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I don’t think most people going to 3rd-tier college to study humanities are doing it out of some abstract love of education. They’re doing it because every adul

I don’t think most people going to 3rd-tier college to study humanities are doing it out of some abstract love of education. They’re doing it because every adult or counselor in their life told them they have to go to some college no matter what.

Jtsummers 6y ago
And, worse, many office jobs that were satisfied with high school diplomas or 2-year degrees in 1980 were requiring a bachelors by 2000. Even when the degree was irrelevant. Seriously, data entry does not require a history degree. At one place I worked nearly every one in the data entry positions had a history degree, and all had 4-year degrees of some kind. (NB: Talking about in the US)
- minitoar 6y ago
  Requiring a 4 year degree for a job even if the major isn’t relevant doesn’t seem wrong to me. Maybe data entry is taking it too far? Maybe the data was really sensitive and complicated.
  - Jtsummers 6y ago
    It causes inflation of job requirements, delays entry into careers, produces vast amounts of unnecessary debt and spending, promotes substandard graduate programs so people can be differentiated from the other history majors, and all because a high school diploma is considered worthless by most companies for their non-technical entry level positions.
    - minitoar 6y ago
      Maybe the value of differentiating potential employees is worth it overall.
      - Jtsummers 6y ago
        Maybe for the businesses, I'm skeptical that this is a positive for society and the economy overall.
      - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
        Size of their feet differentiates them too. How is it actually usefull?
        minitoar 6y ago
        If that’s a useful differentiator then people would probably use it. Maybe you’re trying to imply that whether or not a candidate has a certain credential is not useful as a differentiator?
        ClumsyPilot 6y ago
        Would they? We don't use IQ or neuroticism, are they useless? We have solid proof that attractive sociopaths get ahead more, is that usefull? Maybe we should not pretend that hiring is this optimally tuned machine that knows exactly whats needed
        Jtsummers 6y ago
        To expand on your point, it's the arbitrary and superfluous nature of this requirement. If I were hiring pilots, to go with the physical quality example, I would discriminate on height. You can be too short to operate an aircraft, and you can be too tall or too big to fit in some aircraft (I knew a helicopter pilot who only flew helicopters because he couldn't, physically, fit in fighter aircraft which had been his dream job). But if I were running an airline, I wouldn't use this as a discriminator on all my employees, only the ones that it made sense for. Degrees ought to be treated similarly in white collar jobs.
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    If the knowledge is not required for the job, what is the degree for? Is it a concealed/outsourced IQ test? Is it a concealed illegal minimum age requirement? Isit collective insanity? I dare you to provide an explanation that is not illegal and/or deranged.
    - VLM 6y ago
      I'm not disagreeing with you, but I'd embrace and extend your remarks with two other illegal or semi-illegal reasons: One is employees who are deeply in debt can be more easily abused than, for example, wealthy skilled tradesmen. You can do all kinds of things to woman with a student loan debt larger than a mortgage and she'll have to put up with it, whereas a journeyman electrician, in addition to being paid more, would simply move to a competing jobsite the next day. The other reason is colleges highly promote diversity in freshmen accepted class statistics but always cover up graduating diploma holder statistics. You can kind of legally/illegally guarantee you hire a white woman or certainly tilt the odds against PoC, by demanding the office receptionist hold a bachelors degree in something "to maintain office culture because everyone else in the office went to college and we wouldn't want her to feel left out". Presumably those type of places where PoC need not apply, will soon require their janitors to have a four year degree in some sort of liberal art...
    - agar 6y ago
