Over 4M Gen Zers are jobless–experts blame worthless degrees and broken promises | Hacker News Reader

Over 4M Gen Zers are jobless–experts blame worthless degrees and broken promises

fortune.com

11 pointsamichail9 comments

Couldn’t be massive cost-cutting efforts in corporations preparing for a future with a skeleton crew of humans maintaining an ocean of thinking machines, could it? Add in an impending recession (or depression if you like), and you’ve got a recipe not to hire many inexperienced workers no matter what their educational background.

I’m old enough to remember the same type of argument playing out when corporate executives sent US jobs overseas in the 80s and blamed the workers then too.

"Here at Craptech we are facing a huge labor shortage of highly skilled workers that we can hire for the very low wages and nearly nonexistent benefits that we are offering. The situation is so desperate that we are considering doing anything in our power that does not involve increasing wages or benefits, or any kind of employee training."

> “In many cases, young people have been sent off to universities for worthless degrees which have produced nothing for them at all,” the political commentator, journalist and author, Peter Hitchens slammed colleges last week.

If humanities or social science degrees are now (economically) worthless, it would be interesting to examine why. Have universities failed to make courses of study intellectually challenging? Are students cheating their way through? Do employers no longer understand the value of employees who are skilled at reading, writing, and critical thinking?

It looks like the most popular non-professional track degrees in the UK are Psychology, Economics, and History. Is it not useful to have employees who have some understanding of how people think, feel and interact, how money and markets work, or how and why things happen over time?

Given that they're giving prominence to a podcast by noted clickbaity contrarirans Vine and Hitchens I'm not sure how much credence I'd give this article.

An entire generation that demanded easy degrees that were all worthless because it was easy to get massive student loans for dumb degrees that required no rigor at all.

They leave college with a piece of paper while they can barely do high school math, evidenced by the fact that they signed a loan for 6 figures without actually thinking about it.

this is a bit unfair — a degree is required in almost any professional context.

I don’t have that piece of paper and while I’ve done OK in tech, there are structural barriers to advancement without a degree.

the majority are simply following what the system dictates. deviating from that system is difficult and not for the faint of heart.

> they can barely do high school math, evidenced by the fact that they signed a loan for 6 figures without actually thinking about it

That is false and is at best a flippant assessment. Society places substantial pressure on high schoolers to attend university, especially in the middle class, and the loans were presented to them as an option commonly taken by your peers. At 18-ish, peer pressure can be massive and, tied in with the uncertainty about the near future, any revealed life path can seem perfectly acceptable.

> an entire generation demanded easy degrees

This is also false, an entire generation wanted to move forward with life and college seemed like the correct choice to them (regardless of if it was actually a correct choice). They didn’t demand easy degrees.

I blame tight money policies designed to slow the economy to prevent inflation, plus, more recently, a whole bunch of bad non-monetary (trade and fiscal) policy from the administration that has led us to the point where we are probably nearing the end of the first quarter of a major recession.

But, yeah, for Gen Z its “worthless degrees” and for older people in tech its “AI”, and for every other group there is some other micro-explanation, and the huge macro-facts that we know from historical experience drive (un)employment are mysteriously not having their normal effects.

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