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Which is why the real answer to this is actually an older paradigm: apprenticeship. Companies should be doing their own training for their jobs, and university

Which is why the real answer to this is actually an older paradigm: apprenticeship. Companies should be doing their own training for their jobs, and university can be freed up to actually be about intellectual pursuit rather than economic pursuit. It was companies themselves who created this issue anyways, by demanding degrees for every damn job, regardless of whether a degree could prepare you in the first place, and slashing entry level jobs to almost nothing. Then they started using degrees as a proxy for work experience (and I mean that in the literal sense; "bachelor or 4 years of experience" is common to see in job reqs, despite no bachelor degree actually being equivalent to 4 years of full-time job experience), which just further pushed incoming students to expect that to be the purpose of their time at University.

d_silin 2mo ago
That's a cost, though. And in today's world, companies rather burn millions on AI than train their own labour.
- ang_cire 2mo ago
  Yes, but that's not something universities can solve. Universities predate capitalism (despite the author's absurd assertion that they were founded to serve the interests of businesses), and will exist after it, if any humans survive it.
Eddy_Viscosity2 2mo ago
> Companies should be doing their own training for their jobs, and university can be freed up to actually be about intellectual pursuit rather than economic pursuit. This would be great of course, but the reason that 'what actually happens' is so different than 'what should happen' are the usual economic incentives. How can we change the financial calculations to separate formal education from job training in a way that drives the ship in the better direction. One way could be to regulate degree requirements to only jobs that really require them like engineering, nursing, etc. Another might be allow student loan bankruptcy if certain criteria are met such such as x number of years below y income.
- ang_cire 2mo ago
  We (meaning the US) won't ever fix this ourselves, because we systematically refuse to hold businesses to any kind of standards. Make it illegal to discriminate based on degree status in hiring (it's not like anyone is hiring an SWE without doing technical interviews anyways, so if you prove out their skills why does the paper matter?), and you remove both the backdoor socioeconomic discrimination route (which is itself a backdoor route to discriminate against protected attributes), and solve the degree 'inflation' incentive.

d_silin 2mo ago

That's a cost, though. And in today's world, companies rather burn millions on AI than train their own labour.

ang_cire 2mo ago
Yes, but that's not something universities can solve. Universities predate capitalism (despite the author's absurd assertion that they were founded to serve the interests of businesses), and will exist after it, if any humans survive it.

Eddy_Viscosity2 2mo ago

> Companies should be doing their own training for their jobs, and university can be freed up to actually be about intellectual pursuit rather than economic pursuit. This would be great of course, but the reason that 'what actually happens' is so different than 'what should happen' are the usual economic incentives. How can we change the financial calculations to separate formal education from job training in a way that drives the ship in the better direction. One way could be to regulate degree requirements to only jobs that really require them like engineering, nursing, etc. Another might be allow student loan bankruptcy if certain criteria are met such such as x number of years below y income.

ang_cire 2mo ago
We (meaning the US) won't ever fix this ourselves, because we systematically refuse to hold businesses to any kind of standards. Make it illegal to discriminate based on degree status in hiring (it's not like anyone is hiring an SWE without doing technical interviews anyways, so if you prove out their skills why does the paper matter?), and you remove both the backdoor socioeconomic discrimination route (which is itself a backdoor route to discriminate against protected attributes), and solve the degree 'inflation' incentive.