      Flipping this around, put yourself in this situation: you have five open positions, and expect 300 applicants. You have approximately 1 hour per day to interview, and need to fill the positions in 10-15 business days. You would like to find people with the following characteristics: They can follow complex instructions with minimal oversight, they finish what they start, they have good social skills to work with colleagues and occasional outside parties, they are fully literate (i.e., spell well, read quickly, understand context), and can be trained and managed. You're handed 300 resumes. How do you select the top 10-15 that are most likely to satisfy the requirements? What would be your initial filtering criteria?
      - Jtsummers 6y ago
        Past work experience, letters of reference, relevant training program/certification. This is assuming there is not a degree program that can be seen as preparatory for the position. A 4-year degree is a useless indicator when it's irrelevant to the workload. It tells you the person was willing to spend $40-80k (in much of the US) for a piece of paper that didn't prepare them for the job you're hiring them for.
- Miraste 6y ago
  High school standards in the US have reached a point where I would not trust someone with only a high school diploma to be able to do data entry. Bachelor's degrees aren't a perfect credential but they're a passable filter, in lieu of building a much more extensive hiring process for low-level jobs.
  - worker767424 6y ago
    Seriously. If you're working class or higher, you have to try to not get a high school diploma.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      If highschool is really as terrible as you say and any random college is better then why not abolish most of it and let students take a reduced college workload at 16 years old? They would be able to finish college a year earlier. It's weird to have a dumbed down version of linear algebra and analysis in high school and then redo it in college.
      - minitoar 6y ago
        Some public high schools offer programs like this, that let students accumulate some college credits while still in high school. This can shave a year off your 4 year degree.
awillen 6y ago
One million percent yes.
mrweasel 6y ago
The article is about colleges in the US, so I have no reason to doubt you. It’s just a ready bleak observation for someone who is raised to pursue a career that would make me happy, and be lucky enough to live in a country that allows me to do that. More and more the Internet makes me feel that the US somehow lost the cold war and it’s now a dystopian nightmare.
- minitoar 6y ago
  I wouldn’t know. I went to college for a topic I’ve always loved and that happens to be lucrative. I actually think the narrative of “pursue a career you love” is still the basic message. It’s just framed as requiring a college education in order to achieve that. There is some truth in it, as it’s hard to even get your foot in the door without the credential.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  > More and more the Internet makes me feel that the US somehow lost the cold war and it’s now a dystopian nightmare. And yet the country is attracting talent more than it exports it!
- fallingknife 6y ago
  99% of the people writing about how the US is a dystopian nightmare haven't lived in any other country.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    I don't think it's a dystopian nightmare. I just think about how you guys got all those counter productive policies. Guaranteed student loans in combination with private college simply doesn't work. The way you zone your cities is causing widespread social problems. Arresting people for doing drugs doesn't rehabilitate them. It's not a dystopia, it's just lots of short sighted policies that cause long term failures.
dbspin 6y ago
Outside perspective - here in Europe, enormous numbers of people in late middle age to old age return to university out of love of learning. Despite low to negligible impact on wages etc. They generally have better outcomes in terms of overall grades also. There's a boatload of research into intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation that supports the idea that we have an innate love of learning.
phabora 6y ago
> I don’t think most people going to 3rd-tier college to study humanities are doing it out of some abstract love of education. Well, the fact that they are third-tier already tells you that they won’t get some cushy job from the education by itself. Are they necessarily doing it for the love of education? Probably not. But I suspect that that motivation is more likely to be found in them than the students at the top-tier institutions that will be welcomed by the open embrace of six-figure salaries and social status once they graduate.

