College May Not Be Worth It Anymore

Having to grind to get in the game sounds like real life. An education that does not prepare you for real life is of questionable value.

For a HS counselor, that would mean they also work as a career counselor outside to tell people whether or what jobs to change to, or to stay at their current one.

I wouldn't apply that to core education, as there are no e.g. professional adders, but you get the the picture.

I could go on, but that's a topic for another day, I guess.

[1] a retired or former practicioner would suffice here too

This simply isn't true a lot of the time. It is sometimes, but there are plenty of jobs that require highschool level skills but will filter out those who don't have a degree just because they can. It's not that big a deal if you select one candidate over the other because the former has done a 2 week internship that made no difference in the qualifications, but did signal some small extra thing that gave the candidate the edge. It's not okay if a diploma gives a candidate the edge structurally, despite being useless for the required job skills, and costs $40k for the individual to get. That's an insane price we expect people to pay just to compete for a job.

> No respectable tech employer cares

It's not just that. It's the fact the vast majority of jobs are obtained through your network. Class and race are just proxies for the probability that a person has a weak network within a high-socioeconomic-class industry like tech or finance. It's not necessarily a claim of blatant classism or racism by the employer, but rather that your mom not knowing an uncle with a position for you, or dad not showing you you need to do this internship and that volunteer project and apply to that program to get recruited, or growing up with friends who became plumbers and whose parents were plumbers too, is not as conducive to landing a job as others with similar intelligence/credentials but a different class background/upbringing/network is.

That having been said, I agree with your other points. These articles get a bit tiresome. As always the answer is, it depends. College can be worth it, but not for everyone and not by doing anything.

It sort of amazes me sometimes to speak to people who just never ran any of the numbers. It should be mandatory for student loan applications to be data-driven. i.e. any college in a state should be able to go to the state educational board and obtain annual data for every accredited program or at least workfield, and use that for the loan programs. So for example, the state could track the average salary at 1, 5 and 10 years for an Art History major. Plug that into a loan calculator. Then plug in the loan payments. And then offer a comparative view, compared to not going to college, community college and other majors in college. And then a student has to read through all of that and make a conscious decision that yes, I'm going to borrow $50k, have an estimated payback time of 45 years old and earn no more than minimum wage and be expected to have a >50% chance of not being employed as an art historian in the first place. I'm seeing this kind of data take off a little bit, but it's still pretty poor and some universities skew the numbers. Government should do more to standardise these things and mandate universities and students use them.

My fear is that UBI will tempt policy makers to cut social programs. "We gave you money, buy your own medical insurance". With guaranteed jobs we can put more work into our infrastructure while eliminating unemployment, which helps keep fair labor practices in the forefront of employer's minds.