with college diplomas were a minority, and they could use the diplomas in their hands to prove their value to society and enterprises, so that they could be in a favorable position. However, with the devaluation of academic qualifications, because everyone has a graduation certificate, it is impossible for companies to directly select them. Instead, they have to find truly capable people from it. As a result, the graduation certificate has no real value.
Business days are also better, economic growth is slowing down, finding a job becomes harder, what should this group of university graduates do?
The illusion created by the expansion of graduate students
Now look back at the Japanese graduates who didn’t find a job at the time, who chose to study for graduate students, and pretended to be trying hard. The Japanese government has also met this trend, not only adopting a policy of university enrollment, but also easing the restrictions on study.
Also in 1992, all college students and graduate students in Japan expanded their enrollment. Less than three years after the implementation of this policy, the number of graduate students in Japan has increased from 60,000 to 110,000. The Japanese government euphemistically calls it academic qualifications promotion and talent reserve, but is this really the case?
After obtaining a master's degree, Japan's employment situation did not change at all, and in 1995, as many as 80.3 million university students entered the job market, the university employment rate fell further to 67.1% this year.
The postgraduate enrollment did not change the situation of employment difficulties, but instead reduced the overall quality of postgraduate students.The Japanese government originally planned to increase the size of the Masters to more than 100,000 in 10 years, and did not expect that it would exceed the original scale in less than 5 years, or even more than twice the number of people planned.
Due to blind expansion, schools that did not have postgraduate teaching qualifications have also begun to recruit students privately, and a large amount of private capital has also poured into the field of higher education. This has also led to a rapid decline in the quality of postgraduate teaching across Japan. In other words, further education has been devalued.
So, the Japanese once again discovered that the expansion of graduate students not only did not solve the problem, but exacerbated the problems and contradictions, but only created another illusion, people who can not find a job still can not find.
Eating and eating old.
Everyone is college students, and a considerable part of them are still graduate students, but they just can't find equal jobs. What should we do? The craze for civil service examinations quickly became popular in Japanese society that year. Yes, you are right. The Japanese did it very early on when my country later experienced the public examination craze.
Data shows that in 1991, the number of Japanese civil servants applying for the exam was only over 70,000. In just four years, the number of applicants soared to 124,000. After all, the scale of civil servants is limited and cannot accommodate so many college graduates and graduate students. Therefore, most of the remaining people can only go home and work on the premise of not finding a job.
From the late 1990s to the beginning of this century, a large number of NEET people suddenly appeared in Japanese society. In just a few years, the number of young people lying at home doing nothing has soared from 80,000 to more than 400,000.
A 38-year-old Neet has been lying at home for 15 years, and a 47-year-old abandoned house has also been at home for 17 years, living entirely on his mother's pension. The Japanese later defined this group as the lost generation, but the real problems should not be borne by them all.
What is the essence of academic depreciation?
People will definitely have such doubts. With so many walks of life in society, can it really not support the employed population? In fact, it is not that it cannot bear the burden, but that after the expansion of university enrollment, people's concepts of employment and job search have been greatly changed.
Imagine why a family would work so hard to provide for their children to go to college? Isn't it just that we hope that our children can find better jobs in the future, and then drive the entire family to achieve a class leap? This is equivalent to investing. People must think about making money, not keeping the principal or losing money.
So, after graduation, every college student wants to find a decent job, high income, and space for growth in the future. But the problem is that such jobs in society are always a few, even in the era of rapid economic development, can not digest the huge university graduates.
As a result, the group of students who graduated from the university, many of whom can only become marginalized people. The Japanese talent who experienced all this gradually understood that the hard-working education, the hard-working desire to get a higher return, especially through academic qualifications to get a higher return, is simply an obsessive delusion.
There is also a view that as long as the social economy keeps growing, it will certainly be able to digest so many graduates. Theoretically, this is true, but the reality is that no country's economy can maintain rapid growth forever. Therefore, people should have a clear understanding of going to college and employment, that is, learning can enable people to master knowledge and skills, but it does not necessarily enable people to complete class leaps, at any time.
Only with this relatively rational concept will there be no gap in people's mentality. Especially when the employment situation is not very good, if the original concept remains unchanged, the gap will be even greater. Japan has proved this with personal experience in the past.
conclusion
Another essential reason is that the definition of success in society is too single. The success people pursue is nothing more than a good job, a good income, a happy life and a leap in class. The only criterion for measuring success is wealth, and once you fall into the trap of academic worship, you will mistakenly believe that you can succeed if you go to college.
But this is not the case in the real social operation. Therefore, once academic qualifications are worshipped too much, there is a high probability that academic qualifications will depreciate. In a word, you can't look at going to college with your ordinary attitude, and you can't look at success with your ordinary attitude. Going to college is regarded as an investment in wealth, and it is also the only investment, so once it fails, the sense of loss will naturally be great.
References:
"Japan's academic qualifications are devalued for 30 years, doctors are unemployed, university students can't eat old" Chinese business May 28, 2025