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GenZ grads say college degrees a waste of time/money as AI gets into workplaces

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Re: GenZ grads say college degrees a waste of time/money as AI gets into workplaces

#11

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

sinuhe69 wrote: post #8

"Their degrees are already obsolete" -> I don't understand this attitude. Do they expect to have special knowledge after a bachelor's degree? Or do they think that just asking an AI what to do is the way to create better AI and a better future for us humans? A bachelor's degree is like an extended grade 13. With a master's degree, one can start working independently, or as we jokingly say, "know where to ask and what…

It's a depressingly common confusion that the purpose of education is to be stuffed full of facts. If that were the case, then libraries and search engines would already have made us obsolete.

But I do get the frustration with going into huge debt. And we have made obtaining a degree a requirement to get even quite basic jobs now.

Re: GenZ grads say college degrees a waste of time/money as AI gets into workplaces

#12

Post by xeonmc »

sinuhe69 wrote: post #8

"Their degrees are already obsolete" -> I don't understand this attitude. Do they expect to have special knowledge after a bachelor's degree? Or do they think that just asking an AI what to do is the way to create better AI and a better future for us humans? A bachelor's degree is like an extended grade 13. With a master's degree, one can start working independently, or as we jokingly say, "know where to ask and what…

Alternatively, it could be seen as a sign of a failed college education.

Re: GenZ grads say college degrees a waste of time/money as AI gets into workplaces

#14

Post by netsharc »

nxm wrote: post #7
nicbou wrote: post #5

Reminder: The New York Post is a rag. Look at the front page before treating any of what you read as journalism.

And yet the only one that printed the Hunter Biden story. I trust NyPost more than activists at Washington Post

Your comment made me look into the whole mess: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controvers...

(of course Wikipedia is probably "manufactured narrative", right?).

Looks like it's another attempt of finding dirt, but whoever was doing it, put so much of made-up dirt in that laptop, that proper journalists saw it as an "Elvis spotted with aliens" story, even NYPost journalists didn't want anything to do with it:

> According to an investigation by The New York Times, editors at the New York Post "pressed staff members to add their bylines to the story", and at least one refused, in addition to the original author, reportedly because of a lack of confidence in its credibility. Of the two writers eventually credited on the article, the second did not know her name was attached to it until after The Post published it.

The fact that you trust this sort of journalism makes me assume your trust is based on what you find favorable...

Re: GenZ grads say college degrees a waste of time/money as AI gets into workplaces

#15

Post by triknomeister »

It's kind of counterintuitive, but AI means you actually have to learn even more logical thinking. That doesn't mean Bachelor's degrees need more material, but that, we need to have more of logical thinking and expression. Because you need to be able to tell AI in an efficient manner what you want.

Re: GenZ grads say college degrees a waste of time/money as AI gets into workplaces

#16

Post by TMWNN »

netsharc wrote: post #14
nxm wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet the only one that printed the Hunter Biden story. I trust NyPost more than activists at Washington Post

Your comment made me look into the whole mess: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controvers... (of course Wikipedia is probably "manufactured narrative", right?). Looks like it's another attempt of finding dirt, but whoever was doing it, put so much of made-up dirt in that laptop, that proper journalists saw it as an "Elvis spotted with aliens" story, even NYPost journalists didn't want anything to do…

So on the one hand the New York Post is "a rag" as nicbou said, but on the other hand its reporters' judgments are reliable. Got it.

If you'd bothered to keep reading in Wikipedia, you'd have seen (from after all the shouting subsided):

>Former Politico reporters Marc Caputo and Tara Palmeri said in January 2025 that, because of "dumb decisions of cowardly editors", they were told "Don't write about the laptop, don't talk about the laptop, don't tweet about the laptop". Caputo said the Bertrand story about the 51 former officials had a "terrible, ill-fated headline ... because the Hunter Biden laptop appeared to be true". In 2019 the campaign of a rival Democratic candidate for the 2020 presidential election gave Caputo opposition research on Burisma and Hunter Biden but "That story was killed by the editors, and they gave no explanation for that either", he recalled.

After that, read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_letter>.

