When I was a schoolboy, our teachers routinely warned us that the era of lifetime employment was drawing to a close. In truth, that security had already begun to unravel. Yet in those years, holding the Matura still represented a tangible threshold. It commanded genuine respect. Candidates featured it prominently on their curricula vitae, and the statistical divide in life prospects between those who possessed the credential and those who did not was stark and real. It functioned as an authentic signal of intellectual discipline and civic capability.
Today, that distinction has been thoroughly hollowed out.
The social and professional weight once carried by secondary diplomas has been forcibly migrated upward to the master’s degree. Yet even that mantle is visibly fraying. Advanced degrees have proliferated across every imaginable discipline, multiplying like mass-market fast food: ubiquitous, uniform, and fundamentally commodified. When an asset becomes ubiquitous, its signaling value drops to zero.
The architects of public policy would have us believe that algorithmic execution and artificial intelligence engineered this displacement. They did not. The decay is organic, bred inside the structural dysfunction of the state educational apparatus itself.
The turning point was political, not technological. In the 1980s, François Mitterrand’s administration codified the target of driving eighty percent of an entire age cohort through the French baccalauréat. What was celebrated as the democratic broadening of opportunity was, in operational reality, an act of catastrophic institutional dilution. The state flooded the labor market with credentialed paper while steadily draining the curriculum of its rigors.
Over the intervening decades, that egalitarian dogma mutated and compounded across the continent. By systematically replacing rigorous vocational apprenticeships and selective academic standards with mass credential factories, we produced a profound structural distortion: entire generations credentialed to the hilt, yet utterly devoid of functional competence.
Here lies the root of the contemporary labor crisis. It is not that machine intelligence is suddenly rendering human intellect obsolete. It is that our institutions spent forty years producing cohorts that were never taught a practical, defensible skill in the first place.
Labor markets have always been ruthless testing grounds defined by cyclical disruption and technological realignment. AI is merely the latest catalyst to expose the underlying reality. The true vulnerability is not that the machine has arrived; it is that the human standing before it was never trained to build, execute, or endure.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/10/24/what-is-the-point-of-studying-if-ai-will-take-all-the-jobs/