As soon as having a bachelors degree became almost an expectation, not having one became a problem to be avoided. We have people borrowing money to go to school because they think they have to...not because they necessarily even need to. Many of the best programmers I know never even went to college...they are just interested in the subject and taught themselves.

At the same time, we have a public school system that after 18 years with a child...has not actually prepared them to get a job. That's borderline criminal IMHO.

I always wonder what the effect would be of transitioning public high schools to a structure closer to Cornell's one-course-at-a-time approach (http://www.cornellcollege.edu/one-course-at-a-time/). It seems like giving kids the opportunity to deep dive into one thing (actually, learn it instead of memorize stuff) would be more effective. At the same time, scheduling of classes that taught real skills would a lot simpler.

Just imagine a gardening and cooking class where you could teach:

1. Plant biology and genetics of seeds 2. Chemistry and Soil Biology, Composting, Decomposition. 3. Use geometry to design raised bed frames 4. Learn some vocational carpentry to build raised bed frames 5. Plant in different environments, track growth, production, measures in a scientific experiment 6. Learn to cook some different recipes with what you've grown as well as how different temperatures affect what you're cooking (caramelization of onions, etc)

In a single intensive class you can bring together so many subjects and life skills that seem otherwise unrelated on their own.

Heaven forbid you take it to the next level and get into programming a farm bot.

Yes, college is expensive and I absolutely think something should be done to resolve that. And certainly not everyone needs a BS to be productive citizens. But societies "reverence" for the Bachelors degree was earned. Historically, these programs equip people with the background and education necessary to advance their careers.

Like many people here, I have a BSCS, and if computing became obsolete tomorrow, I feel entirely confident in my ability to transition into many other technical careers. My feeling is that a BS should be designed to open up entire classes of career options for people. But I also feel that people who opt for technical training in lieu of general education shouldn't be upset when they find out they can't transition as easily into other fields that require skills they may have never learned.

I honestly think this article serves as a cautionary tail to reinforce Bachelors "reverence" more than it does to dispel it. A person who spent years learning the depths of Italian cooking shouldn't be surprised when people don't want him managing their businesses. Knowing how to field for truffles and prepare them in a traditional way is nice, but it's not analogous to knowing how to run the logistics of a business.

"my nephew was set to graduate from Maryland’s Towson University with a degree in political science. After six long years,"

Six years for a degree in political science. You have to actively try to take that long to graduate. Maybe he changed majors.

"Holding up their son’s transcript, his adviser pointed out that he had taken the same economics course twice—one year apart. My nephew hadn’t noticed."

Really? I've met plenty of people in college who would do things like this. They all had no motivation or interest to graduate. They were there just because their parents made them and could afford it. I think this defends the authors point. However, using two people who clearly have no idea how to pave their own path to a successful life should be used as an example to argue against universities and trade schools.

Maybe the author is trying to say its the high schools fault for not teaching them. I disagree. Everytime I've seen behavior like this it's because the student just doesn't care or their parents have plenty of money and know they'll be fine no matter how bad they do.

The organization that promised to hire him ran the admissions process, set the curriculum, and after training screened him into a particular path for at least the first stage of his new career. He was surrounded for four years by people who will be his professional peers for the entirety of his career. He knows that the likelihood of him reaching the pinnacle of his profession is increased substantially through this network.

Obviously the military is well set up to do this. I am surprised though that other industries haven't attempted to build schools to train their respective employee bases.

I know plenty of folks that went to Towson and the only thing that they could do after freshman year was funnel a beer. I know a few that went on to pursue respected middle class careers in tech, legal, education, and health care.

When will our youth finally start taking responsibility for their own actions or lack there of?

    > After three years in a college-based apprenticeship 
    > program and three years of solid work experience, he 
    > was still the equivalent of a brand-new high-school 
    > graduate in the eyes of higher education.

In addition, high school should have 'guest' speaker from different lines of work come in (engineer, scientist, mechanic, doctor, HVAC, florist, baker, etc.) and tell grade 12 students about their job responsibilities, how much money they make and advise students frankly about the job.

Only then the kids can decide with full knowledge what they would like to pursue and their expectations would be realistic.

The current system does not leave much in the way of learning things (or at least getting credit) later on. This is a problem, because your average 18-22 year old knows nothing about what work they'll find satisfying, or what work will be in demand.

