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Comment by Manuel_D | Hacker News Reader

I think 2 years of schooling and 2 years of working an becoming financially self-sufficient would better prepare people for adulthood than 4 years of schooling. Software development, electrical engineering, and plenty of other tech jobs could be taught in 2 years. Perhaps not to the level where people are contributing to cutting edge research - graduate and PhD programs still have their place. But I think many people are interested in an education that primarily serves to develop employment opportunities.

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> I think 2 years of schooling and 2 years of working an becoming financially self-sufficient would better prepare people for adulthood than 4 years of schooling. Software development, electrical engineering, and plenty of other tech jobs could be taught in 2 years.

Engineering programs are widely considered to be difficult to complete in 4 years. Where do you get 2 years?

Also, after my sophomore year in college, I was not nearly well-educated enough (whatever 'enough' means); I would wildly approximate that I learned 70% in the last two years. Much of freshman year was just adjusting to college, learning how to write at a college level, etc.

But most importantly, you are still focusing on college as job training, and as I imply in the GGP, specific skill training is just a side benefit. If corporations want job training, they can provide and pay for it themselves. College for the student, not the corporation.

One, eliminating a bunch of required courses not relevant to the job would make things go faster. Sure, things like humanities are fun but for many people getting an education it's not worth the cost-benefit analysis. Plenty of people taking on debt going to college to improve their future prospects would be better served

Two, I don't think someone needs a full engineering degree to become productive. Writing my own compiler was a blast, and gave me some real insight into how computers work under the hood. But if our goal is to improve the earning potential of young adults with the minimum financial burden, I wouldn't be teaching compilers. I'd be teaching how to spin up cloud services, the network stack, and modern web dev.

College is for the student. But it also costs the student a boatload of money. If we want to give the student the best bang for their buck, approaching it as a form of job training would be more effective. Sure, companies could pay for that training. But they're not and colleges fulfill this role, and insist on tacking on a bunch of other requirements that don't really do much to help the student's job prospects.

You get a lot of writing and analytical reading practice in humanities. Both of which are generally very useful in modern corporations.

> humanities are fun but for many people getting an education it's not worth the cost-benefit analysis

Humanities are more important than STEM. Humanities deal with the world and yourself on issues that aren't quantifiable, which is most of the issues in life and in the world, including at work.

> if our goal is to improve the earning potential of young adults with the minimum financial burden

Again, life is much, much more than jobs - you are much, much more than what you do for some corporation - and early jobs are the least important ones. It's all so absorbed in the corporate perspective: your only value, your existence, is for serving the corporation. And it puts people permanently in that class, as servents rather than as the powerful - the citizens of a democracy, to whom the corporations report.

I think if more people studied the humanities, it would be brazenly obvious. It's craven on the part of the powerful and corporations.

Note: 4 years of college is probably 2.5 years of school, not 4. It runs 36 weeks a year and unless you are doing something rigorous, it mostly doesn't require a 40 hour week, except in short bursts.

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