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> "Really the problem is that there just aren't enough jobs for college grads, and the jobs that are available, employers naively put bars of experience, completely ignoring a mass of very competent workers."

If your premise is true and any employer with competitors did this systematically they would be subjecting themselves to a significant competitive disadvantage. You're postulating that employers in general voluntarily ignore their own best interests. Some companies may be this mismanaged, but suggesting that the market as a whole is this incompetent is quite a stretch.

Rather, it's likely that employers have some incentive to put up these seemingly arbitrary bars of experience. Perhaps they're mitigating risks (e.g. of high turnover) or they have trouble filtering the candidate pool to a manageable size with other qualifications.

There are companies that do a wide variety of nonsensical things and survive because of other qualities. How many of us long for sane managers that understand estimates, fighting the employee's corner - even if just so that they're a sustainable resources - and the basics of meaningful targets?

One aspect of competition is selection pressure, but the other is diversity. You're assured of reaching an asymptote with your threat environment in order to survive for any significant length of time, but it's perfectly possible for a majority of the market to do very stupid things if they all think much alike.

Heck, if the market were that adaptive, insane companies would be getting squished left and right.

>One thing I might be in support of is more of a compromise: cut out more of the atrociously poor general education in exchange for a policy of something like 1 career degree (Business, Science, Engineering), 1 arts degree (Everyone must double major). But this would likely have the drawback of students having to grind through a subject they're not interested in and are never going to apply in practice.

I would argue the opposite.

Learning how to write is essential for everyone. Of course, I would also argue that learning how to program is essential for everyone. Now, we aren't all going to be Knuth or Shakespeare, but... you are going to be at a severe disadvantage, really, no matter what field you choose, if you can't do those things at all.

You learn the basics of those two things? You are going to do okay, no matter what your degree was in.

You learn the basics of those two things? You are going to do okay, no matter what your degree was in.

A friend of mine didn't know what to study while in school so his dad told him to study English. He said no matter what, knowing how to read and write properly is a good thing. At this point my friend has worked in IT for years, and is now the CTO of a decently sized company.

Ironically, my dad's advice to me was that college-level English is completely useless, maybe even counterproductive, and I'd be better off doing almost anything else with my time. He had a master's in English and made his living doing training (ie, public speaking) and writing books (over 40 of them).

His take is that communication absolutely critical. But what college English courses teach you is not so much how to communicate as how to bludgeon readers with how terribly erudite you are by using longwinded, stilted, and dense verbiage. ie, they teach you the exact wrong way to write.

>His take is that communication absolutely critical. But what college English courses teach you is not so much how to communicate as how to bludgeon readers with how terribly erudite you are by using longwinded, stilted, and dense verbiage. ie, they teach you the exact wrong way to write.

Yeah, but I was talking about the "gen-ed" classes. I would expect gen-ed English to be, you know, basic. I would expect graduate courses in English to be more about writing as art, which is rather less generally useful.

Yeah. I think being able to write is one of those things that acts as a multiplier on your other skills; It's not worth all that much by itself, but knowing how to write and having some other skill is vastly more valuable than just having that other skill.

Right now? I think just programming pays pretty okay, even when you don't have much else... but I don't think that will last forever. I think in the future, having basic programming skills won't get you a good job by themselves, but basic programming skills plus something else will be vastly more valuable than just that other skill alone.

The presence of bullshit skill requirements is an indication of supply:demand mismatch. Employers only do that when there are too many qualified candidates and they need fast ways to reduce the potential pool.

You can re-state your point that "there aren't enough jobs for college grads" as "there are fewer jobs that require a college degree than people with college degrees"

Society needs: lawyers, janitors, computer programmers, bus drivers, etc.

There are other imbalances in the labor-training market: we're currently over-producing lawyers, and under producing programmers.

> as so many of the graduates with "bullshit degrees" are incredibly competent

A history graduate is competent in what exactly?

They aren't even competent at teaching history, which generally requires Masters or PhD.

> Counseling students of the trends of the market is stupid

I never said the students should counseled on the trends. But the counselors must be aware of them.

"A history graduate is competent in what exactly?"

Studying/researching problems.

Writing persuasive documents based on evidence.

Working collaboratively in teams doing research.

Or, at least, that's what I'd expect. I'd expect that almost anyone graduating with a 4 year degree in anything.

Sadly, I know it's not the case. > 20 years ago, I was taking a college course on 'intro to china'. It was definitely a 'blow off' class - a 2 credit class you had to take to fulfill some general ed requirement.

