How many jobs really require college?

Lots of interesting ideas here, but also some wacky or condescending assumptions about other people's lines of work. Let's take two:

TRUCK DRIVERS: They don't just move big rigs around. They also need to keep detailed log books, plan out routes, pass inspections -- and know how to talk civilly and constructively to DOT inspectors. An eighth grade education will not get you there. Especially on the last part. The back-and-forth of a high-school classroom socializes teenagers to work with authority. Most high school dropouts give up because they can't conform to those norms, not because they can't do the work. Trucking companies rightfully insist on a high school degree for exactly this reason.

FINANCIAL ADVISERS: Met any lately? I work in a co-lo space with several within 50 feet. They're all college educated, and they put non-obvious skills from their education to work, every day. They need to provide their clients with highly literate, personalized updates via quarterly letters. They need a sophisticated understanding of clients' expressed and unstated needs -- and you're not going to be fully capable of doing that with just a high school education. Some college-level psychology classes, history classes or behavioral econ classes will get you in the game. And if you actually want to be a financial adviser with some understanding of how markets work, an econ/finance major is your best path in.

Some of the other analysis is quite interesting. But the classification errors in this piece are more than just a matter of tweaking a spreadsheet. They come from a deeper misunderstanding of what many jobs are all about.

I recently helped transform a customer service department from being an embarrassing shambles to something we could be proud of. The queue of tickets is now empty whereas before, when we didn't have things automated, our many customer service agents were struggling to keep up with the back of a 4000 long queue. Things are now pro-active, we fix problems before customers know rather than wait for them to complain.

Essentially it is the same job but done properly, however, now everything is in order, we just need two people rather than hordes of people. Note that these two people are college educated, i.e. able to listen and learn, write good English and show up in the morning.

We get customer service ratings and these also come in for the things that the computer does rather than just what a human agent has done. The computer always writes impeccably, my human colleagues are nearer grunt and point level. The humans are lucky to get 76% satisfaction level, the automated stuff consistently gets 91% satisfaction level.

The net result is that our remaining customer service staff are the educated ones, their work is now pretty professional albeit not to rocket surgery levels and the job pays fairly rather than it being a temp type of arrangement. As a company we no longer need the hordes and the people to manage/hire/fire them.

My point being that college education is more helpful than one might think. It does not matter what the education is in particularly, it is the skills of being able to do basic things like work without disrupting others, being able to write and being able to learn that matter.

Cleaning lady, construction worker, janitor, plumber, electrician, building inspector I could go on.

> The most elite companies in the valley have correctly found out that remote doesn't work...

The success of remote workers is entirely dependent on the culture of the company and team. I may not work for some hotshot silicon valley startup or Google, but our entire development team works remotely without issue. Daily standups ensure work is getting completed, and we all have GoToMeeting licenses so we can jump on a call and talk when IM doesn't cut it.

> and yet we're going to do remote with our students?

Probably not a wise idea for every student, I'll agree with you on this part. However, I don't think the idea of self-paced curriculum is a bad idea either - and it can be offered both in-person and online with ease.

Before I dropped out in my sophomore year in high school I attended a self-paced program for a semester, and it was amazing - I could burn through the topics at which I excelled leaving me time to focus one ones that gave me difficulties without pressure of getting the assignment in on-time. All in all, had I stuck with it I could have easily graduated a by the end of my Junior year.

Now, this is my personal anecdote - so take it for what it's worth.

> You're giving too much credit to students, they don't know what is best for them. This $100k will be exploited in some way by profit-seeking companies before you have a second to glance back at the money.

One only needs to look at for-profit universities to see how this is a bad idea. It would have to require you use it on a state-run institution or one that has been properly vetted, at that point why not just offer free tuition at public universities and call it done?

So I don't know about all fields, but I know about programming.

Do you know how much value a high school type person has in writing computer programs for an actual software company? Something fairly negative. Say -$10 an hour or -$50 an hour, based on how much experienced person time they take up and how much damage they do.

If you run a small profitable business, even if you could get high schoolers to work for free to write you code, you should not do it. If you need to pay them minimum wage... even MORE reason not do it.

I feel this is a situation that other industries have dealt with for 100s of years. For example the day 1 statue carver was probably a huge negative value also. I suspect they had to sign something like "I will work for enough pay to feed myself for 2 years, and then work for a industry standard wage for 2 years after that if you agree to train me". So all in agreeing to 4 years of work for training. (And some pay, but not really break the bank pay). At the end of the 4 years, the company got a decent amount of value out of the statue carver, and the statue carver learned a bunch of skills without going to college.

Not really anything like this in programming. Not even sure it would be legally enforceable. But I think that is a big reason why there is a gap in needs of programmers vs people willing to train people to do the job. It really would suck for most people to train someone how to do a job for a year (losing tons of money), and then the person job hops to someone who pays higher and bears none of the training cost. This is why so many jobs advertise 1-3 years of experience required. They want people over the initial learning hump, but not making the big bucks yet.

So perhaps I am proposing a way to bring back bonded labor apprentices? Hum, seems terrible. But also seems like it could work...