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Stuff like this is why I have a problem questioning the value of a college degree. Even if you never need what you learned during college the degree is still an
by Ididntdothis 7y ago
Stuff like this is why I have a problem questioning the value of a college degree. Even if you never need what you learned during college the degree is still an entrance ticket to a lot of jobs. If you don’t go to college you are handicapping yourself. It’s just bad advice not to go to college.
- EpicEng 7y agoOr you could fix the real problem and stop the lunacy of requiring four year degrees for positions that can be taught while on the job.
- oh_sigh 7y ago"Fixing the real problem" is huge - you need to get hundreds of millions of people to change their behavior. Leading your life as if you may not have the ability to materially change the world isn't a bad idea.
- EpicEng 7y ago>Leading your life as if you may not have the ability to materially change the world isn't a bad idea. As if, what; this is the way things have always been? College attendance, funding, and cirriculum are akin to laws of physics? This is a relatively recent issue which began when the fed started backing student loans in the mid sixties.
- oh_sigh 7y agoThe fact that things change doesn't mean that a single person can expect to change things.
- fzeroracer 7y agoI think higher education in general is valuable for, well, any job. Especially because of the dire state of highschool education in the US due to a combination of factors. That's partly why companies demand a college degree because it's a guarantee of a certain level of performance (and wealth, for that matter). There are only really two ways to fix this problem. 1. Make college education free. This includes trade schools for those that would want to go that route. 2. Government regulation to cut back on companies demanding higher education for blue collar work. Since this is the result of the free market (companies wouldn't demand that level of education if they couldn't get away with it) then you would have to add some restrictions on the free market to solve it.
- AWildC182 7y agoOr we could just not make getting such an education financially burdensome and we can go forward as a universally highly educated and thoughtful society?
- jlmorton 7y agoThat's a pretty tall order.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- abfan1127 7y agomany people don't want to be highly educated.
- drdeadringer 7y agoTo be fair, I like to learn new things and see no need for me to get a Master or PhD degree. I have no idea why I would want or need an alphabet after my name, be that for an extra half dollar per hour or feeling smug enough to not talk to the janitorial staff.
- mattkrause 7y agoHa! That's not the point at all. People go to graduate school to learn new things and, specifically, to learn to discover new things. A PhD is essentially an apprenticeship for researchers. You spend very little time in the classroom, maybe a half dozen classes or so over as many years. If you go for the title or for the money, you're going to be very disappointed, very quickly.
- EpicEng 7y agoThis sounds great if you buy into the ridiculous notion that everyone is basically equal and would thrive in college. This is not at all the case.
- um_ya 7y agoIt's a supply and demand problem. We've inflated the supply of college graduates, so when a company decides to hire someone, they choose the person with a college degree over someone without. To fix this problem, you would need to stop the supply of overqualified people. You can do this by having more jobs, or by getting rid of the government guaranteed student loans.
- JasonFruit 7y agoOr you could teach the people about the hardships that come from accepting government-guaranteed loans to purchase an education that does not ensure income proportional to the size of the loan. But, yes, definitely get rid of the government meddling in student loans that has warped the market for education.
- fzeroracer 7y agoGenerally speaking, cutting off educational opportunities for people that desperately need them is probably a bad idea. Even if you did get rid of government guaranteed loans, companies would happily step in to grant people guaranteed loans in exchange for servitude over the rest of their lives. If they don't find a well-earning job well that's even better. There were multiple non-government loan options back when I was in college that were just that.
- BlueTemplar 7y agoAs a reminder, high education in Europe is basically free (well, as compared to the US, I've met a few low-middle class people whose parents refused to help them pay the remaining costs involved).
- rhexs 7y agoFree for all students universally, or free for students who score well on tests with good grades?
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
- jvanderbot 7y agoFWIW, TFA separated by "high school or lower" vs. "more than high school". This includes 1 or 2 year tech school which are affordable and accessible. To be a machinist or welder can require a training program like this. I'm not clear on whether that's well represented in this article.
- Ididntdothis 7y agoSure. The people in power should fix this. But don’t advise some 18 year old to go against this.
- bsder 7y ago> Or you could fix the real problem and stop the lunacy of requiring four year degrees for positions that can be thought while on the job. No one teaches at the jobs anymore because those people then leave. You need to smack the owners and HR departments who can't get their head around the fact that raising someone's salary is cheaper than having to hire a replacement. Unfortunately, as things stand in American business, if you want to get ahead you have to jump around at least every 5-8 years.
- BlueTemplar 7y agoWhich is nonsense, as college can NOT, by its very definition, teach you a job! (I guess some very specialized community schools / community colleges can.)
- redisman 7y ago> No one teaches at the jobs anymore because those people then leave. This is circular though. Companies don't invest in their employees because they leave anyway <-> employees leave for better opportunities because their companies don't invest in them.
- KoftaBob 7y agoI bet if the federal gov mandated a higher minimum wage (say, $50k) for any position that required a college degree, they'd stop that nonsense pretty quickly.
- dobleboble 7y agoI like that idea!
- trisolxornor 7y agoThis is exactly where the phenomena of "college-educated person who loses out on low-level job to a GED-holder because they're overqualified" comes from.
