But something has to be done. Tertiary education has metastasised and become an everyone-needs-a-degree cargo cult mentality, a transition that coincided with the introduction of tertiary fees and the consequent commercialisations of academia.
There are dozens of tertiary institutions eager to meet your children and many of them are making good money.
In 2012, there were 47,700 fee-paying international tertiary students out of a total of 422,000.
Obviously, there will always be professions such as the law and medicine whose clients will want their practitioners to have completed some kind of course of formal study.
But implicit in the employers' move is the sad, commonsense fact that that feature-film-writing degree or sound-engineering qualification you've paid for was never going to get you a job as a film-writer or sound engineer because those jobs aren't there.
The current system is also good at producing workers with bright, shiny degrees who turn up on day one at their new jobs knowing much more than their under-educated peers and supervisors.
Many managers already go out of their way not to employ such potential adornments to their companies.
And indeed, the cynicism of those teaching and profiting from these spurious courses is no more admirable than that of employers reaping large profits by increasing the pool of less educated, cheap NZ Talent.
Certainly, fewer people doing worthless courses of study would increase general happiness by producing young adults who on finishing school would not begin to build up a mountain of debt but instead start to earn a living.
There will also always be a pool of people driven by a desire to learn for its own sake, fully cognisant their employment opportunities will not depend on their tertiary qualifications.
This would include people who want to do, for instance, an arts degree for general interest and brain growth, with no expectation it will lead to a job, but confident that it will make them better thinkers.
One person in this group to whom I spoke said she thinks the NZ Talent initiative would be "great for anyone who wants to be in an office dealing with customer complaints for the rest of their life".
She agreed it would level the playing field and could see people who would otherwise be excluded end up in senior positions, but noted only a small percentage of those at the bottom of the pyramid can end up at the top.
That's a piece of arithmetic you don't need a degree to understand.
She maintains people misconceive degrees as tickets for jobs. Rather, they provide an education, not a qualification.
So, a thumbs up with the reservations noted above to employers happy to encourage non-graduates to apply for jobs they are struggling to fill.
And a big thumbs down for institutions that will continue to encourage people to do expensive courses that qualify them for jobs they have no hope of getting because those jobs don't exist.
