Attending a university graduation ceremony - a regular occurrence in my professional life over the past three years - always leaves me with mixed feelings: sometimes confusion or puzzlement, other times joy and hope.

I have been puzzled at the preponderance of academic dissertations that, though impressive and scholarly, are clearly out of sync with the developmental imperatives of this country. As a developing country I have felt our academic output must try, in some way, to address immediate challenges - everything ranging from poverty alleviation, how academia thinks we can tackle crime, teenage pregnancy, housing shortage, etc.

Universities are places of freedom, where people must push themselves to intellectual plateaux hitherto not visited. Yes, without the dreams that are central to university research and life, we would not have produced the likes of Elon Musk, Siyabulela Xuza or Chris Barnard.

But I believe we cannot afford to churn out graduates who will then become unemployed or will not have the knowledge to create businesses of their own because the university training they have has no relevance to the economic realities of the country.

Some in the academic community or in government planning have taken this to mean we need more scientists in the country. Hence the tendency to gradually transform former technikons into "universities of technology".

Yes, we do need scientists, engineers and technologists of various kinds who will join the likes of Musk, Xuza or Mark Shuttleworth in the world into the future where man can, thanks to technology, even go and live on Mars.

But, being the country that we are - neither powerful enough to be the US nor under-developed enough to be Eritrea - we have to develop basic skills that speak to our needs.

The skills of boilermakers, carpenters, bricklayers, builders. It's a sad indictment on our schooling system that we have to import skilled artisans and mechanics from countries such as Mozambique.

The phasing out of the previous vocational schools which provided the aforementioned skills in the past was a huge mistake.

Yes, I do realise that the FETs are meant to fulfil the role previously played by the vocational colleges. I sincerely believe their work needs to be given impetus.

Quite frankly, not all of us are geared towards a university education. Prevailing conditions have created an impression that if "you are serious about life" you have to go to university. This, sadly, is an expensive lie.

Which brings us back to the graduation ceremony I attended this week at Wits University. I was heartened by the number of PhDs conferred, and the topics that the candidates tackled in their theses.

A thesis by Gloria Ernest-Samuel explores what I would call a new imperialism - the SA company MultiChoice making strides into the rest of the African continent. The thesis explores the dichotomy of how, while MultiChoice's growth was a fillip to the Nigerian film industry (known as Nollywood), at the same time the company exploited or bullied up-and-coming filmmakers.

How MultiChoice behaves is a sociopolitical event that cannot be ignored.

Another thesis spoke to a growing phenomenon: bullying in rural schools. Newspapers have reported a growing number of assaults, in some cases murders, sparked off by bullying in rural schools, especially in KwaZulu-Natal. It's heartening that academia has not dismissed this as a phenomenon too marginal to be accorded scholarly scrutiny.

Though I still insist universities are not panacea for developmental challenges in the country, they are increasingly behaving in a manner that shows that they want to be relevant to the issues the average South African is grappling with.

That they are not unapproachable ivory towers answerable only to the whims of those who live in them. #UniversitiesMustNotFall