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How many jobs really require college?
- Apreche 9y agoIf your job doesn't require college, then pretty soon it won't require a human either. The more brain required the longer you have until a robot or computer can do it better.
- nugget 9y agoLots of automation-resistant jobs require "cleverness" which is different than intelligence, and isn't much taught in school anyway.
- jakubp 9y agoCan you give a few examples of such jobs, and what consitutes "cleverness" in them? Really curious.
- ThomPete 9y agoCleaning lady, construction worker, janitor, plumber, electrician, building inspector I could go on.
- analog31 9y agoAh, but those jobs are being eaten away by automation, even if it's happening slowly. Cleaning ladies are being displaced by disposable products that don't need to be cleaned. Plumbers and electricians are being displaced by labor saving technologies. A new house contains no copper tubing or sweat fittings -- they use flexible hose and swaged connections. Wiring is no longer done with hard conduit. Framing is done with machine made components such as roof trusses. Inspection is done by bribery. ;-)
- ThomPete 9y agoSure but before that ex. radiologist will have been replaced.
- analog31 9y agoAh, yes, but the person who owns the AI radiology business, and the equipment, will happen to be a radiologist.
- ThomPete 9y agoNo they wont. In fact they aren't today so why should they be in the future. And furthermore you need only very few people running a whole radiology business for billions of people.
- analog31 9y agoMaybe radiology is an exception (or my understanding is outdated), but from what I've read, a large portion of the medical industry is doctor-owned. For instance I've read that doctors provide a large portion of the investment pool for big ticket diagnostic equipment, and for businesses such as clinics, provider systems, and malpractice insurance companies. "The workers own the means of production." ;-)
- ThomPete 9y agoDoctor owned not doctors owned. The point is that you don't need the amount of radiologist you are currently education if pattern recognition gets done by machines.
- nugget 9y agoFull stack web development, growth hacking, lead generation/user acquisition, on- and offline marketing and entrepreneurship in general. I have half a dozen close friends who dropped out of high school and/or college and used their raw "ingenuity or shrewdness" rather than any learned skills in order to achieve enormous success (tens of millions of dollars). Some of them in Silicon Valley, but others in boring places and boring fields. In the past there were significant barriers to entry in many fields that required expensive, time consuming, often discriminatory pedigree to pass. These barriers have largely been destroyed over the last decade. The walls have been torn down and the ladders burned (much to the discomfort of those mid-climb), and they aren't coming back. Persistence and cleverness are the deadliest combination these days.
- paulcole 9y agoPlenty of jobs that require a brain don't require college-- creative work, trades that can be learned through apprenticeship...
- pcurve 9y agoWhether a job requires college degree or not is a pretty lousy predictor of whether it can be replaced a robot or computer.
- randomdata 9y agoDesigning robots doesn't require college. Once the robots are left to do that autonomously, what jobs are left?
- iamacynic 9y agothis is a bimodal distribution. my plumber/electrician/mechanic and my investment banker/lawyer aren't going to be replaced by robots any time soon.
- eru 9y agoYour investment banker might be replaced sooner than your plumber.
- komali2 9y agoWhy wouldn't your investment banker be replaced? Most trades are by bots anyway.
- Const-me 9y agoI once worked for a company that aimed to replace investment bankers with their robots. Basically an AI that reads news and other data sources, and gives stock trading advices.
- malthaus 9y agoinvestment banker != trader or investment manager an investment banker typically advises on M&A transactions which is a very human business where your career path is strongly correlated with your social skills and status rather than technical knowledge.
- joefourier 9y agoThat is one of the point the article argues against: thinking a college education is required to be highly skilled is confusing cause and effect. Especially for programming, the most important skills are acquired either through self-study or on-the-job training, making a formal 4 year program a waste of money, time and productivity.
- ThomPete 9y agoYou ironically couldn't be more wrong and you are looking at this the wrong way. A cleaning lady is going to be able to keep her job longer than a radiologist as the radiologist requires mostly the ability to understand visual patterns where as a cleaning lady requires general purpose AI. It's way harder to lift the rug, get in between the books etc. Furthermore you get it wrong. Specialization requires knowledge yes but mostly requires less of the brain. A cleaning lady have to use all sorts of different parts to do their jobs. So your rule is right in some way but you apply the wrong people to it. It's the cleaning lady who uses most of her brain not the specialist.
- wsxcde 9y agoYou're being biased by presentism. In an age where robots are cheap and ubiquitous, we won't still hire cleaning ladies (interesting assumption they're still ladies) just because they'll be able to clean under the rug. Instead, home furniture will change so that it becomes easier to clean for robots.
- zigzigzag 9y agoThat hasn't happened yet though. Stock brokers, on the other hand, once the quintessential white collar job, have been completely replaced by automated trading algorithms.
- wsxcde 9y agoBecause robots aren't cheap, at least for now. We're still at a stage where compute is cheap but interacting with real world using interfaces that go beyond screens and keyboards is still cumbersome and expensive. But coming back to stock brokers, is there an epidemic of college educated stock brokers ending up unemployed due to automation? I don't think so and that's because they have other skills they gained from their education. Automated trading algorithms don't make stock brokers useless in the same what that automated garbage collection doesn't make programmers useless.
- 9y ago
- esja 9y agoIn many cases the reverse is true: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
- Grustaf 9y agoMore likely it's the other way around. Most jobs requiring college education are actually pretty simple, and I think the next wave of AI powered automation will replace many of them. Meanwhile, it will take longer for people to build robots for each particular manual job. Not to mention the service industry where a lot of people prefer to deal with other humans, even when it wouldn't be necessary.
- snuxoll 9y agoArguably many jobs that require a degree are still nothing more than desk work that can be automated with relative ease.
- coldtea 9y agoYou'd be surprised. Some of the last jobs to go will be ones that require human judgement and motor skills but not much in the way of education.
- gremlinsinc 9y agoI'm a web developer, self-taught, some college, but no degree. Teaching myself ML now, so someday I can code AI -- pretty sure I'll keep teaching myself into a career without college, until all jobs are obsolete and we live in a post-scarcity society.
- pkaye 9y agoJust curious so you are learning the statistics and linear algebra background yourself so you can learn ML?
