College became the default – Let's rethink that

Kind of like applying for a job restoring Native American artifacts and being asked tricky questions about artifacts discovered in Egypt 5 years ago. Sure, you might have noticed the story or even read a lot about it 5 years ago, but it's not going to be a part of your daily work. Different procedures, different materials, and different local laws? I guess you should get studying if you want this job! And really, I just wanted to see your problem solving style when I ask irrelevant questions!

But ya, I think it's fair to say that my degree helps me not take that sort of thing as a rejection of my intelligence or qualifications though. I don't feel lesser than. I just feel belittled by someone who doesn't put effort into their interviews, which is useful information if you're considering working with them.

1. The way I handled this was to insinuate on the resume that I had a degree. I went to a university for a couple years (before flunking out) and before that I did a couple summer classes at an extension program. Those add up to four years, and I point out that I studied computer science (which is true). If they don't outright ask that's not my problem. And if they do then I explain that something personal came up, and not completing it is one of my biggest regrets in life, but at this point I don't see how a degree would help my career blah blah blah.

This has only actually affected me once, and it's for a role I'm starting this week. The net effect is that my software engineering title can't have "Engineer" in it because I don't have an "Engineering degree".

3. A degree doesn't resolve that. I interview people every week for a role at my MAGMA company, most of whom have degrees, and most of whom act like they have impostor syndrome. Practice it. Do interviews for companies you don't expect to join just for the interview practice in a low-stakes setting. You'll get over it.

It likely wouldn't. What would help you with solving leetcode questions is just grinding leetcode questions. Taking an algorithm class years ago wouldn't help beyond your first attempt at the problems.

That said for all the other reasons you listed, getting a college degree is usually a good idea.

And everyone gets imposter syndrome, so I doubt college would help with that.

For me, I've found that my course-related knowledge provides a little more context than before, but ultimately I'm not really better at solving leet-code style questions. It hasn't resolved any imposter syndrome. I haven't noticed any difference in recruiting efforts.

I am very happy I completed my degree, it was an important goal for me. I think college is important because it results in more well-rounded individuals, with broader perspectives.

I don't think college should be viewed as a means for job-training. We are not our jobs, and I really think we need to find a way to stop treating people like their role in society is exclusively to work for 50 years and then go away.

This is excellent and taking lessons from the Swiss apprenticeship programs. Typically working with local companies to provide training, in return they get excellent labor, and the labor pool is far better off without any student loans or burden of spending 5 years in college.

Not that there aren't other paths, or non-degree-gatekept jobs with those things. But they are harder and fewer and becoming increasingly so.

Programming is one of the few prestigious, highly paid jobs left that doesn't have a pretty hard req on having a degree to get into. That's why I do it. But yes I've also run into all the things you mention.

Anyway, in large measure, we are only talking how college is not for everyone because it's so expensive. It's fine to have alternatives but education needs to be more accessible to those that want it.

In our company (and my previous too BTW) I was strongly advocating working on real problems during the interview. I find it really troubling that the industry still sticks to this outdated way of interviewing (I refer to Leetcode) instead of: A. Having accreditation which would require renewal after X years B. Having other types of competency checks

I really don't understand how Leetcode is superior to let's say Coderpad or Codeinterview.io (I am not affiliated with either of them).

These tools actually pretty much allow you to set up a relevant coding exercise in the candidate's preferred language and framework, and it only takes a few minutes to customize their templates to the candidate's experience and the interviewer's imagined coding problem.

Just yesterday I set up a React coding problem in just below an hour, which allowed me to ask relevant questions about: language syntax, state management, routing, code organization, system performance, error handling, and data organization among others.

Isn't that the end goal here? To ask relevant questions from the candidate so that we make sure his skills match the imagined role and/or project?

Based on all this above, if I would be back to interviewing now, I would generally take it as a signal of a broken organization, lack of clarity about the role/project in the company, if they would shove a Leetcode/Codility/Hackerrank coding problem first in my face without asking.

