College-educated workers are taking over the American factory floor

At best, it could be close to that if you chose the right major and friends. But the majority experience seemed closer to binge drinking, cheating on homework assignments, and wasting time in class by asking the professor if X was going to be on the test.

College is absolutely just a continuation of high school for most people, and I'm afraid it's going to become even worse as the demands for free college get louder.

College costs an insane amount of money in the States. I'm not sure more money is the answer. The government should be pushing ways to make it cheaper. Ceasing to guarantee public student loans and making private debt more easily dischargeable in bankruptcy would be a great start.

Turn off the money firehose and colleges will return to their core competencies - teaching and research - instead of building football stadiums, basketball arenas, and doing other stuff that's irrelevant to a good education. They may also differentiate by having tuition prices better reflect costs and future job prospects. So for example art, writing, polisci, history degrees may cost way less than engineering, science or medical degrees. Making community-college-to-state-college transfers easier would be another thing to try.

Basically there are many things one could do to expand access to college, and leave students better off, without spending more tax money.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/educ...

A few years ago, there was a widely publicized article about University of Florida getting rid of their CS programs while simultaneously expanding their English/History programs.

The US Federal Government is providing 90%+ of the liquidity. What benefit is it gaining?

With Germany, in contrast, the priority was to get us up and running as a democratic society. Mostly this was a side effect of needing a stronghold against Communist-Russia dominated GDR, but still - had the US gone through with de-industrialization of Germany as some plans wanted to, Germany would have been in chaos again.

That narrative is totally destroyed by knowledge retention studies. It's one of the few things in life where the data is completely unequivocal: people don't keep what they don't use, and most people use almost none of what they learned in college. (I predict anybody who disagrees will be a STEM major in a STEM job, i.e. extremely unrepresentative of former college students at large.)

If this weren’t the case, just hire people who dropped out during senior year for a wonderful discount. They got 7/8s the education!

College has an entrance barrier and is very disconnected to the outside world, so it has a strong signal effect.

Also consider this: with four years of college time, you can get two career educations with real life industry experience and come with much less cost.

A degree doesn’t just steal value in terms of money, which puts you tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of compounding debt, but it also steals your time, and indoctrinates you into a top-down style of learning. Your time, the most valuable asset in the world, could be spent solving real problems in the real world. The whole system is a scam, and I’m truly sorry for those who have fallen for it.

My advice would be to cut your losses and get into entrepreneurship or work for a company that interests you ASAP. Life is too short to participate in someone else’s profit centered system of learning (Doctors and Lawyers excepted, but only because the level of gatekeeping in those fields is so high and perverted, and backed by government, that learning only via apprenticeship has literally been outlawed)

The issue is that it's a waste of time for people who will never use it for anything. If you spend four years to get a BS and then find a career as a factory worker, it was a waste of time -- the education is worth less to you than the cost in time it took from you.

This comes from subsidies causing oversupply. If you're going to actually be a doctor or an engineer then a college degree is worthwhile. But some people are going to be retail clerks and factory workers. Just blindly sending everyone to college because Everyone Should Go To College is wasting their time and the taxpayer's money.

Seems reasonable to me. I'd love a better method for quantifying the value of education, too. It's too easy for Big Ed to argue how college is essential as they jack up the prices.

There’s also been some follow on studies that look for differences in the effect depending on race and gender

[1]https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C32&q=Kru...

Transportation and infrastructure are broken requiring private car ownership and whose design holds back community and local growth around the country (in transit and in broken water, electric, and internet monopolies).

Agriculture is also super broken with subsidies for unhealthy corn syrup, half of food wasted, huge meat subsidies, an industry dependent on undocumented labor, etc.

Really they all come back to planned bad incentives - housing is regulated to be cost prohitive and NIMBYed, all infrastructure is deeply controlled to protect encumbant oligarchs, prison industrial complex is lobbied by the prison supply chain and police forces. It all comes back to politicians acting in the interest of few over the many contextualized over many circumstances. And that can only happen if they are unaccountable, which is the root problem to fix.

My father got hired on as a machine maintenance person almost immediately after he dropped out of college, with no previous training or experience whatsoever, and then bought his first house within two years. They trained him and he worked his way up on the job and held it for over 30+ years. Lets look to a quick Indeed listing typing in that same job title today and read a few off the top listing together that don't have 'senior' in the title.

Applicant must have 3 to 5 years’ experience

Three (3) years equivalent work experience required or a machinist/technical degree.

Technical degree/machinist certification or 4-6 years equivalent work experience required.

I mean if you are going to argue that this is the same way the market has always been, that is just completely incorrect, both anecdotally and statistically.

The issue is that you can’t even get your foot in the door to haggle. And even if you get an offer, you’re not guaranteed a better one even if you think you’re “worth more”.

