Everyone has a right to a university degree in America, even if it’s in Hamburger Technology.

In this sardonic line, Clive James skewers the democratization and credential-inflation of higher education in the United States. The joke hinges on treating a university degree as an entitlement (“a right”) while imagining the degree’s subject as comically narrow and vocational (“Hamburger Technology”). The implication is not simply anti-education, but a critique of how universities can be pressured—by consumer demand, status competition, or labor-market signaling—to multiply programs whose chief function is to confer credentials rather than cultivate broad intellectual formation. James’s phrasing also targets a specifically American tendency to professionalize and institutionalize almost any skill, turning everyday commerce into an academic specialty.