I'm not discrediting your experience but I've never had any issues on this front. I went to college for ~3 years before dropping out because I didn't see the point in continuing and I've never had any issues getting a job in tech. I've also far outpaced my peers (geographically and friends) when it comes to salary so I'm struggling to figure out what the difference is. Potentially we are going after different jobs or want different jobs. On the recruiter-front, I have recruiters in my inbox 24/7 pestering me. I don't see recruiters reaching out as a measure of how good of a developer someone is (also almost every external recruiter is trash), it just means you got put on a mailing list at some point. I believe you when you say your friends with similar/same experience get asked back more than you do but I'm hesitant to automatically assume it's because of college (due to my lived experience). I have only interviewed at 1 place that I can remember that I actually was interested in getting a job at which ended in them saying they weren't interested (though I've only worked at 4 companies over 11+ years and interviewed about 6-8 times total, the other offers weren't ones I was interested in taking).

For #2 yes, I could see that being an issue but it's not something I'm looking to do so I don't really care

For #3, everyone feels this and college doesn't change it. Interviews are notoriously terrible on the whole and serve as an ego boost to the interviewer more often than they actually tell you if someone would be a good developer.

> 1. /../ they have recruiters beating down their doors while I barely get emails back.

I have recruiters beating down my doors. Because of job experience. Unless they assume I finished college just because linkedin says I went for N years.

> 2. If you want to move to another country, a degree will more than likely be part of your visa requirements. Even if it isn't, it would absolutely help in a points based system.

I was able to get multiple O-1 (special ability) visas in USA without a college degree.

> 3. I still get imposter syndrome

Me too. But if you were hired then the company thinks you can do the thing. Just do the thing.

edit: It is very likely the things that enabled me to do #2 also unlock #1. To this I can't offer much more than "Do interesting things and make sure people know about them"

These exist, but the problem is the jobs are not the good and neither is the pay. You need a lot of certification and training, which is time consuming and costs money.

Many low-skilled young and middle-aged men are more content with an easy retail job or just living with parents or with friends or with girlfriend than going down the apprentice route. It's sad that America is going down this route, but I don't see any way out of it.

Natural aptitude to a certain extent is required, but if you are coding you probably have it. Then it is practice: there is nothing easier than a question you already answered in practice and you recognise the shape.

So for the purposes of points 1 and 2, college degrees are bullshit harmful things. So having a harder time getting jobs and visas are identical. Yes, you get little brownie points for a college degree, but you used to get the exact same little brownie points for a high school degree. What happened? It's a filter, nobody gives a shit about what degree you have in an ultimate sense, plenty of places see college-degree only as insufficient, guys saying what you just said but about a master's, or a PhD, or a post-doc.

What this is is a rat race. They want you to be a rat, and race. To do so, they say they'll only take the rats with under a certain time. But if many rats make that time, the time is reduced. Then as the rats really race more and more the times they individually have to make to make the cut keep falling and falling. Also, keep in mind you get paid for working but nothing for studying, in fact you pay for studying, or parents pay (same thing, the benevolence that is for you is spent). So the rats racing means the guys setting up the rat race--the rats who won in the past, often--get more work all the time from the racing rats in exchange for less and less cheese of their own. So by demanding college degrees and being shitty to people who don't have them--all the things you describe are vulgar fuck-yous from employers for not having raced hard enough as a rat. What do you get for racing harder? Well if you do well enough, you get a "chapita". A chapita means badge, like you get badges in bags of fried crisps sometimes if you're very lucky because only a third contain them. These badges are very powerful, superhero badges that give you magical powers of invisibility and flying through the air, but superpowers. Real superpowers, or they better be, because these chapitas are morally equivalent to college degrees, and those

They both say you're special, now it's true the college degree is letter-sized, so they take up more area, and they have more letters in them, everyone but me says they're prettier than the chapita, but I say WAIT, that chapita is printed in color, good drawing of real art, it's got a metal back, it's got plastic on the front so it doesn't look shitty if it gets wet, and you can attach it to your clothes! You can go around with that chapita everywhere you go. And as for the powers, they both have the same superpower granting ability because they both SAY you have that power! And in fact the chapita superpower, invisibility or flying through the air, is a much better power than the college degree, which is that you've got a major, and IMPLIES you have more powers.

