This irritates my non-degreed friend, and it raises in my mind the matter of so-called higher education and the questions of whether a university degree and only a university degree confers higher education.

The questions arise because my non-degreed friend is highly educated. He has two trades, quite a number of TAFE qualifications gained in the course of those apprenticeships and later, the experience of a number of occupations, and any number of skills and knowledge sets developed in what is sometimes described as self education. Time and again I have marvelled at his capacity to work mentally through practical and abstract problems. He is an exceptionally clever man.

But, some will say, cleverness is not education. But, I say, cleverness is the capacity to reason, to think, and isn’t the capacity to think, to reason, the thrust of what universities claim to impart?

Universities have been on a mission for at least a decade to take from TAFE and other organisations the qualifying role for a great many occupations, and the occupations themselves have been delighted by this because their practitioners believe the degree will lift the occupation’s status.

The result is that a rapidly increasing proportion of people in many occupations are now highly educated, and by that I mean they have the benefit of what is seen as the higher education offered by university, and a dwindling proportion of people, the incumbents, have just the tertiary education provided by TAFE. Some, like me, have merely further education, the on-the-job training of a cadetship.

In some occupations this is creating conflict between the degreed and the experienced, between theory and practice, and nursing is one such occupation. Journalism is free of the conflict, possibly because a journalist's worth is so starkly evident.

There has always been a division between those with a degree and without a degree in the community, and until a decade or so ago those with a degree were the superior minority. It seems that those of us without a degree are becoming the minority, the inferior minority.

The monopoly of the degreed on the capacity to think didn’t matter when most of us didn’t have a degree, but it’s time the few of us left challenged both that monopoly and the higher in higher education.

Do you believe experience is being discounted in the rush for degrees? Should we challenge the attitude that universities have a monopoly on higher education and the capacity to think?