You also don't know what you'll actually be learning. For instance I did management classes at a well know university. Did I expect to learn something about how to manage? Yes. Did I learn anything about how to manage? No, that's not what management class is about. I suspect many people had similar experiences with their classes. To be fair engineering classes are not about how to be an engineer either, so I don't think it's a science/humanities thing.

What you do find out in uni is that pretty much anything academic can be learned if you dedicate some time to it. Read a few books about economics, and you'll know the major ideas of that field, presented in a somewhat coherent fashion.

So what we need is a way for someone who's found an interest to be able to pursue that. You work a bit as a coder, and you realise you should get a CS degree. So you find a course, read, practice, do an exam.

What's important is people who've discovered this need tend to be in a different life situation from ordinary college attendees. They might have work already, family, and so on. So incentives need to align to allow people to learn things without tearing up their whole life.

1. Author complains her lazy nephew's approach to school (and resulting Political Science degree) did not result in a good paying job.

2. Author complains her other nephew's lack of a degree and previous chef jobs did not result in a good paying job.

3. Author advocates for community colleges, blames higher-ed for being "too rigid" for her nephews, and says how much better Germany and other European countries are at training.

In this day and age, what we need is some sort of more granular description of education and experience. I don't have a finance degree, but I've gone through the Yale econ lectures online.... how do I reflect that knowledge gained when all an employer wants is where did you graduate?

I see granular descriptions like this all the time on certain forums, down to people listing their audacity courses, tech certs, etc.

We need to find ways to revive intellectual curiosity and a yearning for knowledge in the masses, not stifle it by arbitrarily tying it down with businesses wants, especially in an information age where much of it is freely available online.

The fact that Americans are some of the least intellectually engaged people on the planet is not proof that we need better alternatives to college. We need better alternatives to intellectual disengagement.

Which, I should add, I'm not against.

Technology (streaming) enables everyone to have MIT grade education for free (theory part). Exams could be paid. The only labour intensive part of education is the practical part. This could be paid or community based co-study.

If you can't afford insurance then you're stuck paying out of pocket. By the "one price" rule, doctors have to charge an individual the same they charge insurance. An individual cannot strike a deal as easily with a provider as an insurance company can - so they wind up paying 10-100x what an insurance company would. Notice, that's not saying anything about what an insured person would pay.

There's no corollary to that for education. People finance their education (largely) with loans and up front. They're striking a deal based on what they expect their future income to be. That future income, by the way, probably won't be realized for the majority. For those it is, it may not be realized until 5 or even 10 years down the road. By that point, the loan payments have already started and may have already been scheduled to be paid back completely.

America needs a new economic model. It needs an economic model that allocates nails and food differently than it allocates healthcare and education. Right now, it allocates immediate needs the same way it allocates 'possible demands'. Financial companies estimate 'possible demands' on imperfect data across imperfect realities. Because those two things are not the same, they need to be handled differently.

But maybe the vocational training is better institutionalized here, so people can actually earn enough as a craftsman or in the service industry.

There certainly isn't profound respect or reverence for a bachelor's degree itself, from employers or anyone else. However, there is an expectation of social and to some degree, field specific exposure.

Perhaps the point of the article is there are far more useful ways to gauge someone's career/field specific potential than a bachelor's degree. And if there are more practical assessment tools than not having a bachelor's degree shouldn't be a barrier to entry.

Take everything you know about how nonsense the tech hiring/interviewing process is, and just for a second play with the idea the problem is deeper than anyone thought.

What if barely any employers have the faintest idea what they need from the workforce? No real understanding of how to screen for it at all? Limited ability to assess what portions of those needs are most effectively created through self-organization among the workforce at no line-item cost to the employers (school, etc...)?

If we, for a moment, assume that was true, we'd probably expect to find a world that has cargo-culted a definition of what a qualified applicant looks like. A person who is smart in general, and knowledgeable in a domain with a surface-level resemblance to what they would be expected to do at work. Enter the bachelor's degree.

Like any other metric standing in for something the user doesn't know how to (or can't) measure directly, the metric started getting gamed. Once "BS degree" = "employable" was well-known, and a generation run through that system from birth through college, then you have respectable news outlets writing thinkpeices about the value of a BS.