- IAmGraydon 9y agoNot quite. Some medical jobs could be among the first to be in jeopardy, for example. I believe those will be replaced before some very simple, low wage jobs like tech support in a call center. Why is this? Because many medical jobs consist of looking at information, making a diagnosis, and suggesting the course of action most likely to work. This is something that machines excel at. Many medical professionals never even communicate directly with the patient, leaving that to the doctor, while they assist the doctor with diagnosis behind the scenes. Take a radiologist, for example. On the other hand, a call center employee must be able to communicate in real time with a human at conversation level. That is doable by AI, but is much more difficult, and requires something closer to AGI. So the jobs that will be replaced first have nothing to do with education. They have to do with jobs which are reliant upon pattern recognition and information analysis. Those will go first, and some of them are very high paying and require quite a lot of education.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- alacombe 9y agoAll the plumbers, electricians, welders, drivers & construction & assembly folks who build the infrastructure you rely on will appreciate.
- dsfyu404ed 9y agoIt's gonna be a long time before we can automate the trades. Pretty much everything they do is non-repetitive except at the lowest level.
- maxerickson 9y agoComplete automation sure. Tools and techniques that remove a lot of direct labor? Those have already had a big impact on trades.
- jostmey 9y agoHow many jobs will be really required?
- pen2l 9y agoI think the author of this post is making the same mistake that a lot of other people (particularly smart folks) make whenever they are thinking about the ills of modern education system and what can be done to improve it. Like Peter Thiel and others, I don't think they understand how and why students are failing in classrooms today. Take for example the author's suggestions on how school systems can be improved: Create a set of free, online high school and college degree programs that any American could enroll in, and pursue at their own pace. Can you really expect high school students to perform well in online classes? The most elite companies in the valley have correctly found out that remote doesn't work (in most cases)... and yet we're going to do remote with our students? I took online classes when I went back to complete college at an older age... it was the worst mistake of my life. As a human, I needed the social imposition of a disappointed teacher telling me that I performed poorly on my test, I needed the camaraderie of students with whom I could study somewhere. Online classes, especially at high school stage are very bad (perhaps with the exception of "gifted" students who probably would benefit from being in a fast-tracked line). At age 13, give everyone a $100k education voucher. You're giving too much credit to students, they don't know what is best for them. This $100k will be exploited in some way by profit-seeking companies before you have a second to glance back at the money. Legalize and normalize apprenticeship contracts. I agree with this.
- kazagistar 9y agoAren't apprenticeship contracts functionally slavery? You think free money will be abused, but this won't be?
- Grustaf 9y agoSlavery? More like paid education. The best possible education in many cases.
- ryanmarsh 9y agoGraft is a constant in human endeavors. It's like a scaling problem, you deal with it as it presents itself.
- brianwawok 9y ago
- Grustaf 9y agoVery few. I think it's much more a matter of job culture and a bit of red queen (useless arms race) competition that has brought on this situation. Probably with a sprinkling of politicians wanting to be able to say that "in my country 50% of high school students go on to university" when they hob nob at international conferences. In almost all white collar jobs the apprenticeship model would work just fine, but that doesn't work well when people want to change jobs every few years. It's not that most desk jobs are actually harder to learn that most skilled manual labor jobs.
- randomdata 9y agoThe litmus test is pretty straightforward: Will the law come down on you if you do the job without a degree? If yes, the job requires it. Otherwise, it does not.
- komali2 9y ago>the most elite companies in the valley have discovered correctly that remote work doesn't work That's extraordinarily presumptive. Is IBM and a handful of others gods of all things HR? Why? There's conflicting data on both sides of the table, IBM just went with one choice over another. Recently, by the way, so we don't even know it's going to work. Furthermore, there's a strong argument that the move was an easy way to achieve layoffs, which kind of nullifies the "IBM is big and smart and so they switched because remote work doesn't work" argument. Finally, I'm not even sure some of these companies you're describing as elite (I'm assuming you mean "companies in the bay area we've all heard of that don't do remote work") are universally regarded as elite. And how do you account for the actual bay area giants that do allow for it, such as Google?
- dhimes 9y agoGood point. Didn't Yahoo abandon remote work as soon as Mayer took over?
- matwood 9y agoDepending on who you talk to, this was either a ploy to do a non-layoff layoff, or since all the good people had already left the people still at Yahoo were just cashing paychecks. It didn't matter if they were in the office or not. Pointing to the burning, foreclosed house is not a very accurate way to draw conclusions about the whole neighborhood.
- besogno 9y agoThe solution is to be long in anti-fragile assets such as bitcoins and gold. If approximately everybody else is getting it wrong about degrees, the economy and the value of its fragile assets, especially paper money, will shrink systematically, while my assets will keep gaining value. In that sense, it is better to encourage most other people to get it wrong. Hence, they should get MORE useless degrees and saddle themselves with MORE stupid and MORE enormous student loans. That is what will eventually sink the boat completely and make me more money.
- NotSammyHagar 9y agoCome on, bitcoin and gold are very fragile. Look at their huge variation in value over short time frames. A new crypocurrency could arrive to take bitcoins place, also, or govt regulation could make it hard to use in the us or china. There might be an argument for diversifying your investments in these things, but these aren't the certain safe places to put your money for long term.
- nebabyte 9y agoYup, and inb4 "it's anon so impossible to regulate". You're not fighting someone trying to stop you from purchasing it, you're fighting an apathetic system that will go with "whatever works" and isn't a pain in the ass to use. All it takes is for some litigators to decide that operating businesses anonymously is illegal, and now those "anonymous customers" could be police stings making your "system" more trouble than it's worth to use anonymously. Truly-anonymous currency is either a fantasy or will only exist in niche markets. In reality all they really have to do is scare people at the point of sale, and the point of sale is by the nature of markets not hard-to-find or 'hear about on the street' (because it has to attain customers).
