The degree that postpones the work

A graduate in Riyadh is deciding what comes next, and the most comfortable answer is more of what she is already good at.

She was excellent at exams. A well-known master's programme abroad has offered her a place. It comes with a respectable title, a predictable two years, and relief from the frightening openness of choosing her own direction.

Ask her why, and the answer is generous. She wants to build something for young women who cannot find work. She wants to help small family businesses survive. The programme, she says, is how she gets there.

It is worth asking whether the programme was designed for that at all.

Most prestigious courses are designed to feed prestigious employers. They end with a loan to repay and a set of firms ready to hire you, and the firms pay well precisely because the hours leave little room for anything else. The plan to help family businesses becomes a plan for later. Later has a way of becoming a decade.

None of this makes the degree wrong. Some people want exactly the career it leads to, and for them it is a sensible door. The point is to walk through it knowing which corridor it opens onto, not assuming it leads to the dream on the application form.

For everyone else, there is a less glamorous option. Find three family businesses this month. Sit with the owners. Fix one small thing for each of them. Nobody will give her a certificate for it, and nobody needs to.

If the change she wants is real, the cheapest way to begin is to begin. A credential can follow the work. It is rarely a substitute for it.