And if the person doing the hiring doesn't really know what they want, the population of people that just want to find a way for everyone to pay their bills doubly don't. So the next step of the dance is absorbing the on-the-job training that employers don't want to pay for, and rarely figure out how to do properly anyway.

What happens after flushing a generation of kids through the new process without really figuring out what we're trying to accomplish in the first place will be _______________________.

Same thing applies to bootcamps. In 2-4 years, the frameworks and concepts you've learned to implement web apps will have changed. In ten, it will be an entirely different game.

I disagree. Life circumstances can keep you from graduating as well.

I spent nearly 7 on a CS degree. There were a few hold ups. The biggest being until VERY recently, I was unmedicated with Bipolar Disorder. I would sign up for classes while manic, and barely scrape by or fail when depressed. It has taken me 5 years to get a proper diagnosis and find the right meds. Meanwhile, I still tried to do my best in the classes I was attending.

Another reason it took me so long, I attended community college and got a 2 year degree in programming I was told would directly translate to my BS in CS. This was not the case. I found that my university only took certain credits off of my AS, effectively putting me at about a year of coursework when I was under the impression I had 2.

None of this was me trying to take that long to graduate. I do take some of the responsibility for it, I could have done better to get out of bed and go to class some days. I could have done more research about PBSC's transfer degree. I could have fought harder for the right diagnosis when I was 18 and everything started happening.

The article isn't presenting the two nephews as the same argument at all. The idea is that the one who went to college did what society demands, and it clearly wasn't the right move. The second made the "correct" decision, only to have society fail to reward him.

I'm not sure how you took away something different there, unless I'm just misunderstanding your argument.

There are trucking schools, mechanics school, cooking schools (as in the article). But the trades in general tend to be more of an apprentice system.

Finally, some specialized companies do have extended in-house training. But this sort of thing is definitely less common, in part because people skip around jobs a lot more so there's going to be a lot of free-riding on a company offering expensive training.

Yeah, professors have experience with people like this. They're the students that stop lecture to ask a 5 minute long "question" that somehow hits the high points of their 20+ years of experience and doesn't really go anywhere, that roughly ends up at the same kind of "when will we ever use this in the real world" question that you'd expect from a 19 year old kid, when you're lecturing on rings and fields.

That's generally not all that true. While many degree programs have no formal credit for experience and have minimum "residency" (time in program) requirements, the latter tend to be substantially shorter than the normal time to complete all coursework, and many programs have, instead of the former, means to satisfy some portion of credit requirements without actually taking classes if you can demonstrate equivalent knowledge gained elsewhere (e.g., credit-by-examination.)

With that paper, plus her decades of experience, she was able to transition into a career she likes. She's still in corporate America, but not middle-management.

Playing devils advocate for a second...

How does college teach you about the wider world? By taking a bunch of tests on subjects being taught by TA's (if you are lucky) or professors that sometimes struggle with English?

Or

Cramming for tests and writing papers you don't want to write is learning about the wider world?

Find me the Engineering major that would rather take 2 semesters of humanities|Literature|etc or graduate sooner!

Find me the doctor students that wish undergrad was a like 2 years shorter! Fuck it, make it 4 years shorter and call it a day! Strait to med school if you have the aptitude.

> but I'm willing to bet one semester of finance would far outweigh the knowledge that construction worker has about why the building is being built like it is.

One semester of finance is craptacular, you wouldn't learn much. Better if you had said Accounting... but most students don't pick accounting. You would do far better listening to Dave Ramsey for a month, IMO. Seriously, where in the bulk of College majors outside of Finance can I find the requirement to take a finance/accounting/econ classes? I'll answer, NO WHERE!

The fact that you bring up finance is interesting because fully half of the Colleges today would go bankrupt if their students knew ANYTHING about money! Why would they go into such crazy debt for what they get in return? The subset of college majors that actually have promising career futures ahead of them are miniscule in comparison the "majors" offered at universities.

Any engineering intern can run some numbers and write a spec. Whether that spec will be easily implementable or whether it will encourage corner cutting in certain cases is a different story. Specs (building requirements, part design, etc) written up by people with little or outdated experience with building the finished product is probably the single biggest time waster in blue collar industries.

Think about that next time you encounter something designed with enough clearance to swing a wrench but not enough clearance to swing a wrench with a hand on it.