Rosemary McLeod: value of degree

Like thousands of people, I never finished a degree: too young, and too goofy.
I couldn't call my academic efforts at the time serious study. My life was dominated by fumbling attempts at learning about relationships, which is about what you'd expect of a 17-year-old. There didn't seem to be much time left over for attending lectures, reading texts and writing essays after my exhausting adventures, and to this day I have a clearer memory of what the most glamorous girls in my year wore than of Spenser's The Faerie Queene, or the Merovingian kings.
I got the English major, but not the rest. At the end of my first year, when I should have been swotting for exams, I scampered off with a boy who had Hieronymus Bosch prints on his bedroom wall. Unimpressed, my father stopped paying my rent. I'd have to work my own way through any further study I might vaguely have in mind.
In various flats during those years, and amid ongoing boyfriend dramas, there were calamities. There was the gate-crashed party, when people stole my possessions as I stood by helplessly. That ended with a young art student being bottled in the face. Another flatmate died in a tragic accident that was first thought to be a homicide.
People I knew tried every drug going, all of which looked too scary to me. We did the cliché things - walked through the Botanical Gardens in 3-D glasses, listened to Janis Joplin, enthused about Picasso's Blue Period, and thought Leonard Cohen was a poet - and imagined we were intellectuals. Somehow I emerged with a fondness for Restoration tragedies, and finally shot of the boyfriend who'd starred in my most operatic moments. A while later I got my first job on a newspaper. They still hired on talent and hunches then. I was lucky.
Two academic stars of my time went to jail for drug dealing. One kept his stash behind books in the library that nobody ever looked at. Another - whose essay on Hamlet was the benchmark of excellence, we were told - is, I gather, still at it. A supermarket full of drugs passed through my contemporaries, too many of whom are dead. Most came from families that supported them financially and from homes where at least one parent had a degree. I didn't.
The difference is more telling than we like to believe.
I look back on those years of blundering and reproach myself for the wasted opportunities, but I was just a kid, like so many who now have to take out student loans for courses they'll be just as vague and goofy about as I was. The difference is that they could wind up in debt for life, working as over-educated waiters and baristas, with no hope of ever owning their own homes.
With the cost of a university education rising everywhere - in America student debt now exceeds credit card debt - it's no wonder some people are daring to question its usefulness. Billionaire Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, and one of Facebook's early backers, is among those who argue that degrees are dangerously over-valued. He has just given 20 teenagers $100,000 to skip university and found a business instead.
Thiel has a point: some of the richest and most successful people in the world are high school drop-outs, but it so happens that he isn't one of them: he has degrees from prestigious Stanford University, where basic undergraduate fees are US$38,700 a year.
The obvious question Thiel raises is whether less goal-directed degrees help people to get good jobs.
The implied question is whether arts degrees, with their abstract thinking, have any value. The message is that money is the ultimate, true measure of success.
There are a lot of people who think like him. Hopefully we're not narrow-minded enough to believe them.