> It falsely signals to employers that you’re better than the average Jane just because you have a piece of paper
This is a reductionist argument stating that everything you learn in college is just a piece of paper. It's a bad faith argument. If you believe it, you weren't convinced and if you don't believe it, you still weren't convinced. The whole intent was to be polarizing.
> I preceded to tell him that it doesn’t matter if you have a college degree anymore to do today’s jobs and that he was basically bragging about his family’s socioeconomic status, not his son’s actual achievements. I tried to elaborate about the inequalities of higher education and why it’s an outdated metric of future success. I explained why employers are absolutely wrong for thinking his son is better than someone without a degree or a degree from a public university.
This is a clear example of hypocrisy and an opinion that is regurgitated over and over in the article. The man being discussed never asserted that his son was better than everyone else, that was the author's excessive bias. Believe it or not, many fathers are proud of their childrens' achievements. The whole argument being peddled is that nothing of value was gained and that this man needed to be put in his place by the author because she's better than his son.
The "data" that the author provided was mostly correlation (not causation) with wealth and people doing well in college. That doesn't imply in any way that people that have strong support systems but not wealth cannot do well. The argument is fallacious.
The tone that the author set for the article in the very beginning is that people are supposed to be enraged, like the author is, that employers want some indication that the candidate is a good quality candidate. In the current system, that often means getting a college degree. Employers want the closest thing they can get to a guarantee that the candidate knows something. Without proposing an alternative this was just a poorly supported rant by the author. Your devil's advocate that I must stimulate discussion because the author did not is again, fallacious.
>> anecdotal evidence misapplied as representative
> Such as? Did you happen to skip over ALL the other sources they used to prove their point?
Such as using specific schools when talking about corruption but then using all schools in the later points about performance. Presumably, people with the prestigious degrees would have better job performance but no stratified data was used in that discussion. To me, it appears as though the author had a point they wanted to make and did the bare minimum research to make that point without questioning whether it was right.
With this in mind, I don't find that the article had all that much substance other than cherry-picked statistics and made no effort to to have any nuance. The takeaway was supposed to be that all people with college degrees got no value because the author had no nuance.
>You're taking an article with enough substance to have a valuable discussion around it and poo-pooing it away because the author is inferior relative to your subjective standards. That's what I'm getting from your comment.
You're asserting that I am assessing that the author is inferior because she doesn't have a college degree? I actually don't know whether the author has a college degree, but don't find the points particularly convincing either way.
I am stating that I don't believe the article to have much valuable substance beyond the clickbait title. You're asking me to invent substance for the article in the comments because of your opinion that the article hits some critical point.