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You just made an apples oranges comparison. In the UK a bank or consultancy will hire you regardless of the degree, which is true for a ton of places and in my experience including Germany, that's just the nature of many multinational consultancy companies. But don't think you can do EE in the UK without an EE job, or that an EE graduate can become a structural engineer or something like that, which is no different from Germany, either. I've studied in various countries in three continents and I feel it's mostly the same.

Then the argument you make that follows doesn't make much sense, either. If Germany has such a strict degree-to-job path relative to other countries, you'd think Germany's engineering companies wouldn't mind paying rewards through salaries for engineering graduates (or indeed paying direct sponsorships for students). I'd say Germany's police is such despite the fact businesses don't strictly require it, but that it's simply better for society in general because it improves everyone and works as an equaliser, as a way to boost equal opportunity. After all the notion 'anyone can take a loan if they want to climb the ladder' differs immensely. Even if tuition is completely 100% free, the fact some of us are already providers by age 18, means the opportunity cost of merely dedicating time to studying in the first place for 4 years, is an immense one. Sure its great you don't have to pay to go to school, but if you have to forgo a full-time job and you're a or the provider in the family, that's a heavy burden that requires decisions to go into debt even if tuition is inexpensive or free. It's part of the reason why those in lower socioeconomic groups go to college disproportionately less often for their success in high school and 'eligibility' to access and do well in college. In that respect I think Germany made an excellent decision.

> Your Classicist will find it harder than your CS guy to write good OO code

True but in my US & UK corporate experience we found that someone with a humanities degree and a Masters or Diploma in CS was by far the best hire for any technology position that had end-user exposure. A mixture of analytical, deductive and soft-skills that the inverse combination never seemed to match.

Perhaps found it harder to write good ( smart or super-efficient ) OO code but could usually write decent code to better-researched and specified requirements.

Then you hire someone who studied CompSci with humanities as minor (at many German universities you need to take one course per semester in a non-CompSci field for CompSci).

I don't see hw studying humanities gives you any more soft skills than studying computer sceince. That the sort of thing you would get from a sales job, not from sitting in a library. Maybe comp-sci just filters for the real nerds earlier.

Spending all day studying something seems to encourage people to go out and do related things in their off time. And they get better at them.

Do you really think that the soft skill building activities are equally likely to be popular among the people you meet in a humanities class compared to one in a computer science class?

And you also seem to be completely dismissing the ability of education to give you tools to better understand and contextualize situations you encounter in the real world.

If you asked two students to try to understand a complex biological system and one was a computer science major and the other a philosophy major which do you think would do better? It's probably the one who has a lot of practice building models of abstract systems, even if they are of a type that's more squishy than they are used to.

Now take those same two people and ask them to convince someone of something while knowing only a few things about them, the one who is used to thinking about various different belief systems and world views is going to find it much easier to identify with someone different from them.

> Now take those same two people and ask them to convince someone of something while knowing only a few things about them, the one who is used to thinking about various different belief systems and world views is going to find it much easier to identify with someone different from them.

Different paradigmas of programming (say, logical (Prolog), imperative, functional (Haskell), aspect-oriented, etc.) also represent various belief systems. The same can be said about nearly every aspect of computer science, say computer architecture (CISC vs. RISC, VLIW, superscalar vs. not superscalar, in-order vs. out-of-order, memory models (weak vs. strong) etc.), building blocks for algorithms (say, divide & conquer, dynamic programming, different kinds of tree data structures that make different runtime compromises, etc.), etc.

So also in computer science you are confronted with lots of belief systems and world views.

> In the Germanic world (Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavia) doing a degree is choosing a life path. You're an Electronic Engineer? Great, you can apply for jobs in EE. Nobody else can.

Not really. Unemployment among people with college degrees wouldn't be so low if hiring criteria were as strict as you intimate, and they aren't. For example, I have a Ph.D. in computer science and work at my university's math department. I know astrophysicists working in IT and at least one historian (by training) working as a journalist. Businesses will hire someone with a college education not necessarily because they need the specific subject-related skills that have been installed into them in college, but just as much because of the subject-independent skills they learn; this is also why a master's degree is still the gold standard: a bachelor's degree in many quarters is still seen as something that's too much like school where you receive knowledge rather than researching it, but neither conveys the practical skills of vocational training.

Humboldt's ideal [1] has become more difficult to maintain in a world of ever expanding knowledge, but as an ideal, it still exists.

The exceptions are occupations with very specialized requirements (such as law, medicine, or teaching) and the vocational system: it's actually one of the biggest drawbacks of the system, where changing careers (in a society where 90% have a credentialed education) can be a daunting perspective past your 20s, but where vocational training often being too specialized [2] may necessitate it. This is where the situation that you describe occurs far more often.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldt%27s_Ideal

[2] Vocational training has its own career paths and options to expand your skill sets, but that doesn't always work.

This is spot on. One final point is that if you get a BSc in electrical engineering in Germany then you have little choice but to get your masters and PhD or you just won't get a job.

In the UK the BSc is often enough to get yourself on the job ladder.

Almost all the sciences in Germany have a PhD as an entry point for a good job. You start working at 30. In the UK you will already have been working for 9 years in industry.