Now it's true that perhaps you STOLE your chapita from its true owner! You didn't buy the bag of fried crisps yourself and open it with your own hands, and eat the crisps one by one without any falling to the floor, slowly eating them and enjoying them, until finding the chapita in a moment of beautiful merit! You STOLE the chapita from its true owner, you stole those powers, you do not deserve it, you are stealing someone else's invisibility! Or you bought it, that's just wrong, you're supposed to buy the fried crisps and have GOOD LUCK OF YOUR OWN.

But the college degree is no different because tons of people cheat their asses off, leading to learning literally nothing[1]. And some people just buy college degrees outright, like pay $400 and they email it to you, or OK they fedex it but you pay for the fedex, if you're stupid and pay $400. If you're smart you can ask the fried crisp company what software they use (and pirate it obviously) and design your own letter-sized college degree. Or fuck it, just write COLLEGE DEGREE [YOUR NAME] on a page in a notebook, real big, look at it, be proud of yourself. Now let's turn the page to the real work.

Leetcode? Leetcode sucks. Not leet. So it has a few different functions, so first it's a way to get workers to work for nothing to "apply" to a job where they can earn money. That's good! Gets the boss much better terms ie. more submissive workers more afraid of getting fired because then they have to waste more money to get another job, or "reeducate" to get another chapita wasting more resources, becoming poorer and more indebted and more desperate, good things all around. That's the first part, worker impoverishment.[3] Then, to make you feel stupid. You say, "I can't solve this shit"--it's true you can't, it's very elitist in that regard, I've never met anybody who can solve this kind of problem from nothing. Well there's some math wizzes, like Math Olympiad guys, there's some, but they are gluing together clever things a lot of the time. So what people do is they look it up. Then, to brag by getting lots of internet points, notice leetcode is a point system? You add up the points? Try to get a lot of points on a high score? You can't just solve one problem to get a good leetcode score, you have to solve lots. And there's usually a story in the media at some point about the top leetcoder getting hired due to his leetcode score, like with Github or Kaggle.

Then you have to "grind leetcode" for interviews. Well you do, I don't, but you do. You have to know all the tricks, and sometimes be able to come up with something clever in the moment. And so then they tell you it's meritocratic, FAANG just cares about these tests. Well what this does is produce lots and lots of rejects. This is good, rejects generally maintain a highly positive impression of the places that rejected them, blaming themselves for their failure (you get little brownie points for self-blame like talking about getting fired in suck-uppy terms), and these companies don't have to pay absolutely anything to the rejects. In fact, they tell the rejects to apply again in a few years. Plus--well they're stupid for buying into their own bullshit like this they ought to remember their lies--but the companies then say, oh, we're the absolute best, we're the select few, you're in the club, we're special. Well to be fair these filters do get you clever people in general, in most ways. But on the other hand no true dropouts. So Tesla wouldn't hire Tesla.[2]

So for the same three reasons you gave for being unhappy, contrariwise, be happy, be very happy. I believe people act collectively, if you make a choice others will make the same choice with you, if you had made all those painful sacrifices to get a degree, which toward the end are about proving you submissively do stupid assignments against your own interests, well more people would have done that with you and you would not have gotten ahead. Employers would have asked for more chapitas, visas would have asked for more chapitas, leetcode would be a little easier but you'd also be worse at it, and you'd write the same comment with Master's in place of Bachelor's, you'd actually make lower wages, and you would have done harm to the other rats. You would feel worse about yourself, especially because you would have wasted all that money on tution.

