The only reason I went to college was so I could be taken seriously and offered a job in my career. Before graduating I had 0 calls backs, after I started listing a completed degree I had many many call backs.
College may be a poor choice for some, but if you dont want to get stuck waiting tables or making coffee then its a sure bet with the right major.
That being said, having these sorts of discussion may sway employers to have a more open mind to non-traditional ways to become qualified for employment. And if that starts to happen, a B.S. or B.A. will stop being a litmus test and start being one path towards qualification for a job or a career.
This is actually a serious problem. If change in technology and the job market continues to accelerate (will there be long-haul truck drivers in 15 years?), we need to be able to retrain people without demanding four years of full-time education and massive student loans.
For instance if long haul truckers become obsolete. Could we retrain those people to maintain the self driving trucks or perhaps trouble shoot problems?
The destruction of the middle class is a different, although related, issue and note that its always downward class migration not upward. Very few lower class jobs require a degree, so no need for schooling when the jobs go away and the former employees permanently class migrate downward. A more realistic life skill would be learning how to be happy "making coffee" than getting a degree for a job that doesn't exist and never will again.
Cultural engineering to convince people that you're more than your job, or that you should work to live instead of live to work, will eliminate more revolutionary strife than any drone or spy program.
After I got a bachelor in computer science I made about 4 times as much as before.
Later I started a master while still working. Just on the side, for fun, because the work was kinda boring.
When my boss heard of it, he wanted to promote me.
He didn't even know what I studied or if it was a good master program...
Glad to hear it kinda worked out!
As I said, the job was boring.
Now I almost done studying and looking for a new job.
I think you are correct that many employers use college degrees as an implicit hiring filter. Interestingly, the same United States Supreme Court case, Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424 (1971), that declared most uses of IQ tests as hiring screens illegal also declared most educational credential hiring screens illegal.[1] But the headline report about the case holding was the part about IQ tests, so a lot of employers and even lawyers don't know that it can be legally dodgy to require an educational credential as a hiring criterion.
The better way to hire is to give applicants a work-sample test. I have a FAQ about that[2] that is one of my best-liked comments on Hacker News, and I encourage you to give that a look and to let me know how I can make that FAQ more useful for job-seekers who have skills but who may not have a degree.
With the right networking and projects in the high school years, you can have a position waiting on you and then have 4 years experience under your belt before you'd have graduated college. For some people, this will make more sense (and cents) than the college route.
There's a lot of people with college degrees waiting tables, but very few people with software or operations experience have a hard time finding work, regardless of their college education status.
I list Coursera on my resume. I understand it bears about the same weight as 'hobby' section, but I think it still tells my potential employer more about me than 'hiking' or 'skiing'.