- alexmingoia 9y agoHow do you think student loans will "sink the boat completely"? They aren't traded, the money is mainly owed to public institions and banks, and it isn't the biggest piece of the debt pie. I'm even more confused how you think gold and bitcoin are hedges against a crash in the dollar. Historically, real gold returns have been worse during higher inflation. And during previous currency devaluations, holding commodities only worked out if you held the right ones. Oil has done far better than gold depending on which time period. Foreign currency can do just as well and is easier to trade than gold. To properly hedge the dollar you need to hold more then just bitcoin and gold, you would need silver, oil, and a basket of currencies as well.
- Gormisdomai 9y agoOne of the best things you can support, whether you agree with Bill Gates, or with OP, is investment in making primary education as good as is absolutely possible. The result is: 1) people are smarter and more mature even if they don't go to college 2) people who do go to college are already ready to do great work If, like OP, you seriously want people to effectively graduate at age 13 you need to put a lot of work into primary education first. I admit, if like Gates, you just want more competent graduates, then it is probably going to be more nuanced.
- jobu 9y agoCollege has become little more than an aptitude test for many jobs. If you're willing to grind through the years of studying and financial hardship to get a degree, then you'll probably be able to handle the job.
- randomdata 9y agoMore importantly, you'll probably not have the financial resources to walk away from the job.
- branchless 9y agoI may be putting words in your mouth but I think you are saying that non-graduates who are not soaked in debt have more choices, and if so I'd agree. Employers want in order of preference: * h1-b - work late or life as you know it ends * big mortgage with family - work late or I ruin your family's life * big university debt - work late or I ruin your life Debt is a tool of control.
- nebabyte 9y agoI, or my high-paying competitor who wants you working for him :)
- branchless 9y agoFor the majority of IT workers this isn't the case. At the top-end of the market it works. But my point was the average case for employers. They don't want people with choices.
- randomdata 9y agoAlthough, with some exception where protectionism ensures high pay, the higher the paying the work, the less concerned the market is with degrees. This is more due to the fact that high paying jobs are high paying because it's difficult to find people, and you can't be choosy when your options are already limited. But the secondary effect is that with the high pay, the benefits of "debt control" is lost anyway, so there's still no reason to look for workers with degrees. Hence why the reasonably high paying software industry couldn't care less about formal education, but lowly office jobs that barely pay minimum wage expect the world from their applicants.
- amelius 9y agoThe author risks to make mistakes related to the Dunning-Kruger effect [1]. Quote: > The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which low-ability individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability as much higher than it really is. Psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger attributed this bias to a metacognitive incapacity, on the part of those with low ability, to recognize their ineptitude and evaluate their competence accurately. Their research also suggests corollaries: high-ability individuals may underestimate their relative competence and may erroneously assume that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
- dghf 9y agoCould you expand on why you think this?
- always_good 9y ago"Dunning-Kruger" has become the new "cognitive dissonance", a phrase everyone recognizes just enough to throw around as an epithet in lieu of making an actual point.
- woogiewonka 9y agoI am 100% convinced that colleges were created for good reasons but were quickly exploited for profit. Today's version of college is designed to empty savings in the maximum way possible. I can't think of too many professions that require the general education requirements that colleges claim you need. I'd say most if not all professions can be learned through training and on the job practice. Take nursing for example. Today's nurses have to write countless nonsense papers that have nothing to do with improving their knowledge. Dental Technician can do their job without prior education yet many are swindled into a technical program. They say designers need formal education to be taught human computer interaction, color theory etc yet here providing for myself and family with less than 8 months of self-taught reading. One time I wanted to check out a Standford online course to see what designers learn there and was blown away by the uselessness of that information. Pardon the typos, I'm on mobile with whacky autocorrect.
- oldopsguy 9y agoThe author makes a lot of great points here but I took issue with this sentence: All jobs that currently require a degree, should instead require a knowledge test. The employer should not care how the knowledge was obtained, just that the applicant has the knowledge. I would argue that the degree does provide some value beyond what can be easily tested in an interview setting. I'm not sure if it is the only way but the type of person who completes a degree is the type of person who is able to sit down and start a difficult task and complete it. Often these tasks are not directly related to what the student is passionate about, and sometimes not even necessary without taking into consideration the bigger picture of a multi-year program. In my experience dealing with the drudgery of the tedious day-to-day of most white-collar jobs, this college education degree provides a coarse litmus test for the type of person who will thrive in this environment. A person who will do things well and thorough for their own sake and deal with the bullshit.
- merrywhether 9y agoJust as a hypothesis: is it possible that the sheer number of people we're putting through increasingly bureaucratic college curricula (do this busywork, now go sit in this room listening to a topic you don't care about for a while, etc) is creating a feedback system that encourages the creation of tedious drudge work since that's what we've "trained" people to be good at? Though I'm not sure which is the chicken and which is the egg in this situation.
- tonyedgecombe 9y agoNot only have we trained people to be good at it but we have filtered and sorted them based on that.
- alansammarone 9y agoTo me it looks like we asking young people, in their brightest years (from a neurological point of view) to sit through boring classes, under-qualified teachers, just so that afterwards they'll have proven themselves able to stand a boring job too? That seems very perverse. It is _not_ a "skill" to be able to do what you don't like and be happy with it. It is a skill to learn to (genuinely) like it or get out.
- ThomPete 9y agoThe question to ask is what jobs require you to get educated through either close social interaction with others or needs access to resources you can't just get at home.
- GCA10 9y agoLots of interesting ideas here, but also some wacky or condescending assumptions about other people's lines of work. Let's take two: TRUCK DRIVERS: They don't just move big rigs around. They also need to keep detailed log books, plan out routes, pass inspections -- and know how to talk civilly and constructively to DOT inspectors. An eighth grade education will not get you there. Especially on the last part. The back-and-forth of a high-school classroom socializes teenagers to work with authority. Most high school dropouts give up because they can't conform to those norms, not because they can't do the work. Trucking companies rightfully insist on a high school degree for exactly this reason. FINANCIAL ADVISERS: Met any lately? I work in a co-lo space with several within 50 feet. They're all college educated, and they put non-obvious skills from their education to work, every day. They need to provide their clients with highly literate, personalized updates via quarterly letters. They need a sophisticated understanding of clients' expressed and unstated needs -- and you're not going to be fully capable of doing that with just a high school education. Some college-level psychology classes, history classes or behavioral econ classes will get you in the game. And if you actually want to be a financial adviser with some understanding of how markets work, an econ/finance major is your best path in. Some of the other analysis is quite interesting. But the classification errors in this piece are more than just a matter of tweaking a spreadsheet. They come from a deeper misunderstanding of what many jobs are all about.
