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Comment by throwanem | Hacker News Reader

Casting a college education as a matter of life and death is an excellent example of the kind of rhetoric which produces results like those under discussion.

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http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm

http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2015/unemployment-rates-by-educa...

Employment situation directly leads to living situations. Unemployed? You're going to be in poverty or homeless.

Its hard enough to get a job today with a bachelors degree. Without one? Much harder, if at all.

Getting a degree is truly a life or death situation. With proper social safety nets, single payer healthcare, and so forth, it would not be. But the way things are today, it is.

Oh. Well, that explains why I've been dead these past fifteen years, instead of making a good living as a software developer with a high-school education.

But totally unrepresentative, the plural of anecdote, et cetera, of course. I must simply be one of the privileged 95%.

You are an excellent example of the echo chamber the tech sector exists in.

"I did it, so anyone else can"

Not at all, though I think many more can (and do) than are given credit for being able to. But I'm enough to disprove the overheated "get a college degree or you'll die!" stuff that's flying around right now.

Fair enough, I'm definitely with you on the point of people not giving themselves enough credit. Unfortunately society tends to beat independent thinking out of us, and where I grew up it was definitely hammered into your mind that you "need" to go to college. I once had a teacher though that took a good 15 minutes aside one day, to lecture us how while this mentality came from a good place, we should really assess our future for ourselves and consider things like trade schools + apprenticeships.

Oh, I agree. People should understand their place in life and not be encouraged to strive.

Absolutely, a lot of people in tech haven't got the faintest clue about the world outside their bubble.

Agreed. How else to explain people who seem actually to believe there are no jobs anywhere that don't require a degree?

There are plenty of people who have jobs that don't have Bachelors Degrees. You don't need a degree to work retail, to work in a supermarket, to be a barista, to work in sales, to drive an Uber. A degree is not a requirement to live, and to claim otherwise is offensive to those people who work damn hard.

I have a Bachelors Degree. Didn't ace it, but did pretty well. But it's been completely useless for my work & employers didn't care about it - they're more interested in what you can do than in the random letter soup after your name. I've seen 4-year graduates who literally didn't know what an array was.

(The one place where I have found a degree to be useful is in moving overseas, where visa programs prioritize someone with a Bachelors Degree.)

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