[1] You learn literally nothing. Yeah you remember some words and google and you're good at cheating now and plagiarizing, OK cheating is great for learning to cheat I'll admit that, and at elite colleges the cat-and-mouse game of cheating is hardcore and a great preparation for professional cheating ie finance, consulting and medicine. It's also good prep for catching cheaters, which is important in becoming a teacher that needs to prevent cheating, so cheating in the School of Education makes sense. You could have a cheating class if you wanted. In one class I was the only one who could actually do the work (I actually design and implement algorithms), and I flunked. I learned a lot in that class though, not cheating is the real way of cheating. You fucking learn. I didn't cheat, I saw the assignment they wanted in a document way in the back of one of the class books but I just wasn't going to copy it and hand it in, wasn't going to get a TA to just give me the answers either in "office hours", just wasn't going to cheat because it's not just about the school's rules, it's about my rules too. So basically everyone who passed cheated, and this class was a requirement for the most prestigious major in the world.

[2] I will say I have a remarkably favorable impression of Elon Musk, partly because I view people I do good things for more favorably, like victims I've protected from crime, or in this case, because I acted to protect his capital in a company he funded, where I got a great job by going around their filter and showing up and working my ass off until they took me in long-term. The wage was so high and conditions were so good. So back to protecting his capital, I didn't know it was him funding the company. But, Tesla wouldn't hire Tesla, not through the normal pipeline at any rate. His companies are huge and they care about chapitas.

[3] Every piece of bitchwork (meaning "homework" you do it for free to impress the potential employer, who is assigning it, in order to get hired) reduces your salary by 3%. Always charge for time, not completion, or apply to other places instead with the time you would spend on it.

Probably an unpopular take, but you could lie, essentially 0 risk (especially if you’re even a little clever about it).

This glosses over two World Wars and a massive haul of natural resources and confiscated land.

The data from the time shows little difference between Canada and the USA in high school attendance. Canada might have even had a slight edge. And now Canada is considered most educated nation on earth, according to the OECD, approaching 70% of the population having a tertiary education, compared to just 40% stateside.

If high school was the significant factor, why has Canada never really become all that significant of a power? Several European powers are more powerful than Canada despite their supposed lack of education. It is questionable if Canada would even be strong as it is if it weren't America's neighbour.

> I think if we want to educate more people we need to take a long hard look at how tertiary education works in the US.

I guess the first question is: What is Canada getting out of it? Certainly the top promise the tertiary education system likes to trumpet – higher incomes – hasn't materialized. Canadians make far less money than their American counterparts in almost all cases, not to mention that incomes have been stagnant as far back as the data goes.

I don’t think the university made me much wiser than I would had been at a less expensive public school. And I think I could have learned many things on my own based on my abilities at the time.

However, having a degree from an elite university is an effective signal that you made it through the filter of their college admissions process. This is what companies like to see.

Since those admissions were based on SAT and other metrics, the students they select are among the brightest and regardless of the quality of education, they will do well in the world. This reinforces the value of attending an elite university and feeds more competition for the spots. This is similar to a shoe company sponsoring an athlete. The custom shoe might be better than what the athlete had before and maybe they even provide training from world class coaches, but they’re not just sponsoring anyone. You’re not getting that shoe without already proving something.

My earnings have benefitted from the school network and at the price charged the network is probably still a net benefit for me, without accounting for the financial aid.

So overall, it’s a game, but worth playing. There’s likely a better system we could devise to signal intelligence and ability that didn’t rely on diplomas from 4 year schools. However, the network effects of colleges cannot be replaced in the same manner. For that we have to consider whether these effects are disadvantaging others and worth perpetuating.

China, for example, is limited by quality education being concentrated in first-tier cities and substandard education being widespread in the countryside: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-05-03/poorly-ed...

That's not how most people think of China.

The questioning of the value of university education also coincides with an ageing cohort of men with university educations they got when men dominated university attendance being replaced by women who now dominate university graduating classes. Hmmm.

Not, say, two world wars in Europe?

This isn't a call to educate fewer people. It's to educate more efficiently which, when done right, will reach more people.