- dxemy 7y ago*taught See, education is worth something
- EpicEng 7y agoYeah, I'm sure you've never made a typo on a phone. You really believe I confuse 'taught' with 'thought'? You made a throwaway account just to leave this brain dead comment?
- bluedino 7y agoYou can get an associates in things like CNC machining or chemical process operator fairly cheap at a community college.
- BlueTemplar 7y agoWouldn't CNC machining be also an option in a community high school?
- kube-system 7y agoMaybe. It all depends on which of the 14,000+ US school districts you're in.
- chongli 7y agoPositions in factories are changing. My friend works in robotic welding. The old job of welder, a skilled trade that you learned as an apprentice on the job, is being phased out. It's being replaced by more complicated and more technical jobs, such as my friend's. To get his job, my friend completed a 3 year program at a local community college. He learned about welding, robotics (obviously), a bit of control theory, destructive and non-destructive testing, metallurgy, safety certifications, and more. The latter bits of training are critical, since his job involves setting up and monitoring the robots that weld together the pieces of truck frames.
- swiley 7y agoYou don’t need a liberal arts degree for that. Math? Yes Physics? Yes CS? Maybe Cogito ergo sum? Hell no.
- mattkrause 7y agoYou probably won’t need to know about Descartes specifically. However, making persuasive arguments and writing clearly are parts of many jobs, and liberal arts classes are excellent training for those skills.
- Nasrudith 7y agoIs it actually lunacy? Factories once required a high school diploma when previously they made due with illiterates. It may be unnecessary but if the premium is large enough the "overqualifcation" may be rational if there is enough of an edge on average.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ryanmercer 7y agoMany jobs require on the job training anymore because every company has proprietary systems or hardware, do things their way, etc. For my job, which ultimately becomes glorified data enry on paper, requires 3 full weeks of classroom training and a 6-12 month learning curve before you're considered at normal production levels. But hey, for new hires now 13.5 years after I hired in they want a degree and I can't move up because, they want a degree!
- redisman 7y agoCan I fix it though? Is my unemployment somehow going to fix the multi-trillion dollar pipeline that the education and business sectors have carved their way into? For the individual I would just recommend you play the game. Just like with leetcode questions in SWE interviews, its stupid but you have to get a job so..
- CamperBob2 7y agoBut how is this not a simple rephrasing of the broken-window fallacy? When employers require four-year degrees for jobs that don't, is any value actually being created?
- Ididntdothis 7y agoNo value is created but if you are 18 you are well advised to play along even if it’s stupid.
- davidajackson 7y agoActually it's not. An ISA can save a ton of debt and it's more efficient (less than a year versus 4 years) to get a good job. It's up to you to show you can execute. I know people at lambda school who work weekends and week nights building their portfolio, and have online followings already and are creating awesome projects. No need for a degree. I'd hire the best of them in a second if I were a manager.
- dcolkitt 7y agoI agree, but what may be individually rational may be detrimental from a societal standpoint. There's a compelling case that most college degrees are mostly valuable for signaling reasons. Most people use very little to none of what they learn at university. Yet employers still care a lot about degrees because they signal that the worker is most likely intelligent and diligent enough to successfully complete the degree. Even if its mostly a farce, it's still a smart idea to play along. Not having a degree can lock you out of a lot of important activities. But from a policy perspective, the signaling model tells us something very different than the human capital model (which assumes that higher education is valuable because it confers useful skills). If we're all just getting degrees to signal our good qualities, than its inherently a wasteful zero-sum game. The more people that get degrees, the less they're worth. Rather than talking about expanding people's access to higher-education, we should be figuring out policies to discourage people from going to college.
- BlueTemplar 7y agoThis is insane - college is about having educated citizens first and foremost, not about whatever that might bring to a potential employer !
- dcolkitt 7y agoA thought experiment. Would you rather have a Harvard degree without ever attending Harvard or attend Harvard but have no provable record that you did so? The overwhelming majority of people would choose the former. Which is pretty strong evidence that the value of a Harvard degree is the social status and credibility that it gives you, not the things you learn in class.
- BlueTemplar 7y agothis. is. insane. and means that the incentives have been FUBARed
- sjy 7y agoEducation has obvious value as a signal. I’ve never understood the step in the argument that leads to the conclusion that it has no other value, and therefore should be seen as “waste” to be minimised.
- P_I_Staker 7y agoWhat people mean by value here is murky. Some people are talking about intrinsic value in terms of education. Others, about market value, or overall value. If companies required four years of watching paint dry, would you call that experience valuable? It depends on how we're defining value. Different definitions may be appropriate in different cases. Deciding whether to go is one case (extremely valuable, depending on discipline). Evaluating how useful it is for education is another (in my opinion, it's a pretty terrible value).
- ThrustVectoring 7y agoCollege is fundamentally a positional good, it lets you skip to the head of the line for a lot of jobs. Not everyone can be at the front of the line. So while it's still good advice to go to school, it's the height of insanity to try to elevate large segments of society via subsidized college education.
- BlueTemplar 7y agoThe original goal of college is not this kind of elevation.
- sjy 7y agoI’ll never cease to be amazed by the number of people who think it’s obviously true that nothing of “fundamental” value is imparted by education. It’s a flawed system, sure, but people do actually learn things and that’s good.