When I was deciding where and what to study for my degree I remember the glossy university brochures promising me places where I could purse my dreams. But four years on, as I am about to graduate, it seems the university is singing a different tune.

As I registered for convocation online, I was confronted with questions about my employment status: how fast I got a job, who employed me, what were my current wages…

The skeptic in me thinks that the answers I give will be used in a few weeks in a glowing press release to showcase how “employable” the university’s graduates are.

There really isn’t anything wrong in churning out people for the workforce but shouldn’t we also question whether employment is the only logical ending to the pursuit of a degree?

A very small step would be to ask if university education has helped the student achieve his or her dreams. It is intangible questions like this that I hope we all give more thought to. The answer is probably not a statistic that can be broken down and packaged into a neat bar graph to make the school look good, but at least it doesn’t reduce the students to digits and it makes us reflect on why we pursued the degree in the first place.