(1) The engineers are not actually all leaving - it may feel like that, but maybe it's cheaper to hire a bunch of junior devs and filter out anyone that doesn't buy the loyalty bullshit and isn't content with 3% annual raises

(2) They don't need decent or senior engineers, hiring and managing cheaper juniors is effective enough and cheaper

(1) HR/Management are incompetent and the business is doomed to failure

I was not trying to limit my statement to Silicon Valley, where the job market is very robust (although still far from perfect)

My main point was that when you've just spent 4 years in college learning and accumulating debt, it's very disappointing to look around and find nobody willing to invest in you. I have friends and family graduating from good 4 year schools ending up doing email customer support for startups and making next to no money. That's employment, but it's not what you want/expect.

Understandable but we cannot ignore how history plays into these decisions you know?

> No discrimination found other than that black people didn't do as well on a test as white people.

I don't know the details of this case but there are a lot of systemic effects if the history of racism in the US that have lingering effects in society today.

Consider how practices like redlining significantly affected finance and education access. Jail sentence time disparity and a lot of other often invisible ripples of what happened in the early years of this country.

It's very hard to know what causes some of these disparities and sometimes a society tries to deal with it by using equal/similar outcomes as an admittedly flawed proxy for equal treatment while we try to address the underlying factors ( better schools, representation, access, etc.)

I'd fail that one today. My high school never taught such things, and I never learned to cook.

Regardless, widespread education is of tantamount importance. It will give our society greater meaning.

A bit like the House of Mouse making sequels and remakes, rather than taking a risk on a newcomer or interesting (and therefore risky) concept film.

There are only really two ways to fix this problem.

1. Make college education free. This includes trade schools for those that would want to go that route.

2. Government regulation to cut back on companies demanding higher education for blue collar work. Since this is the result of the free market (companies wouldn't demand that level of education if they couldn't get away with it) then you would have to add some restrictions on the free market to solve it.

To be a machinist or welder can require a training program like this. I'm not clear on whether that's well represented in this article.

No one teaches at the jobs anymore because those people then leave.

You need to smack the owners and HR departments who can't get their head around the fact that raising someone's salary is cheaper than having to hire a replacement.

Unfortunately, as things stand in American business, if you want to get ahead you have to jump around at least every 5-8 years.

To get his job, my friend completed a 3 year program at a local community college. He learned about welding, robotics (obviously), a bit of control theory, destructive and non-destructive testing, metallurgy, safety certifications, and more. The latter bits of training are critical, since his job involves setting up and monitoring the robots that weld together the pieces of truck frames.

It may be unnecessary but if the premium is large enough the "overqualifcation" may be rational if there is enough of an edge on average.

In fact after the company was acquired again later (well a few acquisitions later) I had moved on and was thinking of changing careers when a former coworker(s) and a manager contacted me desperate for help. I was only mildly interested but I agreed to interview at the new company. Their system rejected me for no CS degree, it was an automated email from their HR system ;) I had years of experience with some of their proprietary systems, but nope.

Before they could fix that glitch I had reconsidered and told my friends I wanted to move on (more so based on my personal interests).

I wouldn't be as there are not a lot of 'technical support' degrees.

Someone once told me something to the effect of "the two people groups that understand a program the most are the developers and application support", which I interpreted to mean that just because you didn't write the program doesn't mean you don't gain close familiarity with its problem domain, inputs, outputs, behavior under adverse conditions etc.

There is a world of difference between work and a degree, particularly in the UK where a CS degree varies widely.

It’s a surreal experience to be teaching people who on paper blow me away on academic qualifications on the other hand I’ve decades of producing code that produces value, experience with business side of things and knowing how to get stuff done mostly on time and mostly on budget which by the standards of our industry is pretty good.

Not the only one at my company either, the senior dev/tech lead side of things is about 50/50 degrees/no degree depending.

The CTO and Head of Software Engineering are firmly on the a CS degree is only a weak signal at best that someone will make an effective commercial developer.

Not like we are doing crud of the week either, we have VR division, are solving complex problems and have about 4K employees (only about 100 devs though).

I wish I had the time to go back to school and get one. I would do it if I could afford to do so in a heartbeat. I wasn't a very good student in my early years, but during a career change took a class and found I loved it, but that time has passed for me for now (kids and career obligations for now). And honestly after I changed careers to a more coding centric career I certainly see the value.

I do think the differences you describe VERY MUCH depend on the tasks / job, and are not universal by any means.

A property manager told me once that if you are having problems finding good tenants that you should lower prices. Perhaps counterintuitive, no? He claimed that it opens you up to a much larger pool of people that allows you to discover better tenants.