Re: GenZ grads say college degrees a waste of time/money as AI gets into workplaces

#17

Post by JumpCrisscross »

TMWNN wrote: post #16
netsharc wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment made me look into the whole mess: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controvers... (of course Wikipedia is probably "manufactured narrative", right?). Looks like it's another attempt of finding dirt, but whoever was doing it, put so much of made-up dirt in that laptop, that proper journalists saw it as an "Elvis spotted with aliens" story, even NYPost journalists didn't want anything to do…

So on the one hand the New York Post is "a rag" as nicbou said, but on the other hand its reporters' judgments are reliable. Got it. If you'd bothered to keep reading in Wikipedia, you'd have seen (from after all the shouting subsided): >Former Politico reporters Marc Caputo and Tara Palmeri said in January 2025 that, because of "dumb decisions of cowardly editors", they were told "Don't write about the laptop, don't…

> on the one hand the New York Post is "a rag" as nicbou said, but on the other hand its reporters' judgments are reliable

I know a handful of Post reporters. The short answer is their bar for publishing is lower. That means they catch stories earlier than the majors. (Same way specialist blogs do.) But they also post stuff that later needs to, or should have been, retracted. (Again, like a blog.)

Put another way, it's an entertaining paper that's not really comparable to the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal or New York Times in terms of quality or intent. But it does bring a more conservative angle to the mix in the same way those papers' journalists (or more accurately, e.g. Jon Stewart) bring a liberal/leftist perspective to the fore.

Re: GenZ grads say college degrees a waste of time/money as AI gets into workplaces

#18

Post by adaptbrian »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #4
slaw wrote: post #2

AI stands for Actually Indians. Office jobs are moving to India.

I don't get this meme. Who is doing this? To the extent I'm seeing anyone successfully replaced en masse by LLMs, it's Indian IT consultancies.

I just cut 30,000 in managed services b.c I can self host the solution myself on a 300/yr droplet. The folks that were servicing us in the 2nd year (india) won't have the account now since I can do it myself.

Re: GenZ grads say college degrees a waste of time/money as AI gets into workplaces

#19

Post by akimbostrawman »

netsharc wrote: post #14
nxm wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet the only one that printed the Hunter Biden story. I trust NyPost more than activists at Washington Post

Your comment made me look into the whole mess: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controvers... (of course Wikipedia is probably "manufactured narrative", right?). Looks like it's another attempt of finding dirt, but whoever was doing it, put so much of made-up dirt in that laptop, that proper journalists saw it as an "Elvis spotted with aliens" story, even NYPost journalists didn't want anything to do…

>of course Wikipedia is probably "manufactured narrative", right?

Wikipedia is no oracle they only uses content from sources they view as legitimate and lock anything people disagree with. Its a narrative echo chamber by design

Re: GenZ grads say college degrees a waste of time/money as AI gets into workplaces

#20

Post by Ukv »

netsharc wrote: post #14
nxm wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet the only one that printed the Hunter Biden story. I trust NyPost more than activists at Washington Post

Your comment made me look into the whole mess: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controvers... (of course Wikipedia is probably "manufactured narrative", right?). Looks like it's another attempt of finding dirt, but whoever was doing it, put so much of made-up dirt in that laptop, that proper journalists saw it as an "Elvis spotted with aliens" story, even NYPost journalists didn't want anything to do…

> (of course Wikipedia is probably "manufactured narrative", right?).

Wikipedia aims to represent the current consensus of reputable sources ("Verifiability, not truth"). I think that's often pragmatic - but it does make it a poor ground truth for specifically the case where someone is claiming that an outlet going against the grain was correct.

Seems to be somewhat alleviated here by reputable outlets having since reconsidered the story a couple years later. The Wikipedia article now mentions the authentication of the emails for instance, instead of only the fabrication/manipulation theory. You could always verify by yourself with the provided DKIM signatures, and that was discussed on the talk page at the time, but couldn't be added to the article because it was considered original research and only reported in security blogs/GitHub repos/unreputable sources.

There are still many material claims in the Wikipedia article which, while maybe verifiable, are highly misleading or untrue (at least, to my understanding of events). The claim that "the shop had no contact information for its owner" seems fairly directly contradicted by documents presented in the initial NYP article, for instance[0].

[0]: https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/10/Comput...

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