For smart kids, High School is basically just a grade-grubbing competition to determine who gets to go to the best college. This mostly gets in the way of actual learning. I think bright students would learn much more if, after 9th grade, they went directly to university, with admission determined by lottery.

For all other students, High School is basically just prison. They already know how to read, write, and do arithmetic. They know that the earth goes around the sun and that America invented freedom and fought in half a dozen wars. They know everything that they're ever going to remember learning in school or that they'll use afterward. But, for some reason, they're forced to spend years doing stoichiometry and reading old books that they're never going to appreciate. A liberal arts education is valuable, even if it's not directly applicable to daily life, because it can elevate the spirit. But can you elevate the spirit by force? I think not.

High school was proven important (if we just take that part of your argument as a given), so therefor college must be? By that reasoning, I don't see what makes the highschool cutoff "shortsighted" and the college cutoff correct. Why not four more years for a postgraduate degree?

Favorable demographics, abundant natural resources, a relatively safe geographic position between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, culture, and two World Wars were surely greater factors than how many people went to high school.

I'm not advocating for switching schools 100% to such platforms, I see the problems, but I do believe that perhaps half on those platforms would be an easy and large win over traditional education.

Citation definitely needed on that one, as I think most casual observers would assume that being destroyed by the most catastrophic war the world ever saw ... twice ... would have more to do with it than some long forgotten fashion amongst British intellectuals.

As part of doing that, we should take a long hard look at primary and secondary education too. U.S. public school K-12 is a disaster, and modern educational trends are only making the picture worse and more unequal rather than less.

It's not clear that going to college lets you win wars.

It definitely depends on how you are determining the dominate superpower, GDP is certainly important but it’s not determinative.

If there were a single factor determining a single dominate superpower I think throughout history it is more closely related to the World’s Reserve Currency, and the US Dollar didn’t succeed the British Pound as the Reserve Currency. Though not official until Bretton Woods Agreement in 1944 with 44 nations, it is generally understood this was a concession made in a backroom deal to get the US to enter the War in 1941 while Hitler was actively bombing London.

There are a lot of people that believe, I’ll call them speculators but maybe fair to call them conspiracy theorists, that the economic impact of Covid is leading to a change in the Reserve Currency because the IMF called for "A New Bretton Woods Moment". I’m not sure that will happen, but if it does, I’m certain what that would mean is a passing of the torch of the dominate superpower.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/2000-years-economic-history...

Plenty of countries (Germany, France, Japan, etc.) are only slightly poorer than the US per capita, but have much smaller land area/population and therefore smaller GDP. Size matters!

College "for the masses" today seems to be less about getting an enriching (in any sense but financially) education and more about purchasing a competitive edge in the job market. It's half grift, half class filter. However, as you say, I can't really argue that the ticket isn't worth the price.

The solution seems to require reducing demand for livable jobs and increasing the liquidity of the labor pool, i.e. giving workers more freedom to develop themselves and allocate their labor efficiently. Universal healthcare is an absolute must for this, and today's increased productivity also ought to pay for some version of UBI. The corporate capture of America's government is not only increasing wealth inequality---it's also gutting America's economic future, and causing all these other symptoms that people tend to analyze in a vacuum.

It's probably too late.

That is your anecdotal experience - one person in one place and time -but the data shows, very strongly, that people with college educations earn far more over their careers.

  “I think there’s legitimate criticism” of the growth in hiring of administrators and other nonacademic employees, said King. “At the same time, you can’t lay all of the responsibility for that on the universities.”

  There are “thousands” of regulations governing the distribution of financial aid alone, he said. “And probably every college or university that’s accredited, they’ve got at least one person with a major portion of their time dedicated to that, and in some cases whole office staffs. These aren’t bad things to do, but somebody’s got to do them.”

For instance, the office of student affairs will handle student emotional issues so that I don't have to. I'm not trained in that, I'm an academic, so I prefer that they handle these things. If they didn't exist, I'd have to handle every single medical issue my students have, and I have hundreds of students. Better to standardize the process for everyone, which saves times but creates a bureaucracy that takes personnel and costs money. I think the programmers can appreciate the rationale, we do it all the time in designing code.

