From Düsseldorf: On hearing that a decade’s worth of university dropouts will be awarded a qualification at a Victorian university, I couldn’t help but think that an undergraduate degree is now worth little.

It’s a real shame.

I’ve prioritised my education above everything else, including my finances, my health, and my personal relationships. I’ve always said they can take away your qualifications, but not your education. Now, not only have they reduced the value of my qualifications, but I have had to help pay off other people’s HECS debts, too. But there is some hope.

I’ve always believed that to live an examined life, one ought to be constantly travelling or studying. Unless I was a raving leftie, however, I’d tell my younger self to take travel over university any day.

Labor governments are all about equality of outcomes. It stems from the Marxist maxim:

‘From each, according to his ability. To each, according to his need.’

When I taught political science, I would explain socialism by asking students if they liked group assignments. Not one of my 20,000 students over 20 years ever said they liked group assignments. When I asked why, they responded that they always ended up doing all the work, and then some bludger passed the course by doing nothing.

That’s socialism in a nutshell.

There is an element of inclusion in higher education that is very important. I’ve worked with some students with disabilities that they overcame through sheer grit and determination. They graduated, against the odds, despite some of their lecturers and even their parents telling them they couldn’t do it. But after graduation, knowing that they would never be able to hold anything other than a designated position because of their disability, the result of their education enabled many of these students to participate in meaningful and productive work and to live relatively independently.

To me, that is education.

But giving qualifications to university dropouts? That is credential inflation dressed up as compassion. It values a participation-trophy mindset over genuine achievement.

With universities willing to hand out the parchment for little more than turning up (or not turning up), then a degree itself has become all but worthless. Employers already know this, that’s why graduate recruiters now look at internships, side hustles, portfolios, and demonstrated grit. They also look at the student’s actual results. With a system that no longer believes in failure, a student with a string of bare passes probably isn’t the right one to hire. There is little value for public monies in such a system.

That’s because, regrettably, our higher education system has become one of ideological conformity and debt servitude.

If I could advise my younger self, I’d say take the money I was going to borrow from the taxpayer and buy a one-way ticket overseas instead. Live cheaply, work odd jobs, learn languages the hard way, read everything that interested me, and come home far more educated and far more interesting than any graduate who spent three years being told what to think in a compulsory diversity subject.

This is not some bohemian fantasy. Through my travels, I’ve discovered that the self-taught polymath has an impeccable German pedigree, and Düsseldorf itself provides the evidence.

Five minutes from where I’m writing is the Heinrich-Heine-Institut. Heine was a sharp, funny, even dangerous poet of the 19th Century. He found university to be snobbish and was later suspended for duelling. He was bored by the law and instead educated himself in the cafés of Paris, the libraries of Hamburg, and the harsh school of political exile. His mind stayed free precisely because no faculty ever got its bureaucratic claws into him. In fact, he coined the phrase:

‘Where books burn, so do people.’

Goebbels later tried to remove Heine’s influence from the German language altogether but found it impossible.

A friend of Heine’s, the composer Robert Schumann, also studied law before abandoning it for music. No conservatoire diploma, no graded piano exams, just obsessive, solitary practice until his right hand gave out. He reinvented himself as one of the great composers and critics of the Romantic era. Self-taught, self-directed, gloriously unbalanced.

And then there is the giant of them all, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Goethe was a reluctant law student in Leipzig and Strasbourg. He left without a degree, travelled to Italy on what was essentially a gap decade, and came back to write Faust, Wilhelm Meister, and half the canon of European literature. Goethe’s university education contributed almost nothing to the polymath who became privy counsellor, theatre director, botanist, geologist, and the closest thing Weimar ever had to a rock star. His real university was the open road and the even more open mind.

These men weren’t dropouts in the pejorative sense. They rejected a system that was already trying to standardise thought in the name of enlightened progress. They understood something we have forgotten. Real learning is self-directed, uncomfortable, and unequal.

Some people will read the German icon Thomas Mann on a train from Berlin to Dresden, marvelling at his wit and insight. Others will spend three years and $80,000 to be told that Mann justifies Germany’s out of control immigration program because his mother was Brazilian and therefore an immigrant. Such biased thoughts would occur despite having taken unconscious bias training.

Today’s Australian university sector has embraced the socialist fantasy of equality of outcomes with a zeal that belongs in the former German Democratic Republic. Pass rates must rise, failure must be abolished, feelings must be protected, and if the content has to be hollowed out to achieve this, so be it. The result is a credential that certifies nothing except endurance of the process and a desire to don a rainbow lanyard.

A year or two of hard travel, on the other hand, certifies resourcefulness, resilience, the ability to navigate foreign bureaucracies without a safe-space policy, and, most precious of all, an immunity to the petty tyrannies of groupthink.

I was 36 before I travelled overseas. It took me years to realise that if you want something bad enough, you can make it happen. I’ve since seen much of Asia, Canada, Europe, and the Middle East. Every trip brings new knowledge about politics and history, but also the best of art and architecture, food and wine, and different ways to live. I’m never the same person after travelling abroad.

To my 18-year-old self I’d say book the flight. Learn German in a bar in Bremen, read Goethe on the train to Weimar, listen to Schumann in the Dresden opera house, quote Heine drunkenly in a Düsseldorf kneipe. My younger self might return poorer in money, but infinitely richer in everything that matters.

And when university qualifications are completely reduced to mere participation awards, I will be grounded in the fact that I was educating myself the way the greatest minds of the German Romantic tradition did. Without the state’s permission and without its ideological baggage.

Dr Michael de Percy @FlaneurPolitiq is the Spectator Australia’s Canberra Press Gallery Correspondent. If you would like to support his writing, or read more of Michael, please visit his website.