"This is the time of year when newspapers print increasing numbers of smiling photographs of young men and women receiving diplomas from institutions of learning abroad. Many of them are receiving B.A. Degrees and higher degrees from colleges and universities in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada.

This leads us to ask, what they are receiving? A diploma is only a piece of paper. Education being what it is today, it is not even a guarantee that the recipient has been educated to an employable standard.

At best a diploma is an invitation to go on learning somewhere else, usually as a member of the work force rather than in the rarefied atmosphere provided by schools.

At worst a diploma is a statement that the recipient, the parents, the Government or some other benefactor have wasted their money.

A diploma is not a magic wand. It may of itself open some doors but it will not keep them open unless the recipient is prepared -- prepared by the institution which granted the degree, and prepared as a person, to prove that the degree was justified.

Too often young people are unprepared to admit that they may have squandered their time and their money on `higher learning'.

If you buy a box of Cracker Jacks only to get the prize at the bottom of the box, then you have wasted your money because you do not like Cracker Jacks.

Too often governments and the public are keen to force young people to seek degrees they may not need, may not be able to fulfil and may not have really wanted.

This is not to say that it is wrong to seek to educate the young but it is to say that not everyone is college material and that to force on them degrees which they might consider as magic wands is only to lead them to a life filled with frustration and dissatisfaction.

It is also to point out that today one has to seriously consider the quality of education provided by the institutions which grant the degrees. The standards vary so widely that it is possible for a student to come out of some colleges with less basic knowledge than would have been available at a good secondary school. But the opposite is also true. It is possible for a student who understands how to use what a school provides, to come out of a minor institution with a better education than could have been achieved by that person at Oxford, Harvard or McGill.

What is important is that we do not mislead the young into thinking that degrees are all important. They are not. What is important is a constructive attitude to continued learning, with or without a degree. If we do not understand that, then we run the risk of producing a generation qualified on paper only but taught to feel that the paper itself should allow them a quality of, and place in, life for which they are not fitted.

It is sad but true that Bermuda seems at the moment to be striving for the latter. We seem intent on degrees at any cost.

The result may be a large number of young people who find that their `pieces of paper' do not provide them with the life they have been led to expect. The result for Bermuda will be unhappy citizens who are frustrated and disillusioned because their magic wand was only a bit of powerless parchment.''