Or take the office of research, which has a whole department to help me with my grant writing. It costs a lot to run that office but it saves us all a lot of time and makes our grants more successful, which benefits everyone including students. Get rid of that office and maybe you'd have more budget for academics employees, but they would each be stretch thinner than they would with the office of research.

Taken as a whole I appreciate the support that our non-academic administrative and professional employees provide us. Sure it can be a pain sometimes but my job is easier on balance.

But I agree that there is probably also a lot of waste too.

Signalling remains incredibly important. Employers want to know that their junior employees are capable of overcoming adversity. There are many ways to check for that, but the easiest is check if they've succeeded in a stressful environment before. That's effectively all a degree is for most jobs.

No, you don't need a college degree to get a white collar job, but convincing employers that you are the type of person who overcomes adversity is much harder without the degree.

As far as the price, last time I checked getting a college education is still statistically the best investment you can make. The price is increasing because people are willing to pay since they recognize how much it will add to their earning potential.

However, my son wanted to be an engineer, so he learned calculus and got into a well-regarded engineering program. My mother is pretty well off and she's been funding his education. Now he's about to graduate with his degree and become an ME.

My feeling is that there are a number of occupations that meet a couple of criteria:

- you actually need both a highly-specialized education - there is a certificate that you can only get through formal education - there are jobs waiting for successful applicants - the student in question has a good chance at succeeding - there is some underlying support for the student (in the case of loans, this would tighten up the question about success and and the kinds of jobs available)

I believe in the utility of a deep humanities education, but the US university system makes that ruinously expensive to the point where I more or less agree with your sentiment. It sucks that "necessity for work" has become the only reasonable way of deciding to pursue deeper education.

you've got your whole life to work! it's valuable to take some time as an adult (or almost-adult) to learn random stuff in some depth; this will be hard for 99% of us to do once we've got the rest of the real world to deal with.

(now, if we could restructure life to allow for a more lesiurely pace, that would be great. but until then, college is a pretty precious "out" from the rat race imo.)

Degrees are statistically worth it, salary-wise. Just don't go to an expensive college. There are a few degrees where it may matter, but for the vast majority of subjects the expensive colleges are NOT worth the premium. Find a boring reliable but inexpensive college, hopefully near inexpensive lodging. Some states make it easy to go to a community college for the first half of the education.

It's not that at all IME. That's graduate school. What degree are you talking about? Colleges generally provide diverse, well-rounded educations.

Tuition + housing at UMass is $30K/yr.

$51,574 invested into the S&P 500 in 2011 would be worth more than $225,000 today.

BU enrollment was 32,727 in 2011, and is currently 33,678. I'm surprised it hasn't gone up considerably more.

((79760/51574)^(1/11) - 1) * 100 = 4%

In 20 more years:

79760 * 1.04^10 = $118000

Your guess is pretty good.

I think this may be part of it, but there were also a lot of manufacturing jobs that left the US around this time as well. Many towns become shells of their former selves resulting in a lot of people never find a better job. A prevailing idea was that a college degree would help insulate against such things.

This is a really good point---to some extent we can see college as individiuals reacting to working environments---"inefficiently" in that it doesn't solve the problem, but it solves it for them---meanwhile eventually society handles it as a whole.

I think there can also be a "prestige" thing going on---jobs that aren't prestigious can become less well-paid (relatively), because those with prestige can at some point say, "Why are we paying these undesireables all this money, can't we bring in some immigrants/subsidize substitutes/outsource?" Which means that it's quite possible that certain trades could become much more valuable, very quickly---as we've seen in nursing, for instance.

A friend of mine runs an industrial insulation business (install, removal, maintenance, etc) and uses union staffing for the contracts he wins. He works about 2 hours a day taking the calls he needs and arranging inspections for bidding on jobs. Makes as much as a software engineer at a FAANG.