- zumu 9y ago> Trucking companies rightfully insist on a high school degree... Not sure about these days, but ~10 years ago, my friend's family's company did not require a high school degree. To your point, however, I know this because he specifically complained about dealing with under educated employees. From some rudimentary googling, it seems requiring a HS degree is the norm, but there are plenty of cases of forgoing the degree/GED.
- GCA10 9y agoThanks for the extra info. It's almost worth a whole 'nother thread on the pros/cons of the GED and other high-school equivalency programs. Economics Nobel laureate James Hickman has done some big studies here. If I remember right, he found that the GED was a good way of recognizing sound minds that had been too stormy to finish high school (prison population in particular), but that the social issues that limited some high-school dropouts' opportunities did not go away with this new certificate. In the spirit of OP's main argument, there's room for a lot of cheaper/faster alternatives to college, especially for a lot of middle-skill positions. I like that part of the argument a lot. I'd just urge that we think harder about ways of helping candidates master the social/interpersonal skills that affect long-term success and employability. For now, it feels as if a face-to-face component is needed, too, beyond the technical skills that can be conveyed online.
- Theodores 9y agoI recently helped transform a customer service department from being an embarrassing shambles to something we could be proud of. The queue of tickets is now empty whereas before, when we didn't have things automated, our many customer service agents were struggling to keep up with the back of a 4000 long queue. Things are now pro-active, we fix problems before customers know rather than wait for them to complain. Essentially it is the same job but done properly, however, now everything is in order, we just need two people rather than hordes of people. Note that these two people are college educated, i.e. able to listen and learn, write good English and show up in the morning. We get customer service ratings and these also come in for the things that the computer does rather than just what a human agent has done. The computer always writes impeccably, my human colleagues are nearer grunt and point level. The humans are lucky to get 76% satisfaction level, the automated stuff consistently gets 91% satisfaction level. The net result is that our remaining customer service staff are the educated ones, their work is now pretty professional albeit not to rocket surgery levels and the job pays fairly rather than it being a temp type of arrangement. As a company we no longer need the hordes and the people to manage/hire/fire them. My point being that college education is more helpful than one might think. It does not matter what the education is in particularly, it is the skills of being able to do basic things like work without disrupting others, being able to write and being able to learn that matter.
- tyingq 9y agoWas the college degree itself really the difference here though? I would guess it was more of a high level indicator of someone who has ambition, some base level of intelligence, perseverance, etc. That still leaves you with false negatives and false positives. Just something somewhat better than hiring randomly. There are other criteria you could have used that had nothing to do with a college degree, that would likely have similar results. The enlisted ranks of the US military, for example, use something called an ASVAB test as a bar for certain highly skilled jobs. It's also not perfect, but yields at least similar results. And the pool has very few college grads.
- orangecat 9y agoIt does not matter what the education is in particularly, it is the skills of being able to do basic things like work without disrupting others, being able to write and being able to learn that matter. Which should be what a high school diploma indicates. Otherwise, what the heck are we doing with kids for 12+ years?
- NotSammyHagar 9y agoThis person has a bunch of essays but he comes across as an sad person who doesn't believe in civil rights for women. In an eassy on his website [1], he says "Men have natural abilities and disposition towards leadership. To deny this, to mandate equality of results, to push women into masculine roles, to domesticate and feminize men, only results in misery for both men and women. Universal suffrage elections are virtually always a bad idea." 1. https://devinhelton.com/principles-of-formalism https://devinhelton.com/principles-of-formalism
- arghbleargh 9y agoNot to say that the thing about men vs. women isn't problematic, but that quote is taken out of context. The suffrage part is a completely separate bullet point and isn't saying that women shouldn't have the right to vote as your quote suggests. Also, the main point preceding the quote that men and women may have different natural dispositions is a reasonable one. He only oversteps by implying men are better leaders, a claim that may be defensible under some very specific definition of "good leadership" but is mostly just inflammatory in this case.
- NotSammyHagar 9y agoYou are right, I didn't notice at first that I was conflating two different ideas. Thanks for the correction! But it is a short step from "men have natural abilities and disposition toward leadership" and "people shouldn't have universal sufferage" to women shouldn't vote.
- calcsam 9y agoAh, he's an NRx guy....
- overgard 9y agoThis is like the definition of an ad-hominem attack. Your argument is basically "he believes some unpopular things so all his ideas should be discredited." I dont know this guy and I doubt I think the way he thinks, but the essay is the essay -- it should stand or fall on its own merits.
- bufordtwain 9y agoI agree with the author's conclusions that college is mostly an expensive waste of time and money. Job training can and should be done in a more cost-effective way with paid apprenticeships. Universities should focus on pushing the boundaries of knowledge (research) not job training.
- Spooky23 9y agoMost do. Most high school graduates can barely string a sentence together in writing, and are more likely to have similar limitations in reading.
- Noumenon72 9y ago"You need to be able to read and write to do this job" is not the same as "You need college to do this job."
- aidenn0 9y agoBut the pool of college graduates who can read and write is much larger than the pool of high school graduates who can read and write. Considering that requiring interviewees to pass a literacy test may open you up to lawsuits, and that there is a large pool of college grads with no jobs and lots of debt, it's easier to just hire only college grads.
- acslater00 9y agoOne of the things I learned in college is that when someone says "I have thought about this social problem and understand both the cause and solution, please join me as I attempt to radically address it via state action" you should get as far away from him as possible. The history of such programs is, to say the least, not a story of success and progress and rainbows.
- tptacek 9y agoThe premise of this post is that the author has performed an analysis of the educational requirements for jobs and can extrapolate from it. But this author thinks that only a grade school education and not more than 6 months of training is required to be a cook --- a profession people go to post-secondary school for --- and that some college study is required to be a programmer. How seriously should I take their conclusions?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- massysett 9y agoThe arrogance of the opening of this piece is amazing. Essentially: "I know nothing about analyzing occupations, I do not work in or hire for any of these occupations, now I will classify these occupations based on my subjective analysis of how much education one really needs to do these jobs."
