Did it ever occur to you at all that people might value education for its own sake and not for potential financial yield alone?
(NB: Talking about in the US)
Maybe we should not pretend that hiring is this optimally tuned machine that knows exactly whats needed
If I were hiring pilots, to go with the physical quality example, I would discriminate on height. You can be too short to operate an aircraft, and you can be too tall or too big to fit in some aircraft (I knew a helicopter pilot who only flew helicopters because he couldn't, physically, fit in fighter aircraft which had been his dream job). But if I were running an airline, I wouldn't use this as a discriminator on all my employees, only the ones that it made sense for.
Degrees ought to be treated similarly in white collar jobs.
I dare you to provide an explanation that is not illegal and/or deranged.
One is employees who are deeply in debt can be more easily abused than, for example, wealthy skilled tradesmen. You can do all kinds of things to woman with a student loan debt larger than a mortgage and she'll have to put up with it, whereas a journeyman electrician, in addition to being paid more, would simply move to a competing jobsite the next day.
The other reason is colleges highly promote diversity in freshmen accepted class statistics but always cover up graduating diploma holder statistics. You can kind of legally/illegally guarantee you hire a white woman or certainly tilt the odds against PoC, by demanding the office receptionist hold a bachelors degree in something "to maintain office culture because everyone else in the office went to college and we wouldn't want her to feel left out". Presumably those type of places where PoC need not apply, will soon require their janitors to have a four year degree in some sort of liberal art...
You would like to find people with the following characteristics: They can follow complex instructions with minimal oversight, they finish what they start, they have good social skills to work with colleagues and occasional outside parties, they are fully literate (i.e., spell well, read quickly, understand context), and can be trained and managed.
You're handed 300 resumes. How do you select the top 10-15 that are most likely to satisfy the requirements?
What would be your initial filtering criteria?
Obviously, once you have work experience and letters of reference, no one cares about your college. But you're not going to have that when you're 18.
University is also a social exercise, which can serve to signal that you are okay or at least exposed to the type of cultural norms that might exist at an employer that is already full of similarly college educated people.
> Obviously, once you have work experience and letters of reference, no one cares about your college. But you're not going to have that when you're 18.
That's actually not the case, unfortunately. My wife is fluent in two languages, can read and communicate in a couple more but isn't fluent, has 12+ years of experience, and letters of reference from CFOs and CEOs from major international corporations, and is struggling (here in the US) to get a non-minimum wage job in a medium sized city (we'd be better off if we were in a larger city, but this is where my work is right now).
My point was more that the signal an elite college serves is relatively short lived assuming you then get experience at highly regarded employers. For example, once you have worked at a FAANG, no one cares if you went to a low ranked school.
But it's not. It gives a good indication that the applicant has many, if not all, of the characteristics I listed.
And for many non-specialist jobs (data entry, call center, executive assistants, etc.) there is no relevant training program or certification. Few people grow up hoping to work at a call center or do data entry, so they're not going to go to school for that.
Again, a 4-year degree does not guarantee success, but it tells an employer far more than they were "willing to spend $40-80K for a piece of paper." Many people want to go to school to learn about something they love, then they get out and need a job.
I think it's fair for a hiring person to seek out degree holders as a desirable criteria.
As it is right now, being an average human in a developed country doesn't pay because there are lots of average humans in developing countries who are begging for work harder than you do.
More and more the Internet makes me feel that the US somehow lost the cold war and it’s now a dystopian nightmare.
And yet the country is attracting talent more than it exports it!
Guaranteed student loans in combination with private college simply doesn't work.
The way you zone your cities is causing widespread social problems.
Arresting people for doing drugs doesn't rehabilitate them.
It's not a dystopia, it's just lots of short sighted policies that cause long term failures.
Well, the fact that they are third-tier already tells you that they won’t get some cushy job from the education by itself.
Are they necessarily doing it for the love of education? Probably not. But I suspect that that motivation is more likely to be found in them than the students at the top-tier institutions that will be welcomed by the open embrace of six-figure salaries and social status once they graduate.
Beyond that, if schools put a big warning label on their recruiting materials that said "EVEN AFTER YOU SPEND $200K TO ATTEND YOU WILL LIKELY NOT BE ABLE TO FIND A HIGH PAYING JOB" then sure, that would be fine. But that's not what they do. They allude, if only vaguely, to the value of education to one's career. Many people have gone and gotten these useless (financially) degrees because they have misconceptions about what the result will be. As I said, hopefully the market is correcting that issue as people become more aware of what they're getting.
