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Comment by intended | Hacker News Reader

The arms race itself is a recent evolution that required a few conditions to kick off.

The debate on this will be never ending, and however much I personally value the benefits of international trade, the movement of well paying blue collar roles is the initiating factor.

This arms race didn’t exist here back in the 60s and 80s for example. However it was alive and well in Asia and the Indian subcontinent.

That runaway competition for certification is just… enshrined in the socio-economic fabric there. That structure is why there are so many doctors / engineers and graduates from the region.

If anything, it’s remarkable how long it took to get started here. The upside is that if there ever a chance to slow it down, it’s now.

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but this is a very natural evolution though right?

i mean i dont know if its indeed recent or not i feel like maybe it just is what the market is demanding.

maybe the market didnt require to be education to make a living wage back then. and maybe now it does thus the race.

i mean you cant tell people not to get educated or moreso not to make as much money as you can right.

The market isn't demanding education in the sense of workers knowing a lot. The market is demanding education in the sense of having a degree.

You can check that by seeing how many employers actually care about what people remember from their university days. In the majority, it's fine for people to forget what they learned immediately after the exam.

(Of course, there are exceptions.)

The market (firms) needs to filter candidates.

The best paying jobs that remain require learning and not just high school diplomas.

So that’s what people are incentivized to obtain. Even if they hate it.

Like any metric, eventually people focus on the metric not the aspect it’s meant to measure.

Eventually everyone has a degree, so the previous filter threshold resulted in too many candidates.

The threshold is moved higher, which means that there is now a glut of candidates who are not considered for the roles they are aiming for.

They look for the next best options.

Repeat ad Infinitum and now you have college degree requirements for roles that don’t really need them.

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To be honest, this is a place where GenAi can actually help, without turning into some nightmare of evals or soulless chat bots.

Half the time I’m wondering if I should just quit and build this or figure out how to do it within the firm.

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