Depends on the exact question; degrees trigger Berkson's Paradox [0]. If you do a survey of company workers doing [task X] then there will be a negative correlation between formal qualifications and competence. That is because all the the uncertified individuals doing the task will have gotten in by being very, very good at it but the statistical outcome is that the certification becomes a negative competence signal.

Such as this anecdote, in fact.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox could be considered a variant of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox

And since that became the standard from the beginning, it's what remains now.

I took some time to take a class for a career change and I LOVED IT, i was shocked how much I enjoyed it, but don't have the time / resources to go all in at this time.

I completely echo your sentiment about taking classes at a mature age being completely different. I was not a good young student but I found myself excited EVERY DAY for class when I was going. It was so much fun. There were a few of us older students and we were always excited with a handful of younger students.... the rest of the students looked like they were greatly inconvenienced by going to class (admittedly I probabbly did too at that age).

The difference taking classes now vs then is night and day for me.

There was a core group of us who worked together a lot showing up early / staying to help each other, and it was about 30% older and 70% younger and it was a great experience.

For context, I went to school several years later in life than most undergrads, but I wasn't a developer during the intervening years. I came into university with nothing more than a hobbyist's knowledge, but through continued extracurricular activities and paid internships, I kept myself perpetually well ahead of the curve.

1. True, and the ability to complete over-engineer undergrad CS projects just because you have the time to do so is often a lot of fun.

2. Didn't work that way at all for me. I already had a better theoretical understanding than the undergrad curriculum was designed to teach me, so I was constantly bored. I didn't even do particularly well in the theory-focused classes because tests often asked to regurgitate what the class taught rather than asking for an explanation of the theory that was the subject of the class.

3. I find this one utterly baffling. How anyone could consider studying (as distinct from learning!) a privilege is totally beyond me.

With some notable exceptions the classroom experience was pretty poor and all of the information and resources were readily available on the internet. And if you're not the best autodidact there were plenty of study groups were students got together and figured things out just fine.

That said, I still think self-directing yourself through that kind of environment takes a lot of agency and skill, agency and skill that companies require for jobs where neither ageny or skill of that magnitude will be required.

What also works with theis having a city "efficiency" (tiny) dwelling for the working parent and a cheaper house/homestead in a suburban/rural area to raise a family. Preferably, in the office area on weekdays/commuting home for weekends and 50% telecommuting/50% office for 1 or 2 weeks at a time. For these folks who don't make $300k+, living in a big city full time would be unwise. For almost everyone, Commuting long distances in an ICE solo-occupant vehicle is unwise.

I’ve heard this narrative before but have yet to see it in real life. All the homeschooled kids I’ve met were years ahead of their peers in every respect, especially in social development. They carry themselves like adults and interact with adults as a peer at 16 or even younger.

I suspect those who homeschool because they think their family and community has something much better to offer than the standard fare often do.

Healthy families beget healthy children, regardless of schooling option chosen. I’d argue that unhealthy/unstable families are the ones whose kids would benefit from being educated outside the home.

I have a friend who coached a club sport for high school students. They said that they saw, over their tenure, over 100 homeschooled kids come through their teams, and they can remember only a single one without significant social challenges.

There are probably a few jobs out there that do not require the ability to interact successfully with bosses and peers, but I'd imagine they are few and far between. Looking at "success" in a given job holistically, I would be inclined to argue that "soft" or social skills make up a nontrivial portion of the requisite skillset.

Recognizing authorities and hierarchies are what most people mean when they talk about socializing I think.

There's a lot of confirmation bias going on here. How many homeschooled kids with good social skills didn't you notice?

There's also a potential selection bias in that parents maybe be more likely to homeschool kids that have social issues because they have social issues and don't fit in at school.

I'm kidding, and I stole that, but I have a point. Much of "socialization" in school is horrible. It's not quite as bad as socialization into prison, but it's socialization into a society that's rather broken. Why do we assume that socializing into that is going to produce healthy adults?

Me, I wasn't homeschooled. I attended a private school until fifth grade, and then public school. I... um... wasn't all that well socialized by the process.

Is the socialization problem more due to lack of social interaction because they don't go to a school building, or more due to the kinds of people who homeschool being fringey types who wouldn't let their kids socialize with "normal" kids for fear of contamination?

Maybe I'm too "Midwestern" but my mental model of homeschooled kids is kids who were kept away from the sinful secular world by parents who really, really wanted them to grow up utterly immersed in one specific dogma, such that even the local parochial schools were too broad-minded for them. They're going to have problems integrating once they leave home, but it isn't because their parents lacked the opportunities to let them run around down at the local playground, and building more playgrounds isn't going to help them, because their parents wouldn't want them around "those" kids anyway.

