Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Fact 2: If you are loaned money to obtain a degree which is not economically valued then you will not be able to pay it back But for the vast majority of jobs people don't care what degree you have! In technology yes you often want someone with a particular degree. But if you're hiring a civil servant, a advertising executive, a business consultant, or any one of hundreds of other jobs, you can have any degree you…
And that is obviously ridiculous. > I have friends with theology degrees who work in business and earn more than I do in technology with my CS PhD. The companies that hire them value having people with a very wide range of academic backgrounds. That has nothing to do with their degree and everything with their ability. They would probably still get hired without the degree. Degrees only really matter in formal subjec…
You would think that, and it would logically seem to work that way. But in practice, it often doesn't.
A lot of employers are lazy, and use "has a degree" as a filter to cut down their applicants. And since there are so many applicants in nearly every field, it doesn't hurt the employer much. The biggest value in many degrees is literally just the ability to truthfully claim "I hold a degree", regardless of the field.
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To improve that, we'd need to get employers to drop fake requirements from their job listings. But since there's (typically) only benefits to them for inflating their requirements, I don't think it's likely employers will willingly drop that requirement.