Another friend is a general contractor who has connections to custom cabinet shops and he sells home renovations and is getting 30% margin on high end jobs. Did all the jobs for about 10 years so bidding is easy for him and he doesn't lift a thing except the gas cap when he's filling his 100k truck.

Colleges are far more than just a text book with a certification at the end.

I come from a family that immigrated and worked in trades (cooking, baking, manufacturing, etc.) and I'd like to think I have a great deal of respect for those professions. But the pay is often poor and the work is hard and risky. A radical rethink of how we treat skilled labor and the long term well-being of the people who do it is required before I actively encourage anyone who's not already expressing interest to go into a trade.

The alternative is a top-down approach that requires policy-makers to pick winner & loser professions. Imagine being given the task of investing tax-payers money into incentive programs for trades/professions? How do you know which ones will be viable in 10 years time and which ones will be obsolete?

I'm not recommending a fully market-ist approach. But market forces can help appropriately price scare resources (professional services, in this case).

I'm a huge fan of the comic, but there's a difference between discussing the worth of having art at all, discussing how we make art, and discussing whether every wall everywhere should be covered in art on expensive canvas.

There are two possible reasons for universal college: first, societal ones, where we presume that everyone going to college is good for society. In those cases, it must be justified as such, and crucially must be paid for by society (or viewed as a social duty).

The other case is to benefit the individuals that to go to college. In that case, you have to make the argument that going to college is a better option than not for (essentially) everyone as individuals. This is the tack that the US is taking.

None of this involves the wonders of carrying on a conversation unbroken since Plato. For one, many people don't have a liberal college education, they have a STEM education which, while enforcing some level of humanities exposure, views them as annoying requirements—this is both at the institutional and the student level. For another, most people think they're going to college to get a better job.

Using that comic to justify universal college, is like using a biography of Michelangelo to insist every mason should learn how to sculpt the Pieta. Some people just want to build walls. And we need walls.

With that said, I think we're poorly equipping high school students to make those evaluations as to if/when that's a smart choice for them. I support the argument for more trade schools and apprenticeships because for a number of folks, myself included in my early post-high school years, going to college straight out of HS would have been a giant waste of time and money. I wouldn't have taken it seriously, I didn't understand what I really wanted from life, only that I was "good at computer." High school guidance councilors are spending time and energy on getting you testing well, getting into school, because "it's good", but not once did I get counsel on whether that would have been right for me, or if there was a route I could take later on in life where I could take a path towards short term success that would give me the security to figure out "what do I want to do" after I'd learned enough about who I was.

Try doing some liberal arts grad school, it will quickly disabuse you of the naïve wishful thinking that's reflected in this comic. It's way more insanely competitive and credential-driven than even the hardest STEM fields. Undergrad doesn't count, it's easy mode.

A trained engineer/physicist should be able to approach any new problem in a disciplined and systematic way, which opens up a lot of career options. This is probably true for other disciplines as well, but that is outside my wheelhouse.

If you see engineers and physicists in random but still good careers, like software, consulting, finance - that would indicate their education succeeded rather than failed.

We could talk about the "fairness" of this all century, but for traversing in 2022; focus on your successes, not your shortcomings. It's harder, but not impossible to have a successful career without a degree.

> Not having an four year degree as a man in the dating world is heavily frowned upon.

Sometimes I've talked about what was studied in school or what my profession is (that's an important relationship anchor), but I don't believe I've ever been asked about a 4-year-degree (whatever that's supposed to tell you). This just isn't practical and certainly not common.

I'm not doubting your experience, I'm just saying I don't think it is hypocritical in the way you're implying. A lot of women, especially in coastal cities, have a degree. So they think their dating pool should be people with degrees. It's not rooted in double standard, they are just severely overestimating the value of their degree.

And at the core, the reason a lot of women get such shit degrees is that other options like various trades are not as accessible for them. There are a lot of reasons for that - it's a complicated issue that I don't think can be boiled down to just misogyny or just misandry (or just both for that matter).