universities

Most of my parents' friends and most of my parents' friends' children also have degrees.  This doesn't mean that they've managed to find the kind of work they wanted.  Not at all; they went to university because someone, at a time when universities seemed important, said that in order to rise in the world, you had to have a degree.  And thus the world was deprived of some excellent gardeners, bakers, antique dealers, sculptors, and writers.