Jtsummers 6y ago

And, worse, many office jobs that were satisfied with high school diplomas or 2-year degrees in 1980 were requiring a bachelors by 2000. Even when the degree was irrelevant. Seriously, data entry does not require a history degree. At one place I worked nearly every one in the data entry positions had a history degree, and all had 4-year degrees of some kind. (NB: Talking about in the US)

minitoar 6y ago
Requiring a 4 year degree for a job even if the major isn’t relevant doesn’t seem wrong to me. Maybe data entry is taking it too far? Maybe the data was really sensitive and complicated.
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  It causes inflation of job requirements, delays entry into careers, produces vast amounts of unnecessary debt and spending, promotes substandard graduate programs so people can be differentiated from the other history majors, and all because a high school diploma is considered worthless by most companies for their non-technical entry level positions.
  - minitoar 6y ago
    Maybe the value of differentiating potential employees is worth it overall.
    - Jtsummers 6y ago
      Maybe for the businesses, I'm skeptical that this is a positive for society and the economy overall.
    - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      Size of their feet differentiates them too. How is it actually usefull?
      - minitoar 6y ago
        If that’s a useful differentiator then people would probably use it. Maybe you’re trying to imply that whether or not a candidate has a certain credential is not useful as a differentiator?
        ClumsyPilot 6y ago
        Would they? We don't use IQ or neuroticism, are they useless? We have solid proof that attractive sociopaths get ahead more, is that usefull? Maybe we should not pretend that hiring is this optimally tuned machine that knows exactly whats needed
      - Jtsummers 6y ago
        To expand on your point, it's the arbitrary and superfluous nature of this requirement. If I were hiring pilots, to go with the physical quality example, I would discriminate on height. You can be too short to operate an aircraft, and you can be too tall or too big to fit in some aircraft (I knew a helicopter pilot who only flew helicopters because he couldn't, physically, fit in fighter aircraft which had been his dream job). But if I were running an airline, I wouldn't use this as a discriminator on all my employees, only the ones that it made sense for. Degrees ought to be treated similarly in white collar jobs.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  If the knowledge is not required for the job, what is the degree for? Is it a concealed/outsourced IQ test? Is it a concealed illegal minimum age requirement? Isit collective insanity? I dare you to provide an explanation that is not illegal and/or deranged.
  - VLM 6y ago
    I'm not disagreeing with you, but I'd embrace and extend your remarks with two other illegal or semi-illegal reasons: One is employees who are deeply in debt can be more easily abused than, for example, wealthy skilled tradesmen. You can do all kinds of things to woman with a student loan debt larger than a mortgage and she'll have to put up with it, whereas a journeyman electrician, in addition to being paid more, would simply move to a competing jobsite the next day. The other reason is colleges highly promote diversity in freshmen accepted class statistics but always cover up graduating diploma holder statistics. You can kind of legally/illegally guarantee you hire a white woman or certainly tilt the odds against PoC, by demanding the office receptionist hold a bachelors degree in something "to maintain office culture because everyone else in the office went to college and we wouldn't want her to feel left out". Presumably those type of places where PoC need not apply, will soon require their janitors to have a four year degree in some sort of liberal art...
  - agar 6y ago
    Flipping this around, put yourself in this situation: you have five open positions, and expect 300 applicants. You have approximately 1 hour per day to interview, and need to fill the positions in 10-15 business days. You would like to find people with the following characteristics: They can follow complex instructions with minimal oversight, they finish what they start, they have good social skills to work with colleagues and occasional outside parties, they are fully literate (i.e., spell well, read quickly, understand context), and can be trained and managed. You're handed 300 resumes. How do you select the top 10-15 that are most likely to satisfy the requirements? What would be your initial filtering criteria?
    - Jtsummers 6y ago
      Past work experience, letters of reference, relevant training program/certification. This is assuming there is not a degree program that can be seen as preparatory for the position. A 4-year degree is a useless indicator when it's irrelevant to the workload. It tells you the person was willing to spend $40-80k (in much of the US) for a piece of paper that didn't prepare them for the job you're hiring them for.
Miraste 6y ago
High school standards in the US have reached a point where I would not trust someone with only a high school diploma to be able to do data entry. Bachelor's degrees aren't a perfect credential but they're a passable filter, in lieu of building a much more extensive hiring process for low-level jobs.
- worker767424 6y ago
  Seriously. If you're working class or higher, you have to try to not get a high school diploma.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    If highschool is really as terrible as you say and any random college is better then why not abolish most of it and let students take a reduced college workload at 16 years old? They would be able to finish college a year earlier. It's weird to have a dumbed down version of linear algebra and analysis in high school and then redo it in college.
    - minitoar 6y ago
      Some public high schools offer programs like this, that let students accumulate some college credits while still in high school. This can shave a year off your 4 year degree.

awillen 6y ago

One million percent yes.

mrweasel 6y ago

The article is about colleges in the US, so I have no reason to doubt you. It’s just a ready bleak observation for someone who is raised to pursue a career that would make me happy, and be lucky enough to live in a country that allows me to do that. More and more the Internet makes me feel that the US somehow lost the cold war and it’s now a dystopian nightmare.

minitoar 6y ago
I wouldn’t know. I went to college for a topic I’ve always loved and that happens to be lucrative. I actually think the narrative of “pursue a career you love” is still the basic message. It’s just framed as requiring a college education in order to achieve that. There is some truth in it, as it’s hard to even get your foot in the door without the credential.
908B64B197 6y ago
> More and more the Internet makes me feel that the US somehow lost the cold war and it’s now a dystopian nightmare. And yet the country is attracting talent more than it exports it!
fallingknife 6y ago
99% of the people writing about how the US is a dystopian nightmare haven't lived in any other country.
- imtringued 6y ago
  I don't think it's a dystopian nightmare. I just think about how you guys got all those counter productive policies. Guaranteed student loans in combination with private college simply doesn't work. The way you zone your cities is causing widespread social problems. Arresting people for doing drugs doesn't rehabilitate them. It's not a dystopia, it's just lots of short sighted policies that cause long term failures.

dbspin 6y ago

Outside perspective - here in Europe, enormous numbers of people in late middle age to old age return to university out of love of learning. Despite low to negligible impact on wages etc. They generally have better outcomes in terms of overall grades also. There's a boatload of research into intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation that supports the idea that we have an innate love of learning.

phabora 6y ago

> I don’t think most people going to 3rd-tier college to study humanities are doing it out of some abstract love of education. Well, the fact that they are third-tier already tells you that they won’t get some cushy job from the education by itself. Are they necessarily doing it for the love of education? Probably not. But I suspect that that motivation is more likely to be found in them than the students at the top-tier institutions that will be welcomed by the open embrace of six-figure salaries and social status once they graduate.