> recent graduate with a degree in cyber security
College is the problem! It should provide job relevant skills and education! Instead students are forced to study irrelevant garbage.
If this guy studied himself, he would save money, and had a few years of relevant experience by now.
This is part of the problem, not college in general - at least for this example. Cybersecurity is not an entry level career, and the degrees that focus on it are of dubious value to someone trying to become a security analyst/engineer/architect. Experience wins out over everything else.
Even worse for this young man is that any of the entry level jobs he might be trying to get have hundreds, if not thousands, of applicants. To get experience he would have needed to try and get a part time job while going to school (or work for the school itself doing something relevant to his desired career, many colleges employ students for A/V and tech support).
None of that is an issue with the college education, and even if he had been provided with "relevant" skills (assuming he wasn't) that wouldn't have given him any advantage over the sheer numbers that he's up against. There's plenty of companies that require a bachelor's degree at minimum for any kind of salaried position, and college is overall very useful for rounding out people to be better citizens, better voters, better community members, and better workers - the societal value is nothing to sneer at.
I tried to drop out of college in 2008-2009 and work to get some experience - all it did was drive home the fact that not having a degree was holding me back from starting a real career and not just working a job. Hiring and promotions went preferentially to people with degrees. Eventually I got a degree (in Economics) and then worked my way to being a Security Engineer at a FAANG company, but I wouldn't have gotten here without that BA because the intermediary steps were roadblocked by the need for a degree.
Does it make sense for some people to skip college and go straight into the workforce? Absolutely, but you can't assume to know beforehand who that's going to work out for and who it isn't'. Right now the subject of this article is unemployed but being support by his parents, that's exactly the type of person that should consider going to college because they have the necessary support network to weather a hiring market like the one we have now.
Colleges can't and shouldn't chase the latest industry fad, they should teach the fundamentals of whatever field and give you a mind apt to absorb and process more specific information.
When I started at university, it was because I wanted to learn things about computers and computing that I didn’t think an employer would pay me to learn. I added courses in philosophy and economics out of curiosity and avoided course that appealed to workplace relevance (primarily because I don’t want half the questions to be about what’ll appear on the exam).
And with a sample size of one, all of that is useful to me.
For everything that is wrong with academia, I’d put more of the blame on company administrations minmaxing for quarterly gains refusing to post trainee positions guiding people from school to the workforce. And the housing market pushing up entry salary expectations, and internet job boards for opening up an oversized funnel of applications for any junior position.
In all seriousness, maybe an institution like this would not be a bad idea, alongside universities rather than as a replacement.
The half life of software engineers is quite short. Even some of the brightest minds I met who went to some of the best schools ended up just being tourists in this industry -- flushed out and disillusioned after only a few years.
I don’t plan to stay in software for the rest of my life. Currently, my company develops knowledge engineering solutions, but in 5-10 years, I’d like to get some fresh air.
Nobody wants to explain why the CTO who fucked up big had such a CV.
College takes a lot of time and money. If you do this early in your career, it will hobble for decades.
Imagine you spend 30k on education, spend 3 years and get kicked out in final year, because you disagree with teacher. Or someone makes complain.
> Even today, some doors will stay closed for me, simply because... no formal degree
Degree is only needed for higher positions, those are not accessible to young people anyway. You can always get degree latter, it gets so much easier and cheaper, when you have experience . For me it was just a formality, I spend maybe like 200 hours total for my masters.