- tptacek 9y agoUnfortunately, if you read any of the other posts on this blog, you'll see this is kind of par for his course.
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago"Cook" is a very broad set of jobs. For the basic "chef's assistant" job then grade school and on the job training is probably fine. You wouldn't be surprised if a high-school student got a job like that.
- Zak 9y agoCollege degrees largely serve the social function titles of nobility once did. Having one shows that you have a shared set of experiences and a personal investment in a certain set of values and social norms. Requiring one for many jobs is much more about ensuring applicants belong to the class the employer prefers than any specific education the job requires.
- rnd33 9y agoTrue, but regardless of whether you think that is a good or bad thing it's part of the value of a college degree, and should be included in your calculation when you decide if college is worth it. I've seen the insecurity of some of my colleges without degrees, almost like they think college is a mystical place where deep and unique knowledge is shared. That insecurity can really cripple your career.
- aphextron 9y ago> That insecurity can really cripple your career. I struggled with it daily as a self taught developer working at a large company. I eventually dropped out of the workforce and went back to school because of it. I feel pretty awkward now as a 30 something in class with freshman, but the satisfaction and confidence of having that piece of paper seems worth it to me.
- Neliquat 9y agoJust realizing the paper is not the change might be a cheaper solution to what amounts to a psychologocal issue.
- aphextron 9y agoWell, "just the paper" isn't really all of it. Since I've started going back to school and learning the fundamental maths and science that I missed out on, I've come to understand how ignorant I am to practically everything. If I had just kept going the path I was on as a web developer, I feel like I would have ended up with a career as a specialized technician, which is something I really don't want. Learning just calculus and basic physics is really blowing my mind and opening me up to completely new ways of thinking.
- socrates1998 9y ago1) People don't know what they want to be when they are 11 years old, so how you do determine who gets what kind of education? 2) People don't want to be truck drivers for their whole lives. Hell, truck driver might not even be a job. 3) The goal of education isn't to get a job, it's to get an education. The job comes after and can be unrelated to the education. Those are the three things I can think of that make me think this guy hasn't thought his argument through very well.
- analog31 9y agoIn my view, something that has to be considered is the feedback of a worker's education level on the nature of their job. If you stop requiring a college degree for a particular occupation, the nature of that occupation may change, and it may open up a space for new occupations to form. Remember, anybody can stop requiring a degree for any job, today, so long as the degree isn't required by law. We could stop requiring an engineering degree for Solid Works operators. (Just to choose an example) In fact, about half of our mechanical CAD operators have degrees. I notice a big difference between those groups when getting CAD work done. If the operator has a degree, it's much more likely that they can take a vague idea of mine, and come back with a nice design that even handles a bunch of issues that I overlooked. If not, then I pretty much have to give them a complete specification (taking longer than just doing it in CAD myself) or sit next to them at the CAD terminal and direct them. If a design step requires math, I do the math. If a decision is needed, I make it. K-12 teaching would become a different profession if the college degree requirement were dropped, as was proposed in my state.
- seppin 9y agoI go a step further, how many jobs can be done by most people, and things like college or personal connections decide who fills those jobs.
- kdamken 9y agoAlmost none of them, outside of STEM fields. Even then, not even some of those. One of the biggest scams of modern times.
- drostie 9y agoNobody has really commented yet on how highly suspect the methodology here is, nor the tradeoff between education and experience, nor the tradeoffs inherent in the world "acceptable" when you're trying to figure out what the minimum acceptable education is to land a certain job. Just for the easiest example, the given education stat for top executives (chief executives, general and operations managers, and legislators) is listed as "high school." It's not even "some college". Now if I come to you and say, "hey, my niece actually just graduated high school and she's pretty smart, has a lot of ambition and drive, really great extracurricular involvement -- can we set up a job interview where she might take over your company as CEO?" you would laugh at me! You would say, "let her get her MBA and manage real people for a few years, and then let's talk. Or I mean if she really can't wait, let's give her an entry-level position and if she's really as good as you say, she'll be managing in 5 years and might be able to get to the top in 5 more." But if we say "minimum" as in "could you start a company with only a high-school education and find yourself as its CEO?" then of course the answer is yes. Heck, let's knock this one down a peg, that could happen even if you don't graduate high school, it's just less likely. Legislator? Sure. I mean, most legislators today are presumably former lawyers who have 7 years of post-high-school schooling in them, but all you really need to legislate is to be elected. Or for another example, Devin has said, "Any job specific training takes less than six months. Examples: ...cook." I mean, that's partly true, some 1/4 of cooks in this country work at fast food joints, some other 1/4 of cooks work in cafeterias etc., but placing it at "high school" as if culinary school isn't a thing is just deluding yourself for the other half or so of cooks. And if you have the choice between going to culinary school for a year or going to work in a kitchen that will take you for a year, probably if you're fresh out of high school you're going to get a lot more out of the culinary school. And that's because education has a different sort of value from work experience, which makes them very hard to compare evenly. The cook who went to culinary school for a year probably knows how to cook a much broader diversity of things, but the one-year-anniversary line cook will probably have greater appreciations for, say, prepping quickly and efficiently, taking multiple orders at once, estimating the time that dishes take to cook and communicating that to others, and so forth. They're not easily comparable.
- grigjd3 9y agoI knew a lot of people in college that didn't work all that hard except for last minute rushes to get things turned in at finals. Those people had a hard time finding jobs that justified the cost of their education. I also saw people that consistently worked hard. They are doing quite well. I think going to college is something you shouldn't do if you're not taking it seriously. If you're using college to put off real life, you might be better off waiting tables.
- kartan 9y agoThe article has some interesting ideas. But it tries to solve a problem that is already solved in other countries. Why do not, instead, start looking at how those countries do it? The problem needs thinking out-of-the-box. Education is not "too expensive", remove that from your equation. Education is a great investment. Why is your country not paying for it? Try to solve that instead.
