For young people, the job search has never been so miserable

> recent graduate with a degree in cyber security

This is part of the problem, not college in general - at least for this example. Cybersecurity is not an entry level career, and the degrees that focus on it are of dubious value to someone trying to become a security analyst/engineer/architect. Experience wins out over everything else.

Even worse for this young man is that any of the entry level jobs he might be trying to get have hundreds, if not thousands, of applicants. To get experience he would have needed to try and get a part time job while going to school (or work for the school itself doing something relevant to his desired career, many colleges employ students for A/V and tech support).

None of that is an issue with the college education, and even if he had been provided with "relevant" skills (assuming he wasn't) that wouldn't have given him any advantage over the sheer numbers that he's up against. There's plenty of companies that require a bachelor's degree at minimum for any kind of salaried position, and college is overall very useful for rounding out people to be better citizens, better voters, better community members, and better workers - the societal value is nothing to sneer at.

I tried to drop out of college in 2008-2009 and work to get some experience - all it did was drive home the fact that not having a degree was holding me back from starting a real career and not just working a job. Hiring and promotions went preferentially to people with degrees. Eventually I got a degree (in Economics) and then worked my way to being a Security Engineer at a FAANG company, but I wouldn't have gotten here without that BA because the intermediary steps were roadblocked by the need for a degree.

Does it make sense for some people to skip college and go straight into the workforce? Absolutely, but you can't assume to know beforehand who that's going to work out for and who it isn't'. Right now the subject of this article is unemployed but being support by his parents, that's exactly the type of person that should consider going to college because they have the necessary support network to weather a hiring market like the one we have now.

I started blog and Github project, in a year I had a good job. It takes a lot, but there are much more efficient way.

College takes a lot of time and money. If you do this early in your career, it will hobble for decades.

Imagine you spend 30k on education, spend 3 years and get kicked out in final year, because you disagree with teacher. Or someone makes complain.

> Even today, some doors will stay closed for me, simply because... no formal degree

Degree is only needed for higher positions, those are not accessible to young people anyway. You can always get degree latter, it gets so much easier and cheaper, when you have experience . For me it was just a formality, I spend maybe like 200 hours total for my masters.

Honest story time. I don't even feel like hiding behind a throwaway.

In 2020 my boss, and CEO suddenly passed away to cancer. I found myself (CTO) having to run an entire company, while I was already dealing with personal issues. I rose to the occasion, did the best I could while also I explored the possibility of selling the company, which felt the most sensible option given the context (which I am not going to explore here). After a year of the most intense work I have done my entire life, the majority partner (and inheritor of the boss' shares) decided they didn't want to sell after all. Then everything imploded, I went on a massive nervous breakdown and burned out to cinders. Months later, in later 2021, I left because I literally felt I would die of exhaustion. It was necessary to take a very long break.

After 18 months of a sabbatical and working on my health, things started to look up, and I was starting to get bored. I have been working as a software engineer for 17 years, as employee and later consultant, and as a fully self-taught person I believe I am pretty darned good at it. What follows is 6 months of fruitless job search. Hundreds of CVs sent to no response. People telling me "it's the market", "it's your resume", "it's because you have too much experience", "it's because of Brexit". Silly phrases to explain the state of tech job search. In 6 months of job search, I felt I was crashing back into a second burnout and needed a change.

For the past year and a half I have been working on launching a business because it's the only avenue left to me, and only chance to avoid going through the meat grinder again. With crappy jobs on Upwork at $50/h, some underpaid consulting here and there, and UK universal income I have managed to keep a roof over my head, launch a business but still far from being financially secure. It is fucking exhausting, yet somehow job search is even worse than that.

If a person with this much experience like me is unable to find a bloody job, I loathe to imagine what juniors go through.

If I hear one more person say "the economy is not so bad" I'm gonna force them to look for a job the good old way, through the cosmic joke that job boards are.

Something is utterly broken in hiring, in recruitment, in the entire job market and no one is at the wheel. "The economy is not so bad, look at this chart", they tell you.

I think the best version of universities would be specifically for studying what the workforce doesn’t invest in and we’d have respected vocational schools (and ideally trainee positions) as the default choice for people just looking to get a job.

When I started at university, it was because I wanted to learn things about computers and computing that I didn’t think an employer would pay me to learn. I added courses in philosophy and economics out of curiosity and avoided course that appealed to workplace relevance (primarily because I don’t want half the questions to be about what’ll appear on the exam).

And with a sample size of one, all of that is useful to me.

For everything that is wrong with academia, I’d put more of the blame on company administrations minmaxing for quarterly gains refusing to post trainee positions guiding people from school to the workforce. And the housing market pushing up entry salary expectations, and internet job boards for opening up an oversized funnel of applications for any junior position.

> At some point, we'll need to throw all the economists into the sea and start realizing what's going on here...

I recommend reading Thomas Piketty if you want some of the more modern works on what is going on with our social economics in the west. It's not exactly a new phenomenon though, wealth inequality is part of the cycle of civilization and it always leads to some form of wealth redistribution. How that happens is historically up to whatever aristocracy is in charge, though with the introduction of democracy it's typically done through very high taxes. Before the Regan Thatcher era an 80% tax on the wealthiest (and this means all methods of income) wasn't uncommon, and they were still the wealthiest.

Anyway. It's going to change eventually. Especially the housing market is going to suck. I'm Danish, I bought a townhouse with my wife for 3m DKK. If it were to follow my parents 30 year increase on their house, we should be able to sell it for 26m dkk by 2050... which isn't going to happen.