4 ms·

This is a nothing article, the fact that it completely leaves out what degrees are being obtained invalidates it to me. It says that a college graduate makes on

This is a nothing article, the fact that it completely leaves out what degrees are being obtained invalidates it to me. It says that a college graduate makes only ~$3,000 more a year on average than a high school graduate? With how hard they are dissing degrees, I assume they are talking about some worthless degree like liberal arts. "Why do employers demand a degree for jobs that don’t require them?" > This is a common practice. Speaking from tech industry experience, you'd be hard pressed to find a single job opening that didn't have a degree requirement listed. The kicker? It's not actually a requirement, it's there for formality. " Technology increased the demand for educated workers, but that demand has been consistently outpaced by the number of people — urged on by everyone from teachers to presidents — prepared to meet it." > If this is referencing the tech industry, then this is an outright false claim. Tech industry job openings to skilled applications is something like 2:1, if not 3:1 right now. Since he just said technology in general, it might not be referencing the tech industry. Talking about the job market in general, I don't have any insight into that. "The authors don’t speculate as to why this is the case, but it seems that students from poor backgrounds have less access to very high-income jobs in technology, finance and other fields. Class and race surely play a role." > Absolutely false. Race might play a small role depending on the state and environment, but class sure doesn't. No respectable tech employer cares about your financial upbringing, it's about what you have to bring to the table right then and there. It really all comes down to how you play your cards. If you have the chance to attend college(which not everyone has the chance to do), you have to go with what will open the most doors. You can't expect to spend 2 years getting something like a liberal arts degree and expect to be making 6 figures. You have to research, you have to understand what skills are in demand. I will say that I am biased when writing this. As someone who grew up extremely poor and found opportunity through a tech degree in a local college, I very well have a world of opportunities now because of it. So it is infuriating that the author dares to consider the idea of even community college not being worth it, when it very well is one of the very few doors that leads to bigger and better things for low income people.

IkmoIkmo 8y ago
> It's not actually a requirement, it's there for formality. This simply isn't true a lot of the time. It is sometimes, but there are plenty of jobs that require highschool level skills but will filter out those who don't have a degree just because they can. It's not that big a deal if you select one candidate over the other because the former has done a 2 week internship that made no difference in the qualifications, but did signal some small extra thing that gave the candidate the edge. It's not okay if a diploma gives a candidate the edge structurally, despite being useless for the required job skills, and costs $40k for the individual to get. That's an insane price we expect people to pay just to compete for a job. > No respectable tech employer cares It's not just that. It's the fact the vast majority of jobs are obtained through your network. Class and race are just proxies for the probability that a person has a weak network within a high-socioeconomic-class industry like tech or finance. It's not necessarily a claim of blatant classism or racism by the employer, but rather that your mom not knowing an uncle with a position for you, or dad not showing you you need to do this internship and that volunteer project and apply to that program to get recruited, or growing up with friends who became plumbers and whose parents were plumbers too, is not as conducive to landing a job as others with similar intelligence/credentials but a different class background/upbringing/network is. That having been said, I agree with your other points. These articles get a bit tiresome. As always the answer is, it depends. College can be worth it, but not for everyone and not by doing anything. It sort of amazes me sometimes to speak to people who just never ran any of the numbers. It should be mandatory for student loan applications to be data-driven. i.e. any college in a state should be able to go to the state educational board and obtain annual data for every accredited program or at least workfield, and use that for the loan programs. So for example, the state could track the average salary at 1, 5 and 10 years for an Art History major. Plug that into a loan calculator. Then plug in the loan payments. And then offer a comparative view, compared to not going to college, community college and other majors in college. And then a student has to read through all of that and make a conscious decision that yes, I'm going to borrow $50k, have an estimated payback time of 45 years old and earn no more than minimum wage and be expected to have a >50% chance of not being employed as an art historian in the first place. I'm seeing this kind of data take off a little bit, but it's still pretty poor and some universities skew the numbers. Government should do more to standardise these things and mandate universities and students use them.
- throwawayjava 8y ago
  > It is sometimes, but there are plenty of jobs that require highschool level skills but will filter out those who don't have a degree just because they can. There's also "the minimum viable candidate" vs. "cheap value-add". E.g., an admin asst that does the job as described vs. the admin asst that occasionally helps with spreadsheets, does some basic graphic design work, and proof-reads both user-facing and technical documentation. Does an admin asst need a college degree? No. But I'll take the admin asst with some art, accounting, and writing skills ANY day. Those skills completely re-define the role and add tons of value at very low cost. I've seen the same in tech roles. Given two candidates who are both obviously capable of doing the primary duties of the job, the one with a deeper background (either from college or self-taught) is obviously preferable because versatility outside of the designated role is always a nice value-add.

IkmoIkmo 8y ago

> It's not actually a requirement, it's there for formality. This simply isn't true a lot of the time. It is sometimes, but there are plenty of jobs that require highschool level skills but will filter out those who don't have a degree just because they can. It's not that big a deal if you select one candidate over the other because the former has done a 2 week internship that made no difference in the qualifications, but did signal some small extra thing that gave the candidate the edge. It's not okay if a diploma gives a candidate the edge structurally, despite being useless for the required job skills, and costs $40k for the individual to get. That's an insane price we expect people to pay just to compete for a job. > No respectable tech employer cares It's not just that. It's the fact the vast majority of jobs are obtained through your network. Class and race are just proxies for the probability that a person has a weak network within a high-socioeconomic-class industry like tech or finance. It's not necessarily a claim of blatant classism or racism by the employer, but rather that your mom not knowing an uncle with a position for you, or dad not showing you you need to do this internship and that volunteer project and apply to that program to get recruited, or growing up with friends who became plumbers and whose parents were plumbers too, is not as conducive to landing a job as others with similar intelligence/credentials but a different class background/upbringing/network is. That having been said, I agree with your other points. These articles get a bit tiresome. As always the answer is, it depends. College can be worth it, but not for everyone and not by doing anything. It sort of amazes me sometimes to speak to people who just never ran any of the numbers. It should be mandatory for student loan applications to be data-driven. i.e. any college in a state should be able to go to the state educational board and obtain annual data for every accredited program or at least workfield, and use that for the loan programs. So for example, the state could track the average salary at 1, 5 and 10 years for an Art History major. Plug that into a loan calculator. Then plug in the loan payments. And then offer a comparative view, compared to not going to college, community college and other majors in college. And then a student has to read through all of that and make a conscious decision that yes, I'm going to borrow $50k, have an estimated payback time of 45 years old and earn no more than minimum wage and be expected to have a >50% chance of not being employed as an art historian in the first place. I'm seeing this kind of data take off a little bit, but it's still pretty poor and some universities skew the numbers. Government should do more to standardise these things and mandate universities and students use them.

throwawayjava 8y ago
> It is sometimes, but there are plenty of jobs that require highschool level skills but will filter out those who don't have a degree just because they can. There's also "the minimum viable candidate" vs. "cheap value-add". E.g., an admin asst that does the job as described vs. the admin asst that occasionally helps with spreadsheets, does some basic graphic design work, and proof-reads both user-facing and technical documentation. Does an admin asst need a college degree? No. But I'll take the admin asst with some art, accounting, and writing skills ANY day. Those skills completely re-define the role and add tons of value at very low cost. I've seen the same in tech roles. Given two candidates who are both obviously capable of doing the primary duties of the job, the one with a deeper background (either from college or self-taught) is obviously preferable because versatility outside of the designated role is always a nice value-add.