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Comment by _dczq | Hacker News Reader

==If there were less 4-year graduates, the demand would diminish at all the smallish businesses wanting bachelors and associates in business where they provide little to no value beyond just working for those few years anyway.==

Or companies may shift their workforce into higher-educated countries.

==Community college is junk, go to trade school or into a real profession and stop inflating entry-level job requirements at tax-payer expense.==

The idea that 2 years of post high-school education is "junk" is alarming. What is a "real profession" and who gets to define it? Wouldn't all the new trade school graduates just inflate entry-level job requirements in those fields and decrease wages?

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Removing subsidies will produce more accurate education demand than the current situation. We have too many college graduates who are under-employed, and that's simply because we've subsidized and cheapened the quality of college education.

Sometimes community college is worse than junk, it's downright harmful. The most-recommended method in the US to get an engineering degree is to transfer 2 years of core credits from an easy community college to a harder engineeering school. That cheapens the quality of the degree, as the resulting degree is the same. I've done it - physics at engineering school and physics at community college is night and day.

Apart from that, unless you're going to get a teaching certificate or something else in STEM, the resulting degree would not be in demand from private industry if they weren't so commonplace. Those kids would've been better off working for those 4 years or learning a trade. But instead we have people pushing to fund those 4 years completely at taxpayer expense further inflating the problem.

edit: Hell yeah wages in trades would decrease, they need to. Have you not paid a plumber or electrician lately? The guys going into plumbing right out of high school are a lot smarter than the history majors working at Starbucks.

Do colleges exist solely for the purpose of training future workers?

==The guys going into plumbing right out of high school are a lot smarter than the history majors working at Starbucks.==

Based on what criteria? How much money they make today? How much money they make over their career? How happy they are? How much they contribute back to society? Who gets to choose which measure we use?

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