- dpeck 9y agoI don't understand all the agurments for apprenticeship, what we're dealing with now are the problems of workers being unable to move over/up after being displaced by technology. Apprenticeship systems would only exacerbate that problem.
- midnitewarrior 9y agoFar fewer than most will admit.
- jacksnipe 9y agoI think that the really fundamental problem is the proposition that college has the goal of getting you prepared for a job. That should not be (and IMO is not) the primary goal of education. The primary goal of education should be to make you a better, more informed member of society. That's the only way democracy can work.
- jlarocco 9y agoThe author's cherry picked examples from the 19th century are pretty misleading. The state of the art, as well as society's expectations for most professions have changed significantly since the 19th century. I wouldn't want to live in a building made to 19th century safety and efficiency standards, and while I'm sure some people can teach themselves how to design and build modern buildings, I'm also sure that a good way to get up to speed is to go to school for architecture or civil engineering. Ditto with law and mechanical engineering. I'm also wary of anybody claiming software engineers and computer programmers don't need a degree or other training. Software quality in general is really crappy, and I'm skeptical the solution is less education.
- dahart 9y agoSure, very few jobs give you the direct day to day skills required to do a job. That's neither the claim colleges are making, nor the primary reason that business require degrees. This feels like pure opinion with almost no evidence to back it up, divorced from reality. The table displaying apparent sub-percent accuracy for the completely subjective (made up) number of jobs requiring degrees is demonstrating this disconnect hilariously. I've actually tried hiring people with less schooling than college -- has the author? It tends to not work out that well, especially in tech. Programmers with high school diplomas and two year degrees are usually missing all the theory and most of the practical experience you get during a 4 year degree. Not because someone who skips college can't learn these things, and not because they can't get experience or learn on the job, it just so happens that in the real world they usually don't. One of the biggest reasons that college is a good idea is that someone with a degree in a field related to the job is more often more capable than someone with only a high school diploma. Not always, of course, but statistically more frequently. So who will the employer choose? The college grad is an easy choice. This means getting a degree is simple market competition for employment, and probably won't go away even if people make convincing sounding arguments. Why would employers choose the minimum necessary qualifications if some candidates will do more? Why would people who want good jobs expect to get hired with less experience than others who are applying for the same job? College is something many people are choosing.
- camgunz 9y agoAdvocates of this general position, whether it's Peter Thiel and "hey don't go to college I'll just pay you" or this author's "hey your job isn't that complicated, you can figure it out in less time for less money", all miss the point of college. The best purpose of college is to make you a reasonable citizen in a democracy. Most Americans voting in elections can't even name the Vice President, let alone articulate what plenary powers are, what the 4th and 5th amendments say (or seriously any amendment), name more than 3 executive branch departments (Defense, State and... uh...), point out where Iraq is on a map, etc. It's really no surprise we get the elected officials we get. Sure, professional training is important and I think our education system is not particularly efficient about it. But education is more than just "here's how you work for the man". It's supposed to make you a well-rounded, well-educated citizen so you can participate effectively in a democratic government. Which is why things like public education, state colleges and universities, a separation of religion and education, and state subsidized college tuition are so important, and why religious schools, charter schools, and for-profit colleges/universities are so antithetical to democracy: their agenda is entirely separate from "be a well-educated democratic citizen".
- akuma73 9y agoI had a different college experience. A degree in computer engineering required very little coursework outside of engineering. Due to human nature, I ended up hanging out with primarily other engineering students. All of the non-academic socializing, in retrospect, was very limited to a narrow college bubble. It was only after I graduated and lived in the real world for a few years that I felt more 'well rounded'. The tools to become a 'well informed citizen' should be taught at the high school level since not everyone goes to college.
- camgunz 9y agoYeah I don't have a strong preference about when they're taught. I think college is probably best because the 17-23 age is probably the earliest that most people are equipped to start learning stuff like this, but then again if you can vote when you're 18 maybe it should start a lot earlier. I think there's too much siloing between, say, STEM majors and Liberal Arts majors. You get Philosophy majors who are pretty good with concepts like confirmation bias (just for example), but super bad when it comes to things like "why is the sky blue" and "just what is the Internet, anyway". Conversely you get engineers who are pretty good programmers or EEs, but really don't understand things like "Affirmative Action isn't racist" or "taxation isn't government theft or class warfare". I... mostly think high school is useless? I guess it's more accurate to say I think middle school (6-8th grade) should be more like high school, and high school should be a lot more practical, applied learning. If you're interested in cars, do that. If you're interested in chemistry, do that. Do them both at the same time, and do some music too, whatever.
- figushki 9y agoThis sort of article comes up on Hackerrank a lot. Zero research, a spreadsheet, and a prescription to change eduction from the ground up. The author advocates curiosity as a motivator for education, yet he doesn't appear to know anything about professional architecture (certification is complicated and not always tied to education) and doesn't seem to care enough to research it before bloviating. I read his article dedicated to architecture on his blog, and it was equally ill-informed. Of course buildings built in the 1880s didn't require architects with a college degree. They didn't require that you know CAD, either. What appeals to people about this type of article? The author doesn't bring any experience with education policy or teaching. He doesn't back his assertions with research, primary sources, or even secondary sources. He doesn't bother interviewing anyone with experience with the problem or who has thought about it. And, his reasoning is fairly shoddy. Much of what he's arguing for already exists in parallel with formal education. Nothing stopped me in the past from supplementing my learning on Coursera or hiring a programmer without a degree in computer science. A good friend of mine dropped out of high school, got his GED, and went back to college. Nothing is stopping anyone, you just limit your opportunities. Even if formal education was abolished or fully privatized, businesses would find a similar, expensive process for screening applicants. The government is rarely requiring this. It's usually industry associations. I read this article because I'm curious about this sort of thinking. Why do we not only have a desire for simple solutions but a need for radical ones from people with no experience in the field they're discussing? Why is this appealing? If you're curious about radical approaches to education and the deschooling movement, read Ivan Illich or research the free schools movement. I read Illich before sending my daughters to public school. I didn't think Illich had any answers, and much of what he advocated wasn't precluded by formal education. School doesn't take that much time. My kids thrived in public school, and one of them wants to be a teacher.
