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Comment by EpicEng | Hacker News Reader

Or you could fix the real problem and stop the lunacy of requiring four year degrees for positions that can be taught while on the job.

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Positions in factories are changing. My friend works in robotic welding. The old job of welder, a skilled trade that you learned as an apprentice on the job, is being phased out. It's being replaced by more complicated and more technical jobs, such as my friend's.

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.

You don’t need a liberal arts degree for that.

Math? Yes

Physics? Yes

CS? Maybe

Cogito ergo sum? Hell no.

You probably won’t need to know about Descartes specifically. However, making persuasive arguments and writing clearly are parts of many jobs, and liberal arts classes are excellent training for those skills.

Sure. The people in power should fix this. But don’t advise some 18 year old to go against this.

> Or you could fix the real problem and stop the lunacy of requiring four year degrees for positions that can be thought while on the job.

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.

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

This is circular though. Companies don't invest in their employees because they leave anyway <-> employees leave for better opportunities because their companies don't invest in them.

Which is nonsense, as college can NOT, by its very definition, teach you a job! (I guess some very specialized community schools / community colleges can.)

Or we could just not make getting such an education financially burdensome and we can go forward as a universally highly educated and thoughtful society?

Even if it were free, the idea that it would take someone with an existing career four years as a full-time student to pursue a different career is too much.

We need to start questioning bad assumptions about education. Shuffling money around isn't going to do it.

You're talking about career changes as opposed to initial schooling but I'll bite, what assumptions do you think need to change?

> You're talking about career changes as opposed to initial schooling

Yes, but it's the same question. Initial schooling is implicitly accepting a working age adult contributing no income for four years. We're just accustomed to it.

> what assumptions do you think need to change?

* 18 year olds are capable of making decisions about what career they will want for the rest of their lives

* Leaving (or pushing back entering) the work force for four years in pursuit of a degree is a nigh-universal good

* Taking four years of time / 120 credit hours is a reasonable and good target around which to structure degrees, regardless of what amount of knowledge must / should be imparted

* Training on the job cannot replace any meaningful amount of what four year degrees can offer

* Anyone can get a degree, and should be encouraged to do so regardless of whether or not they actually can or will

I mean, there are more, but that's a good start.

That's a pretty tall order.

This sounds great if you buy into the ridiculous notion that everyone is basically equal and would thrive in college. This is not at all the case.

Not my point at all.

Not everyone needs to go to Princeton but everyone who wants a degree and is willing to do the requisite learning should be given the opportunity at a solid degree.

Further, outside of some niche circumstances, most of the people who wouldn't "thrive" would be much more able if the earlier systems hadn't failed them so spectacularly.

I tend to agree, but look what happened; supply went through the roof, and the four year degree is today's equivalent of a 1960 high school diploma. It's not like all of the people going to college are getting much out of it. It's just a thing you are told you have to do now. Most of my friends spent more time drinking than studying and got very little out of it. They would have been far better off learning a trade.

>most of the people who wouldn't "thrive" would be much more able if the earlier systems hadn't failed them so spectacularly.

Most? Maybe, maybe not. Some amount of them absolutely, but that's once again a different problem to solve, not something to band-aid over later.

The issue with education is that it's not just about the jobs. There are lots of other positive externalities that aren't as easy to account for. Things like financial literacy, political literacy, economic mobility, and a whole slew of intellectual tools that can help them later in life regardless of job.

Personally, I'm totally ok with making college just as mandatory as high school as long as it doesn't place an undue burden on individuals.

Some food for thought: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/11/educat...

Also, we know that education rates skew heavily with SES. It's much more an issue of availability and quality of education than it is some kids being dumb or something...

yeah, going to Princeton is to tell your employees that your family is rich, nothing about your competence or knowledge learned

many people don't want to be highly educated.

To be fair, I like to learn new things and see no need for me to get a Master or PhD degree. I have no idea why I would want or need an alphabet after my name, be that for an extra half dollar per hour or feeling smug enough to not talk to the janitorial staff.

Ha! That's not the point at all.

People go to graduate school to learn new things and, specifically, to learn to discover new things. A PhD is essentially an apprenticeship for researchers. You spend very little time in the classroom, maybe a half dozen classes or so over as many years.

If you go for the title or for the money, you're going to be very disappointed, very quickly.

FWIW, TFA separated by "high school or lower" vs. "more than high school". This includes 1 or 2 year tech school which are affordable and accessible.

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.

"Fixing the real problem" is huge - you need to get hundreds of millions of people to change their behavior. Leading your life as if you may not have the ability to materially change the world isn't a bad idea.

>Leading your life as if you may not have the ability to materially change the world isn't a bad idea.

As if, what; this is the way things have always been? College attendance, funding, and cirriculum are akin to laws of physics?

This is a relatively recent issue which began when the fed started backing student loans in the mid sixties.

The fact that things change doesn't mean that a single person can expect to change things.

Can I fix it though? Is my unemployment somehow going to fix the multi-trillion dollar pipeline that the education and business sectors have carved their way into? For the individual I would just recommend you play the game. Just like with leetcode questions in SWE interviews, its stupid but you have to get a job so..

Many jobs require on the job training anymore because every company has proprietary systems or hardware, do things their way, etc. For my job, which ultimately becomes glorified data enry on paper, requires 3 full weeks of classroom training and a 6-12 month learning curve before you're considered at normal production levels. But hey, for new hires now 13.5 years after I hired in they want a degree and I can't move up because, they want a degree!

Is it actually lunacy? Factories once required a high school diploma when previously they made due with illiterates.

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.

I bet if the federal gov mandated a higher minimum wage (say, $50k) for any position that required a college degree, they'd stop that nonsense pretty quickly.

This is exactly where the phenomena of "college-educated person who loses out on low-level job to a GED-holder because they're overqualified" comes from.

I like that idea!

You can get an associates in things like CNC machining or chemical process operator fairly cheap at a community college.

Wouldn't CNC machining be also an option in a community high school?

Maybe. It all depends on which of the 14,000+ US school districts you're in.

It's a supply and demand problem. We've inflated the supply of college graduates, so when a company decides to hire someone, they choose the person with a college degree over someone without. To fix this problem, you would need to stop the supply of overqualified people. You can do this by having more jobs, or by getting rid of the government guaranteed student loans.

As a reminder, high education in Europe is basically free (well, as compared to the US, I've met a few low-middle class people whose parents refused to help them pay the remaining costs involved).

Free for all students universally, or free for students who score well on tests with good grades?

Well, this depends a lot on the country. University obviously requires some minimum level - for instance you'll have to learn to read/write before you're accepted. The best students often get bigger grants than others.

Or you could teach the people about the hardships that come from accepting government-guaranteed loans to purchase an education that does not ensure income proportional to the size of the loan. But, yes, definitely get rid of the government meddling in student loans that has warped the market for education.

Generally speaking, cutting off educational opportunities for people that desperately need them is probably a bad idea.

Even if you did get rid of government guaranteed loans, companies would happily step in to grant people guaranteed loans in exchange for servitude over the rest of their lives. If they don't find a well-earning job well that's even better.

There were multiple non-government loan options back when I was in college that were just that.

I think higher education in general is valuable for, well, any job. Especially because of the dire state of highschool education in the US due to a combination of factors. That's partly why companies demand a college degree because it's a guarantee of a certain level of performance (and wealth, for that matter).

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.

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