The class was 2 months, 1 (or maybe 2?) nights per week, and we had to write 4 'papers'. The 'papers' needed to be 1-2 pages on any topic of our choice relating to China - historical, modern, political, whatever. The instructor was a librarian by trade, and loved China, and taught the class.

First papers go back to the students, and 3-5 students in the back - 'non traditionals' by the look of it (all over 30 IIRC) started complaining - loudly - that they'd been marked down because of spelling and grammar mistakes. The instructor replied that this was a college class and they should be able to write basic English competently enough to avoid basic spelling and grammar mistakes - we should all know how to use semicolons, commas, periods, capitalization rules, possessive forms, etc.

One of the students shouted back "this isn't an English class - this is unfair bullshit that I'm being marked down like this". Sadly, a group of people all chimed in agreeing. The teacher was visibly shaken.

Of course, not arguing this is the state of every single college class out there, and it wasn't even the norm in my experience. I was just shocked at the time that it happened at all, but now it doesn't shock me any more. Just saddens me that people think like this. Those sorts of people shouldn't be going to college in the first place, but were sold the line "get a college degree and your life will be great". It's not true.

This unfortunately happens fairly routinely even at high level universities. Not always as publicly, though, but it does happen.

I'm a faculty brat (professorial parents) at one of the top public universities in the nation. There are always students that will complain to professors that things are too hard, or that grading schemes are unfair, or etc. with very little cause. Possibly worse is that sometimes people's /parents/ will call or email their professor to appeal a grade.

It does seem to be somewhat major dependent: I have /never/ seen it occur in a math class, for instance, whereas it apparently routinely occurs in my mother's English classes. (She's known for grading more stringently than many other English professors. Complaints also don't usually work.) However, I think that it's a mark of an experienced teacher that they don't let bullshit like that faze them: the one time I've seen it really affect how a class was taught, it definitely made the class worse as a learning experience. (Some vocal computer science majors thought that an algorithms course was too difficult, and the professor made it easier, which definitely was a net loss for everyone. I'm very glad that I wasn't enrolled in it.)

I think it's disgusting. Sometimes professors make mistakes: in class structure, or assignment load, or grading something, or the like, and bringing that up politely is appropriate. But if they know they are assigning hard, long assignments, or the grading is fair, or the like, then it's usually for a good reason. The professors who don't care about teaching usually also don't teach hard courses or grade harshly, because it means more work for them.

I agree that generally the people who do things like this are less likely to do well post-college. Either because their parents are hovering over them (see parental phone calls) and they won't ever learn self-discipline and reliance, or because they expect that if they complain, the world will magically bend itself to their will. I think some of it happens when people are taking courses they don't want to take for a requirement, but I agree that there are a good number of people who get sold on the "college degree -> good job and happiness and money."

Back in my undergrad I TA'd Comp Sci for a few years. That sort of stuff was rarer in upper level courses, but in the intro classes which were often largely filled with non-cs majors, it was rampant. The policies of the course were extremely lenient as well, and very explicitly spelled out in the syllabus.

For example, there was an assignment every single week, and 3 times during the semester, they were allowed to turn in an assignment up to a week late. This is by far the most lenient late policy I've ever seen in a course. And still, every semester, I had to deal with several kids angrily yelling at me because they found out they got a 0 on an assignment because for the 4th time they decided to turn in something late.

Cool insights. I don't think the 'helicopter parent' syndrome was alive and well in the late 80s, but it seems to be a 'thing' now. :/

In this particular case, the instructor was doing this out of a passion for sinology - she was a librarian who did this part-time. Perhaps full-time teaching would have helped her develop a thicker skin over the years. That said, she was already in her late 50s or early 60s at this point - not sure she'd encountered too many outright hostile students up to that point.

My Computer Languages (or whatever it was called) professor had mandatory attendance for his 8am MWF Friday class. I went to a big football school and we had a Thursday night game and that asshole didn't budge on his policy. He even dropped a pop quiz the day after the game.

I got the highest grades in his course out of any class that I took in college. I wish all my professors were as good as he was.

A history graduate learns how to analyze disparate sources of variable quality for a specific purpose and argue a conclusion. They should be masters of long form report, able to select relevant information from a huge library and be able to defend a position cogently. I think its some of the most transferable skills there is.

I'm not sure my comp sci degree was particularly useful. The vast majority of what I learnt turns out in retrospect to be "industry focused" aka completely obsolete now.

> A history graduate learns how to analyze disparate sources of variable quality for a specific purpose and argue a conclusion.

If you think that's how history is written, I have some bad news....

It is not how history is written, but how history is interpreted. Research and forming opinions is exactly what a history graduate should have learned while in school. This is why many lawyers study history in undergrad.