- madengr 9y agoYou may need to go back further than 1880. I'm sure architecture was a college major in the 1880s. Engineering certainly was. Not much has changed since then.
- therpe1 9y agoIt's weird. This article is so poorly informed and, frankly, straight-up dumb that I'm surprised that the author would put it out there under his real name. But what's more surprising is how every time a startup geek shows up and insists he alone understands an enormous, extremely complicated, century-old distributed market system better than those who have been studying it for decades -- everybody actually stops and takes it seriously. I mean, we're supposed to take hearsay like this: > Even fifteen years ago at an Ivy League school I did not like to say things too far outside the zeitgeist in section, because it just wasn’t worth the risk of making someone in class angry. And I hear the problem is even worse now. and a bunch of literally made up numbers (ahem, "subjective assessment") seriously? So yeah. That's the question. Why does nobody listen to the actual experts on the American education system? The people who've been studying this for decades? And when people aren't willing to do the hard work (that requires expertise)... how do you even talk about solutions in a serious manner?
- mankash666 9y agoIt's cute how software engineers are attributed as the likely inventors of HVAC robots. Whatever happened to mechanical & electrical engineers?
- madengr 9y agoEE and ME are not sexy; so 20th century. Labor to be farmed out offshore. Most people think EE is hooking up an Arduino, or ME using Legos. Meanwhile the money is tossed at brogrammers writing sexting apps. /sarcasm.
- mnm1 9y agoWith the quality of education as it is today, and no improvements in sight in the near or long-term future, I'd say a college education--or self-guided personal learning for the few who have the motivation and ability to do it--is required in the US if one is to not be considered stupid. There are exceptions at certain private--and usually incredibly expensive schools--but overall, even the best public schools are atrocious and don't teach children the skills and knowledge they need to be decent citizens, let alone how to prosper. This is why attending college is not primarily about job preparation. Even when job preparation is not necessary, the rest of the education is. Yes, much of it should have been taught in grades K-12, but since that isn't happening, college is the last defense against stupidity that's likely to last a lifetime. Thus, the question the article asks is not very important, and the article's dismissal of any use for college other than job preparation is short-sighted and ill-defended.
- gumby 9y agoThe article's classifications aren't even observed in other OECD countries: for example law and medicine are undergraduate degrees is most of Europe and Australia and people do fine (obviously doctors still need residency etc in order to become skilled). And those countries are doing fine -- better than the US in many ways.
- tomrod 9y agoMost, according to economic signaling theory.
- kmicklas 9y agoStopped reading at: "College actually teaching people how to think is increasingly rare. Only a small percentage of students actually read the classics, get exposed to a variety of ideas, or are actually challenged to think in section or seminar. And more and more, college has become an environment hostile to free inquiry. Even fifteen years ago at an Ivy League school I did not like to say things too far outside the zeitgeist in section, because it just wasn’t worth the risk of making someone in class angry. And I hear the problem is even worse now." This guy is one of classic privileged techie types who's sad he can't shout his glorious racist sexist libertarian views from the rooftops without being challenged.
- exclusiv 9y agoThat's a big claim you're making with no evidence. In fact that kind of assumption about someone that thinks differently is what the author was probably referring to.
- kmicklas 9y agoJust check his other posts: Racist: https://devinhelton.com/hate-group-history https://devinhelton.com/hate-group-history Sexist: https://devinhelton.com/principles-of-formalism https://devinhelton.com/principles-of-formalism Libertarian nutjob: all of them
- exclusiv 9y agoI don't see how you can objectively say all of those points are nutjob - many are just summaries of our existing structure. Perhaps you don't agree with all of them but that doesn't make them nutjob. Racist claim - not seeing it. While I wouldn't try to equate the Black Panthers w the KKK, ignoring the Black Panther violence against innocents is dishonest. And not understanding why someone would boycott a celeb who promotes a group w a violent history isn't being honest either. That's not an unreasonable thing.
- iamdave 9y agoglorious racist sexist libertarian views How on Earth are you divining racism and sexism out of this article???
- matchagaucho 9y agoWhen writing Developer job descriptions I typically settle on "Bachelors degree or equivalent" for the education requirement. The best Programmers I've worked with were self-taught autodidacts with insatiable curiosity.
- Noumenon72 9y agoHow do people prove they have autodidacted the "equivalent" of a bachelors degree?
- aidenn0 9y agoConsidering I've met bachelors holders that couldn't write FizzBuzz in a language of their choice, I wouldn't think that's a huge concern.
- matchagaucho 9y agoI prefer a take-home coding exercise for interviews, paid at an hourly rate. Equal parts subjective and objective. The exercise requires candidates to git clone, unit test, document, submit PR, and walk a reviewer through the solution.... basically go full lifecycle on a coding task.
- sbuttgereit 9y agoIn my experience as a hiring manager, a degree can be useful as an indicator, but I wouldn't actually require it for most positions. A degree requirement can also be a crutch for HR departments that are overwhelmed by applicant volume and lesser hiring managers that put more stock in a culturally defined checklist than their own judgement about any given candidate's suitability. The biggest problem with the degree-as-a-substitute-for-judgement approach is that not all degree programs are equal to start with. There are degree programs which absolutely speak well of a candidate (on a resume) and there are programs you can graduate from which would be less of an indicator of suitability than relevant work experience. Certainly not all degrees are equal. There are some real bullshit things you can major in insofar as being an indicator for employ-ability is concerned. So for me to care about a degree on a resume, it has to be an appropriate degree and it has to be from a program that I know indicates some skill and perseverance on the part of the candidate... otherwise I dismiss it as an evaluation factor: at that point it's simply an uninformative data point.... it's just noise. To be fair, I say this as someone that has had a good career in technology without a degree. I have do have a fair amount of college (in one of those bullshit majors I was mentioning), but no sheepskin. (Actually, one of the schools I attended seemingly attached so little to the degree in terms of success of the candidate, that they had a policy of indefinite re-admittance since many wanted to finish solely for self-enrichment after they had gone off and had their career success pre-graduation :-) ).
- codingdave 9y agoHow many jobs require college is a fair question when you are young. But at the other end of life, I ask how many jobs would have taught you the same things as college. Lifelong education and self improvement is important. Whether it come from college, work, or somewhere else is not as important as just making sure it happens.
