Dragon Degrees: When Academia Chases Fantasies

How the pursuit of the nonexistent is leaving graduates stranded and society shortchanged

Yo, listen up! Are you a dragonology student, a proud graduate, or maybe even one of those high-flying professors? You might be thinking I’m cracking a joke, trying to be all funny and stuff. But I’m dead serious. A lot of those fancy degrees we’re handing out? They’re straight-up dragonology, and with the AI hype train rolling, it’s only getting wilder. Though, let’s be real, this dragon-biz was booming way before AI showed up.

Back in the day, when I was freezing my butt off as an undergrad (yeah, I’m being dramatic, but you get the picture), I had this buddy. His go-to line, every single time he saw you, was, “What’s the last book you read? Spill the beans.” To survive a run-in with him on campus, you had to be prepped. It was kinda cool, though, made you actually read. He’d do the same, drop a book title and go off on it. Plus, he was always scribbling something.

One day, he drops this bomb: he’s writing about “dragonology.” I’m like, “Dragon-what?” Thought he was pulling my leg, just like you probably did when I first said it. But he was serious, man. He lays it out like this:

“Dragonology is when you get a degree – especially a fancy grad degree, like a Master’s or PhD – in something that doesn’t do squat for society. Not now, not ever, and especially when some random thing makes it even less relevant.”

I was hooked. Had to know more. Was I drowning in dragon-crap or what? How do you spot this dragon-nonsense? Maybe I could save some poor souls, like my buddy was trying to do.

Here’s the lowdown:

Shocking, right? Dragonology is like, super popular in rich countries. They got the cash, the crazy ideas, and all the time in the world. So they start chasing after problems that don’t exist, or might never exist, or they see stuff in the universe that nobody else does. Like, they’re obsessed with figuring out how some planet a billion light-years away works. Or they decide cow meat is lame and start growing lab-meat. Or they’re not happy with natural viruses being wimpy, so they cook up some killer ones in a lab. Or they wanna build a dragon flower farm in the desert.

Next thing you know, every college is pumping out dragonology degrees, all the way to PhD. Money’s flowing in, research projects are popping up, and everyone’s hunting for more dragons on even more distant planets.

Fast forward five to ten years, and boom! We got a flood of dragonology grads with zero clue what to do with their lives. Turns out, those dragons? Total fake-out. So, what now? Trash the whole dragon-thing?

Nah! They crank out graduate programs everywhere, so those bachelor grads can keep busy “solving” more non-problems. This way, the schools keep the cash rolling in, the president gets paid like a rockstar, the profs get their slice, and they build a new center to see how AI can predict dragon egg-stealing behavior. Makes sense, right?

Then come the Masters grads. But don’t worry, they got a plan. They flood the market with PhD programs. Even my tiny town of 2,000 people has a dragon-nail PhD program with a lab full of folks making never-die batteries. International geniuses and all!

What about the PhDs? Easy! They become profs, right? Wrong! They become profs because the system is designed to absorb them, to keep the dragon-chasing machine running. It's not about genuine academic pursuit anymore; it's about perpetuating the cycle.

This is where it gets spicy. You got more PhDs than jobs. Universities invent new dragon species, the government throws more cash at them, and everyone’s busy and happy.

But here’s the kicker: it’s a Ponzi scheme. It’s all about bringing in new students and cash to keep the old grads happy, making it look like dragonology is the future. But eventually, it crashes. No more students, no more jobs, no more fake promises.

And now? We’re knee-deep in dragon-crap. We got grads with useless degrees, and a public that’s pissed about all the hype and the real problems that never got fixed. The AI hype is just the latest dragon, and if we do not learn from this, we are doomed to repeat it.