Debatable is a column written by the Otago University Debating Society. The Debating Society welcomes new members and meets at the Business School every Tuesday at 6pm.
For:
There are endless reasons why you should drop out, marry rich, and start a failing pottery business. First and foremost, we live in a material world, and we are all material people. We like material things. Marrying rich gives you this materiality. This is not something that you get from a degree. From a degree you literally only get a piece of paper (and in some cases PTSD).
If you marry rich, you get cold, hard cash. Why is this good? Well firstly, you don’t have to worry about your university assignments. This means avoiding learning about all those horrible things, like regression, or the rule against perpetuities. Secondly, as they say, ignorance is bliss. You literally don’t have to worry about anything, because you don’t learn about the problems which face the world. This is probably quite comforting, as the world is quite a horrible place (but not for rich people).
If the apocalypse happens, you get a nice plush bunker in Queenstown. If the apocalypse doesn’t happen, and you get bored with your pottery, you can get a nepo job at an evil multinational food and drink processing conglomerate corporation and you can be as mean as you like to the secretary, despite them working there for 20 years compared to your one. It would be impossible to get fired. There is also probably scope to get away with a variety of crimes, which means that you can feel powerful and superior compared to your degree-doing law-abiding loser friends. And you can afford various posh drugs.
Lastly, you can probably use your spouse's Koru Lounge subscription when you fly to your various holiday homes. This means an unlimited free flow of Panhead APA and this will make you happier than if you were doing university work.
Against:
What’s the only thing separating us from law and med students? Morals. And we should care about them because in a world as arbitrary as ours, morals give us at least a shred of hope and comfort. Wealth, on the other hand, doesn’t care about right or wrong and is often created at the expense of other people's suffering. Deliberately marrying into it is just another layer of hypocrisy.
With the current recession and the nature of the globalised economy, trying to marry into wealth has never been harder with the number of bachelors and bachelorettes competing for limited spaces. This means that your chances of getting a sugar daddy are low. Plus, let's face it, after a few years of flatting in Dunedin the lack of sunlight and poor diet are going to make it hard to compete in this market. The best you can probably hope for is, like, upper middle class – devoid of agency and reliant on the housing investments of your spouse to continue to grow in wealth.
Finally, there’s the classical argument for the benefits of a university education and the ability to chart your own course. There will never be another time in your life where you'll be able to study a subject that you are genuinely interested in, live in abject squalor, and drink like a fish. Everyone's uni experience is different but it's almost certain to end with you having the ability to enter a profession that you're at least vaguely happy with. This means that you can fulfil whatever dreams you have without the risk of your partner preventing you from doing so. Even if you aren't fully convinced, there's always the opportunity of graduating first and then marrying into wealth.