- bjourne 9y agoI can't help but feeling this has something to do with women. Namely that women are "winning" the education game. Each year, the fraction of women to men in (almost) all programs are steadily increasing. Since men aren't winning anymore, the game clearly wasn't that important. Let's create a new game and play that instead!
- scotty79 9y agoFrom my experience college is not so much about actual knowledge acquired but mostly about learning to learn and think. I could have studied civil engineering instead of CS and be exactly as good software developer as I am, maybe even better. Is college absolutely necessary to perform some jobs? Probably not. But I think I'd benefit if my hairdresser or tailor (I don't actually use services of any of those) attended some technical university during his/her career. Real shame is that not everybody has time and money to do that.
- martin1975 9y agohave known and worked with great programmers who majored in biology, english and film.. so I absolutely concur with this statement.
- andrewvc 9y agoThat's totally confirmation bias. Smart people are more likely to go to college. Almost everyone becomes wiser between the ages of 18 to 22. Why are you so sure that college is causative here? I don't doubt that college is where many people grow up more intellectually, but I have yet to see proof that it is the cause of that growth.
- scotty79 9y ago> I don't doubt that college is where many people grow up more intellectually, but I have yet to see proof that it is the cause of that growth. I can agree that it's not the sole cause. But I really have trouble believing that being exercised and lectured about the stuff you knew nothing about every working day and being strongly challenged at least semiannually has no effect on people.
- andrewvc 9y agoWell it's not as if people who don't go to college sit about twiddling their thumbs. There's an argument to be made that people who don't spend those years having their life structured and defined by a university learn other important lessons. There's particular irony to making the point that college is where you learn to think on HN. Many founders, like Bill Gates, dropped out of college to be hyper focused on their mission. Rather than thinking of college as a blanket solution for everybody I wish people viewed it as a tool. Some people need it, some people flat out don't.
- noonespecial 9y agoThe question implies "how many jobs require college to do". A better question is "how many jobs require college to get".
- didibus 9y agoThe mistake of the education system is its focus on jobs. Education should be motivated by virtue, to raise a generation that can think, reason, innovate, in all aspects of life, emotionally, culturally, artificially, physically, scientifically, spiritually, etc. If we educated more people that way, we'd probably have a society that could solve the job problem.
- chx 9y agoMy father led the chemical safety laboratory of a ~10000 employee Hungarian drug company from 1990 to 2010 or so. He said this and this stuck with me, that when he started he was able to hire the lowest level assistants straight out of trade school but by the end everyone needed a univ degree because every instrument became so complicated.
- aphextron 9y agoAny "job" does not require a college degree. A "job" is something that anyone can be trained to do. If you think that the purpose of college is to train you for a "job" then you're doing it wrong. The point of college is teach you the underlying fundamentals of how things like language and science work, so that you can extend those rules and use them to create new things and new ideas. You go to college to learn how to create value, not get a job. There will always be a need for vocational training. But putting in the long, hard work of accumulating intuitive knowledge of the fundamental sciences, and having that knowledge verified by society to assure you haven't deluded yourself, is the only way to operate at the highest level of intellectual ability for anyone short of a true genius.
- eng_monkey 9y agoExactly. It is baffling that to this day so many people believe the purpose of University is to provide some sort of vocational training.
- tenkabuto 9y agoThank you for sharing this way of thinking about college. I feel like your statement "You go to college to learn how to create value, not get a job" really set things into perspective for me. I'm now really looking forward to taking on the coming week at school (midterm included).
- humanrebar 9y agoThere's a lot good about this point of view, but it comes from a fundamentally privileged point of view. For first generation college students, the goal is to get a return on the substantial investment they are making. Achievement in abstract notions is fine, but paying off loans and escaping the career trajectories of their parents and neighbors is paramount. Maybe the "advancement of humanity" education needs to be more distinct from elite vocational training.
- scythe 9y agoCollege may improve the bargaining position of laborers vis-a-vis employers. Compare eight apprenticeships which provide the ability to work one job each vs a college which provides the ability to work all eight jobs. If students filter into one of the apprenticeships they're locked in; if they go to college then employers must compete for labor across sectors.
- krallja 9y agoNumber of births in US per year: 4.24 million Proposed stipend: $100,000 Budget for proposal: $424B/yr, assuming no overhead (lol) That's 2.5% of GDP, minimum, which is almost as much as the total non-defense discretionary budget is today.
- anymouse- 9y agotl;dr I should have been able to get a 4 year degree after taking 3-4 classes. Why do people who have equivalent education need to _waste_ 4 years of their life? I think that the largest problem is that there is no way for people who have achieved the equivalent or more of a college education to gain the same recognition. But possibly that is just because it affects me directly. While working a technician type job for years with lots of downtime, I studied CS at home and with my work downtime. I took lots of the free courses from the elite universities and finished them. I read lots of good book, most of the No Starch Press books, and did all the exercises. Then I had the money to fund a four year degree, with high expectations for the higher level classes I persisted through the absolutely painfully trivial, tedious work. I got anxious about wasting so much time not learning, after I was not just out of high school. I've burnt out on busywork, started neglecting schoolwork for stuff that actually improved my skill, or to drill way deeper into some interesting bit of a class than needed to get to something challenging. I ignored school for side projects that stretched my legs. It really hit when I took 300-400 level courses and realized that i really wouldn't learn anything CS at all. I've even helped nearly 10 other students learn Python which the school doesn't even teach pair programming with them on a very non-trivial project. But now here I am, way more advanced and capable than a standard graduate, terrible GPA, not going to graduate, and no job opportunities. I don't even care how much I make, I like programming, I like making things, I like solving problems. Probably going to have to go back to what I was doing. That said I did pick up a couple math tricks, but _wasting_ 4 years of my life for 3-4 good classes which could have been taken in 3 months, not even remotely worth it. Been here for a while but using a throwaway for obvious reasons.
- jdonaldson 9y agoHow many jobs really require people?
- jtmcmc 9y agochrist - reading through this person's website he seems like a parody of the 'arrogant engineer' stereotype.