But all the home-schooling communities I know of solve this problem by making sure they participate in exactly that - a community. This is more often that not tied to a church, but not always. But multiple (5+) families that all have the same approach to home schooling regularly let their kids go to each other's homes for different lessons etc. Then you add the church component and they get exposed to a broader number of families who also could be doing similar things.

You don't end up with kids that are party animals, but you do end up with kids that are very articulate, talk like adults, can read social cues, and all things considered, more well rounded human beings than the average public school attendee. Does it always work out? No, but I'd say if you have the energy and passion, you'll get a better result.

I personally don't have kids (yet) , but if I did, it would be a toss up between a good private school and home schooling.

Really? All the homeschooled kids I met at our top-ranked STEM college were way advanced technically compared to the other students and are now all married, with children, while the 'regular' kids are still dating around, no kids, no families.

Perhaps homeschooled kids don't fit in to overall American socialization, but given that overall American society is one of falling (below replacement) birth rates, increasing loneliness, more suicide, etc, I'm not sure that's a bad thing.

An Associates degrees is college, and is normed at two years.

> The reason for a four-year degree is that you spend two years doing courses from other areas (inc. your own)

While some, especially liberal arts, four year degrees work that way, that's not really generally true except at the level of looseness in the meaning of “other areas (inc. your own)” where it is essentially tautologically true of any course of study. Many engineering programs, for instance, are intensely focussed on the central focus from day one.

Now the same grade the equivalent of ASO (assistant scientific officer) is a degree entry Maggie Aderin-Pocock (one of the sky at night presenters) started out as a ASO at RAE post degree, and ASO is what Bob Howard was recruited as (Bob got screwed on that btw)

I have also heard it said the US has 4 year degrees as high school isn't hard enough.

Employers often demand a four-year degree, but they don't really know why. They'll test you on your technical skills, but not on those "soft" skills -- writing, understanding requirements, negotiating, collaborating -- and then complain when you don't have them.

Such things are hard to define and hard to test for. STEM majors regularly complain, loudly, about the fuzziness of the classes that teach those skills. I believe that we could all do a better job of explaining why many of the most important things are hard to measure, and some of that starts with (for example) teaching programmers that their job is to understand what the client really wants. Which is practically never being able to sort a list in .02 milliseconds rather than .03 milliseconds.

I don't know if American liberal arts educations are any better than English universities at cranking out students who can think for themselves. While they do get an extra year, full of courses that should be able to help them think about and communicate about what people think and feel, they often treat those as blow-off requirements. The classes are often uninspiring. They are hard to teach, but I think we could do better at trying to show why the notion is important.

Alvin and Heidi Toffler predicted this with profound accuracy in their 1970 book Future Shock. I highly recommend reading the chapter on Adhocracy, or for a TLDR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adhocracy

This is only true if the population growth accelerates (as in: the per-year percentage goes up every year. So 3% this year, 4% the next, 5% the next, and so on). If population growth is stable at a given percentage, then so too will be the proportion of the old to the young.

To give an exaggerated illustration, consider a population that doubles every day. Every day, half of the population is one day old, a quarter is two days old, an eighth is three days old, and so on. While I admit I may misunderstand the statistics, a quick look at the median age suggests that exactly the opposite is happening: The median age has been steadily rising since the 60s.

While constant growth is indeed unsustainable, an overpopulation of youth does not appear to be a part of that unsustainability.

(edit: formatting)

FWIW in NSW it's 120 hours logged as a learner and nearly everyone I've asked admits to lying a bit. It was only 50 hours when I did it, and most lied back then - mostly due to just driving until they felt ready for a test without really logging, then adding it later.

Being a naive European, I think education should be free just like universal healthcare - both of these things benefit society immensely. The sad thing is that those who have paid (or are currently paying) for the privilege of education or healthcare seems to be determined to maintain the status quo. Free stuff for other people is tantamount to communism in some people's eyes.

Once blue collar work starts paying more than white collar work, it will become “cool” again.

These days, it's mostly "laborer" vs "office dweller". But, there are a lot of jobs in the middle.

A plumber who works for somebody else would be considered blue collar. A licensed plumber who works for themselves and can bill at high rates is in that awkward middle - they still have to do some labor, but can be highly compensated (by middle-class standards). Same for electrician.

Nurses are sometimes called "pink collar" - those jobs that are traditionally held by women. Teachers, clerical, hair dressers, too. But, like electricians, they are highly trained and, in the right position, highly compensated.

And back in the day the entry requirements for Advanced apprentices where high - more stringent than Nursing or direct entry to a bank

It actually got him out of fighting in the front lines of the Korean conflict. He was the only guy in the battalion with all the necessary military schools. His bags were packed. He was supposed to ship out to Korea the next day when he got the call.

My ex was also career army. He was a high school graduate taking college classes while enlisted to try to stay competitive.