by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

The three-quarters of Montrealers without university degrees can be excused for feeling like deadbeats. Take a peek at Help Wanted ads. You can't even dream about a Junior Paper Clip Manager post without certification from a university.

With more degrees being printed, degree inflation is in full swing and employers consider themselves entitled to make exaggerated qualification demands.

Sadly, your pretty multi-font perfectly centred CV is heading into their recycling bin if you haven't dutifully sat in front of professors and depressed-looking teacher's assistants in survey classes of 200 students for three or four years and subsequently regurgitated that information.

If you've fought in a war, lived in a Buddhist monastery and read 5,000 books, it means doodley-squat without that degree.

Meanwhile, grads end up tens of thousands of dollars in hock for fees and supplies (including snorkels and waterproof basketweaving wicker), while governments find that no matter how much they're subsidized, students want more.

The solution is for government to require employers to justify why they demand applicants have a university degree for specific jobs.

As is, we're creating a social gulf between those who endure this lengthy and costly rite of academic passage and those destined to fetch their espresso.

Some census data regarding working-age adults: Montreal has 195,000 high school dropouts, 222,000 high school-only grads, 117,000 trade certificate grads, 141,000 CEGEP grads and 255,000 university grads. In the '90s the high school dropouts decreased by a quarter and our university grad total grew by half.

Montreal has the highest proportion of students of any city in the Can-Am - roughly tied with Boston. But ours are largely book tourists. They graduate and split, leaving us with among the lowest rates of university grads aged 25 to 34.

The cult of higher education and deferred adulthood was concocted around 1970 by demographers wary that young boomers would overrun the job market. The trend continues unabated.

I was lured by the important aura of schooling. University students had sideburns and looked so intense walking swiftly into ivy-covered buildings carrying cardboard coffee cups.

My arts degree days were essentially high school with more complicated essay questions, featuring the usual parade of show-offs and kiss-asses, vain and lazy professors, and some good people too.

But I know such trivia as the difference between Thomas Hardy and Thomas Mann, although it's stuff you could Google in 30 seconds. Now that I mention him, Thomas Mann is relevant. Death in Venice stars an overeducated pedophile who rationalizes his inappropriate arousal by imagining he's interested in pretty boys because they resemble classical art.

Anyway, I studied history. There are more historians than there is history.

The McGill library has a wall of books about the Dreyfus Affair that could crush you like a bug, all discussing a guy who took a rap for a minor military scandal.

Sign up for Latin American history and African history and profs will, eventually, sheepishly confess that nobody knows much about it. Nobody wrote anything down in either continent until a couple of hundred years ago. And I wish in retrospect that they'd somehow worked some useful plumbing or spot-welding tips into that year-long History of Japan course I took.

Like many disciplines, history stays alive through novelty spins, Romantic History, psychohistory, the school of the annales and oral history (no, not the type that comes in handy to repair a bad mark on your final essay). It all keeps Academia Inc. rolling.

Now I keep my education discreet for fear a belligerent drunk will taunt me as the academic big-guy-you-could-take. "You don't know who signed the emancipation proclamation and you call yourself a historian?!"

My education is irreversible. I don't know if it was worth it. I can't fix a drain or a wire but I'm clever enough to find a high school dropout that can. And when I get a tradesman on the phone, I shelve the Jeremy Irons-style articulation that served me so well at McGill in favour of that street accent you hear on the 80 bus. I can't afford to overpay.

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