As someone whose family is more steeped in higher education than most people, I have come to believe that the biggest problem with higher education is the degre

As someone whose family is more steeped in higher education than most people, I have come to believe that the biggest problem with higher education is the degree with which we have allowed it to become the universal gatekeeper of professional careers. I think college is a great experience, and I do hope for a day where everyone can experience higher education in their life, but the basic mechanisms of college are NOT necessary to work in a professional field. It is only our culture that prevents it from happening. The nucleus of this problem is our obsession with pedigree. We want everything to be awesome and perfect and follow a neat little narrative where we all end up rich and famous and successful because we attended the right schools and worked with other people who attended the right schools. But life is never that clear cut, and this narrative ignores the reality that most of your ability to do a job is learned on that job. I didn't know a lick of ColdFusion or even more than a few lines of JavaScript when I graduated college, and within just a few months I could handle anything my employer threw at me. A good amount of that success was because of my education, but most of it was because they were willing to take on the risk of someone that had to learn and grow, instead of insisting on a ColdFusion expert that could have done everything from day one. College is great, but it's not for everyone. My GI Bill-aided grandfather didn't need the college he dropped out of to teach him how to run a successful restaurant and support a family. And most of us understand that a lot of what we get tested on from the age of 5 is bullshit. The way forward is not fixing education, it's fixing employment. We need employers willing to take risks with people who aren't perfect by default. To do this we need to encourage and maybe even subsidize paid apprenticeships. Real, paid work experience is better than any welfare or job retraining or $80k degree. It shows what you are worth and what you are capable of doing. As Ronald Reagan said, on one of the few occasions that he actually managed to make a damn good point: "The best social program is a job."