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Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

The government should make it illegal to require degrees to apply IMHO. If an employer can’t create a sufficiently good screening process that would select those who would have degrees anyways, then maybe they aren’t necessary.

They also need to stop gate keeping. Jobs like being an attorney inherently require some certification, which is fair. Some governments in the USA made it illegal to take the bar exam and become an attorney without going to law school. Same thing with doctors and Step 1/2.

If someone can pass without going to school, good for them. Massachusetts in particular is in clear collusion with schools, requiring school teachers to have masters degrees in education.

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It is an interesting idea.

The real problem though are the ridiculous cost of state run schools.

As someone who has been out of college for 20 years, I can't believe what my state school charges now.

When I graduated my school was a good value compared to private options. That was the whole point of a state school.

Now the same school cost 4X what it does and I don't know if I could even get in when up against so many brilliant Indian and Chinese students. I assumed when I went the goal of the institution was for a more educated population in the state. That was the point of the huge difference in price for instate tuition.

Now it seems like some kind of money making racket.

Afaik, state schools have lost a lot of budget from states (in inflation-adjusted terms) compared to pre-90s.

Consequently, they balance the books by taking on more foreign/out-of-state students (who they can charge much more).

At the core, though, it appears to be a supply and demand problem: there's a ton of demand for people who want to go to college, colleges don't have the resources (or interest?) to expand supply, and so they raise prices because they can.

State schools have also been wasting a fortune on gold-plated facilities. I was just at UCSD yesterday and it was ridiculously nice. This is not a responsible use of tuition and tax dollars. We need an austerity program. If that makes the state schools less attractive to top students and professors then so be it.

This is moreso a problem with government/not-for-profit budgetary processes and capex vs opex.

With government funding, it's use-it-or-lose-it. I.e. state legislature will definitely allocate it to something else next year, if they come in under-budget in a year.

Add on top of that that state schools have the NASA problem: they're effectively performing (to state legislature and donors) for their dinner. And big, splashy buildings (with dedication names!) impress both. And attract picky faculty and students.

With not-for-profit, facilities are one of the few allowed places you can dump excess cash.

I floated in another comment that government grant/loan programs should impose an ACA-style admin vs teaching cost cap on institutions for participation. Maybe for capex too?

For some domains, like most software jobs, it might work. In India, you sometimes see children manning pharmacies. It's not because of child-labour, but because dad/mom is away and someone needs to look after the shop. India has laws against this, but so rarely enforced that in effect, one can run a pharmacy without a degree. I dread to think of how many clinics in small towns are run by people without degrees. Heck, we have even had lawyers and judges practicing without degrees. I know only about a handful of such cases because some scandals they got involved in made it into news media. But who knows how many such people are practicing even now!

The natural evolution is employers pooling their recruiting criteria to not have a single company bare the burden. Then they outsource it, and you end up with private entities managing the qualification tests, and you're back to a system where you pay to get through the door.

We already have that for instance with employers requiring MS certification to be sysadmin with the full salary.

> We already have that for instance with employers requiring MS certification to be sysadmin with the full salary.

Hm, I’ve actually had good luck with specializing in Linux. Windows is a given, sure, but any time I’ve interviewed they glanced over my Windows experience and wanted to talk Red Hat.

What’s hilarious is cities like Washington DC going the other way and requiring degrees for child care while exempting current child care workers.

https://dcist.com/story/22/08/18/dc-child-care-workers-colle...

Wow they really want to make childcare unaffordable.

An alternative solution we had in the UK - I think it's still going but I'm not up to date - is the Open University. It was a government subsidised study at home program that let anyone really get a degree for modest amounts of money and that could be done part time while working. The education was actually good too.

(update still going but not super cheap - about £21k for a degree. I think it used to be more subsidised)

I can generally agree with lowering barriers of entry, even if there would be some social stigma of having a doctor who didn't go to school. My reservation would be around ethics classes, but I guess I just don't know if any of the exams for lawyers or doctors have a set of questions surrounding ethics.

There's an ethics exam you generally need to pass to become a lawyer: https://www.ncbex.org/exams/mpre

I agree. So many jobs have “bachelors degree” in the requirements. Doesn’t matter what kind, just have to have one.

I believe companies use this to screen out lower class applicants, because if it had to do with skills a specific degree would be required. For that reason, I think the practice should be prohibited.

Filtering by school and degrees are indeed effective, there is strong correlation in performance.

The entry to lower should be cost of education itself, the degree should be free/cheap enough for someone to obtain if they are technical wise qualified. Time spent on a subject is evidence of investment.

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