And hey, like I said, there are people who come from rich families or who get full scholarships, and the calculus is different for them. But for everyone else, it's one thing to value education for it's own sake, and it's another to value education at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars (not including the opportunity cost of not working for four years or the interest on the loans to pay those hundreds of thousands of dollars). College is a huge, huge investment of money, and while I definitely value education, I don't think there's a valid argument to be made that any soft education at a low-tier university is worth its price tag.
can't wait for college to put out prospectuses that list out all the risk factors in dry and exhaustive detail (eg. https://personal.vanguard.com/pub/Pdf/p3141.pdf#page=4)
Medical doctors carefully regulate the number of new doctors to keep wages high. Its difficult to get into med school but when you graduate you'll likely get a medical doctor job.
Public school teachers do not regulate the number of new public school teachers at all, and as such the state U system in my state produces roughly twice as many ed degree holders as there are jobs. Assuming hiring system is perfect (which it is not, LOL) the bottom half of ed grads in my state have to find non educational work. Four years of "show up on time and do what you're told" makes them good waitresses and bartenders in my experience, but on a civilizational basis it seems an incredibly waste of money and talent.
Community College classes are MUCH cheaper, and are even more so if you don't take the class for credit (where I went, tuition was $20 for a 1 credit class for non-degree seekers. No that was not a typo, it was Twenty USD for the entire class).
Community College professors don't do research, so they are usually focused much more on teaching classes. I have actually known quite a few professors who are in actual industry and teach a class or two.
I took a Jazz Combo class every semester with a well known local musician. He enjoyed teaching the class because everyone wanted to be there (we were all adult non-degree seekers), and since it was on a weeknight, he wasn't gigging anyways so it was a nice bonus to his freelance work.
But to address your point:
> The problem with community colleges is that you completely miss out on any meaningful networking. As long as all the best students see it as beneath them, you'll have a hard time meeting people in a community college who can actually help your career
Since the instructor I had was a well known local musician, he actually called me up a few times for a gig, and I have done quite a bit of networking that way. I think you would be surprised just what type of networking oppritunities are actually are at a decent community college.
Like I said in my comment:
> I have actually known quite a few professors who are in actual industry and teach a class or two.
One of the best entry-level folks I have ever met we found this way. He is an incredibly hard and smart worker, but did not have the money to go to a four year university. So he went to community college, and a colleague of mine who taught there offered him a job as he was a student. Now he has a four year degree (he was able to pay his way through college with that job) and is one of the best contrbutors to that group.
Classic microeconomics vs macroeconomics problem. Individuals can always improve but you can't extend "just pull yourself up by your bootstraps harder" to an entire civilization. An individual benefits personally by going to Yale, if they can. You can't fix a national education system by making the official strategy telling kids their only hope is getting into Yale. Especially if there's an alternative that actually works for the masses, like CC.
CCs are mostly there either for cheap transfer credits, or technical programs for local industry; things like cad/cam, aviation tech, etc.
There were a lot of classes I saw (and some I took) at Universities that were just as bad, if not worse.
I would say they have a wide variety, much like universities. I have generally had a pretty good experience doing it for non-credit (i.e. education for it's own sake).
Many skills are not like computer programming. You're not learning physical therapy from coursera, or even something like human resources; some things you need others for to mentor, correct, guide, or provide facilities for.
However, many people are not in your situation. They have to work hard to get a good job and if they pick the wrong degree they will have to work even harder in the future. The education itself is not the problem, it's the unsustainable nature of getting a loan for a degree that does not empower you to pay the loan back.
In terms of education for its own sake, why is Coursera insufficient? Or Youtube? Or, for that matter, book clubs?
EDIT: didn’t see GPs caveat.
The other thing is the networking, I have plenty of former colleagues that own their gig, and plenty others that are CEOs, CTO, COOs
You can't quite match the atmosphere of a late night lab session where you finally get your assignment in a working state, the impromptu conversations, someone pitching his startup idea and showing a demo.
It's like saying that you're discouraging the next lottery winner by telling people that playing the lottery is a bad investment.
I kind of feel it may be a made up field to promote forms of Marxism and not something that actually contributes much to the body of human knowledge. Nothing entirely wrong with that either if it's something a person is into, it's just, well, we might actually be better off with less sociology students. The half baked and non realistic ideas that come out of that cause problems in the real world.
The reason I feel this is not from outside observation but because I spent a bunch of time in sociology classes many years ago. 4 as I recall. I wish I'd spent the time in extra math classes and I believe the world would be better off if people did.
*big caveat for hard sciences of course
Nowadays every single bloke demands free entertainment education without having to work for it.
The number of people going to college to increase their future potential earnings is a far, far larger group.