This is simply because in Germany everyone else competing for jobs also has a PhD!

This indicates that education is an arms race, built around signalling relative qualities, not a human capital building exercise centred on the pursuit of knowledge and skills. If it were about gaining knowledge and understanding, your relative level of credentialing, and the selectivity of the institution would be almost irrelevant to employers. If education is an arms race, subsidizing it will only cause people to spend more time in school, studying to beat the competition.

We should also forget that this arms race is very costly regardless of tuition prices, as most of the cost of education (to the average post-secondary student) is not tuition, but lost wages.

David Garber describes this phenomenon in his book "The Utopia of Rules". Basically everythng that used to be learned on the job, becoming a craftsman, has now been replaced by studying a degree in it - essentially reenfocing the class sytem, as only the middle and upper classes will be able to afford it.

Yes, another difference I neglected to mention is in Germanic countries, because your degree is your life, people think it's ok take it easy, enjoy your student life a bit, maybe stretch it out to 6-7 years where it's supposed to take 5. And you certainly cannot just stop after your bachelor's degree!

In the UK, people are 21 or 22 when they finish university, and it's off to find some job. It's not unusual to find 25 year old phds who've raced through the academic system.

This naturally also has an impact on the debate about who should pay, and how much.

It's pretty common for Germans to start working in their late 20s or early 30s if they went to university.

PhD is highly unusual if you want to work in the industry. The standard degree is the Master, but Bachelors are also hired, albeit a bit more reluctantly.

For technical areas you are right, but if you are looking in the field of chemistry or biology a PhD really is required, although even then most of these are doing ordinary lab work which a technician could do as well.

Biology too. I graduated with a batchelors 20 years ago, and pretty mush the only thing you could do with that was PhD, or some really crap lab job. They taught you to design experiments, but you would never get the chance to do that without a PhD.

Yes, but these are pretty much the only fields where this is the case (ignoring the almost worthless MD).

That's a well-known anomaly.

There's a whole different aspect: you can actually choose not go to uni in Germany, and still build a career: vocational training. Germany still runs serious trainee programmes, including IT.

But conversely it's incredibly hard to change jobs in the UK mid-career or at least beyond the entry-level days. Many friends of mine have had tremendous difficulty jumping into a different role without that new role already on their CV in some way or another.

>In the UK, you can do any degree and people will still hire you for a graduate job. Something like a bank or a consultancy won't care whether you did Engineering or Classics.

I had no idea things were like that. I strain to believe that a bank will hire someone with a degree in Art History.

I know several derivative traders who left school at 16. Ran into plenty of people in the City around the derivatives field who didn't do anything slightly mathematical, even though it's an area where people say it requires math.

If you get a good art history degree from a good university, you absolutely can get into an investment banking or management consulting graduate program.

If you get a mediocre degree from a mediocre university, not so much.

The basic idea behind this is that doing well at a good university requires decent general intelligence combined with the ability to understand exactly what is expected of you and deliver exactly that, at the expected time -- and this is obviously independent of the actual subject studied.

A chap I know who worked at Goldman Sachs, Merill Lynch and Credit Suisse, running teams of people in derivatives clearing, OTC settlement etc. has a degree in Construction Management; nothing related to finance whatsoever.

More anecdotally, the primarily qualification for City traders is that they can think quickly on their feet and have an intuitive grasp of numbers. Nothing mathematical, just arithmetic. Trading is extremely performance led, and performance is explicit in numbers. So social capital or education as social signalling isn't particularly valuable.

I think this says more about the field of banking than it does about employability after getting degrees. I imagine any software engineer worth his salt could easily get into banking on aptitude but bankers would find it very difficult forging a reputation in software engineering. Anecdata notwithstanding.

> [...] but bankers would find it very difficult forging a reputation in software engineering.

As long as you can program, we'll hire you.

only a select group of employers are really subject blind. for technical jobs you still need a technical degree.

I think it's the other way round: most employers are subject blind, only a few need you to have specific degrees: Medicine, Law, Accountancy, Actuary, etc.

Technical jobs like coding require you to demonstrate ability, and therefore many people who have a not-quite right degree (physics degree to be a coder) or even no degree can get the job.

"Technical jobs like coding require you to demonstrate ability".

Yet they test you on an hour and a half online "coding challenge", which is completely irrelevant to day to day work. I have been looking for a senior level job recently and only one place has actually asked me questions that I consider relevant. In another I had to calculate the inersection of two rectangles for a Django job. I managed it, but it has nothing to do with my coding ability, knowledge of Pythonic / Django ways of doing things or anything that I would be doing on a day to day basis.

Yes, there's a high false negative rate incurred by doing it this way. I know what you mean, I actually did the same question not long ago (given the 4 corners, return the intersection area), and I too think it's irrelevant.

But it is definitely the case that someone who can't code could not possibly pass this test.

> for technical jobs you still need a technical degree

(EDIT: not sure if you were talking just about Germany. Below is for UK)

That's not 100% true. For prestigious technical jobs it might be. I've not exactly worked at Google etc but only about 70% of my colleagues/managers had degrees.

This. This is EXACTLY it. Good luck finding work if you're doing something general like Political Sciences or Business Administration.