It's not. The vast majority of worthwhile, well-paying jobs require significant education and/training after high school. Not because it's a credential game, but because society and work are complex. And it's getting more complex, not less.

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I'll also risk the opinion that there is more to life than work, and higher education has advantages for people far beyond their ability out-compete one another for corporate jobs. And I would argue, for society as a whole.

To the parent's point; Many college degrees are "just a credential" at this point; and college degree or not, training still has to happen on the job.

I see a trend of millennials (my generation) who go to school to go to school, get good grades to get good grades, not apply the education to the future. Then, there's no entry level jobs (because companies didn't have to train with a recession to get experience) and they jump between unskilled jobs they could have done with a GED or less.

We can also see this with the industry survey the other week of employers saying colleges aren't preparing software developers.

Higher education does have advantages for people beyond jobs; but only if they learn (not memorize) and apply it.

Once someone can read, write, do arithmetic, it's more specialized skills that are needed. There are very few jobs where four years of studying history or political science is necessary. In most cases, a few months of training could do far more than four more years of general education.

The value of a degree for most jobs is it shows an ability to learn. Ultimately, having people spend six figures to send this signal is making society worse off. Employers are looking for the qualities that make someone a good student far more than they are looking for experience criticizing ancient works of literature or solving systems of equations.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of ways to get through college without getting past a high-school level of thinking.

Maybe 20% of my high school class ever finished a college degree, of any kind. A lot more went for a few semesters, struggled through some core classes, and flunked out with a load of debt and little else to show for it. The people that are best off are probably the ones that either went into the military or straight into a trade.

The college-prep for everyone model appears to have been a pretty bad failure. The system in my parent's generation where people were explicitly tracked and split into vocational, business, and college tracks appears to have had much better results. The gutting of vocational programs really hurts; it would be easily possible to do most of a trade apprenticeship during those years.

The 'Everyone needs to get a degree' mentality is really just part of a long term trend:

100 years ago 6 years of schooling was enough to get some generic 'good job'.

50 years ago 10 years of schooling was enough to get some generic 'good job'.

25 years ago 12 years of schooling was enough to get some generic 'good job'.

In another 25 years, 12 years of schooling will not be enough to get some generic 'good job'.

> If everyone has a degree, it offers no advantage.

A degree isn't just a way to give someone an advantage in a zero-sum game - it actually changes the way people think and makes them proficient at different types of work.

I don't think a degree does these things. Education does, but a degree these days is not much of a metric for one's education.

50 years ago a computer was still potentially someone that did a math calculation.

25 years ago personal computers were just barely a thing.

If you can understand how a computer works, and build one and write programs for it in 12 years, then you probably don't have need of any further need of education.

25 years ago was 1994. You're about 10 or 15 years off, kiddo :-) By 1995, PC's were in pretty much every office in the US. Most high schools had had them for a decade (I went to a small town midwest HS that valued football above all else... and we got our PC lab somewhat behind the better HS's in 1983). Around 20mil to 40mil PC's were sold every year during the 1990's in the US alone. From 1989 to 1994, 150mil PC's were sold in the US. I have friends now who have kids who are in university who will be third generation programmers. Digital computers themselves will be a century old in just one more generation (ENIAC came online in 1946, the 100th anniversary is just 27 years from now).

(I'm just being an old curmudgeon here, don't take it too seriously :-)

In 1994 an estimated 31% of us homes had a computer, and 6% of homes went online. But even here, it’s much easier to count people going online than homes with a computer.

Yeah - servers had been around in one form or another since the 60's and even in the 90's not everyone had an office computer. Maybe if you were...again...an engineer or scientist.

We don't have people who are highly educated in useful things despite 16+ years of school.

You point out a shift never discussed: 40 years ago you could graduate and be prepared for middle class life and as a member of civic society (home ec, how to vote, etc) — for free! It was assumed that it was in everybody’s interest for everyone to have a reasonable baseline.

Now the baseline preparation isn’t free, so a significant section (majority) of adults aren’t getting adequate preparation. Is that really what we want?

Otherwise, you'll just be saying the same thing about the same students after college: they're unprepared.

No. Time box your time to get prepared, and do it.

Also, there is no such thing as free. Every year costs a year of your life, possibly disrupting your chances to have biological children.

They easily load the kids up with student loans/debt and have courses/advisers readily available to sign them up and get them what they need to get into college.

I do not remember in my high school, one class about financial literacy or how the best way to pay back student loans.

No one informed us well of the risks of taking out private loans to cover what the federal loans don't cover.

No alternative options are promoted heavily, sure there may be an army recruiter or a weekend where they showcase some trades you could get into, but they never explain union/trades.

I wish they told me that at 18, I could join a Union (Carpenter, Laborer, Millwright) and enroll in a 4 year apprenticeship where you start at 60% scale your first year (Make $18 right out of high school), work while learning your skill with a 10% increase each year over 4 years so by the end of your 4 year apprenticeship when you receive your journeyman card you are making $28+, I think more people would at least consider that course if they are more hands on and like to fix stuff.

What didn't we have? Well, I didn't know what an AP test was until I got to university and it was too late, so there's that. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

That's kind of asking the impossible. Innovation and advancement don't stand still like that. A middle or high school should not be faulted for not knowing what technologies will be in use in 20 years. Quite literally, they can't teach technologies that have not been invented yet. So, again, they pursue the only practical strategy available to them, they teach a general course of study that gives students the ability to absorb and understand what future trainers will teach them. They can't do job training because they literally have no idea what kind of good jobs will be out there when this kid turns 30.

Just make sure the kid is able to absorb the training whatever boss s/he has gives him/her. That's about the best the schools can do. Employers and college really do have to do the rest.

A kid is in middle school or high school or whatever and then 20 years later they are on an employer's doorstep. The tools and technologies that employer uses were not even invented when that kid was in middle or high school. Well, unless that kid's had some additional training in those intervening years, they're probably not going to know how to use the tools that the employer wants them to use. So it's appropriate for the employer to hire, instead, the kid who has had the training during those intervening years.

We currently call most of that training "college". If you want to call it "university", or "post high school", or "adult campus learning", or whatever, then do that if it makes it a bit more palatable. Call it whatever you like, but employers kind of need these kids to have it. And they'll only need them to have it more in the future. That's just the nature of our ever advancing society. That's actually a good thing believe it or not.

At the same time, employers will just have to train employees on the specific technologies and tools they need them to use in practice, rather than offloading the burden to society at large.

This also ameliorates the 'retraining' problem for older workers.

Efficient processes measure outputs/results, like what people actually learn or accomplish after all that time.

But many people in this thread are measuring inputs, like, just put in four more years of time and money and that must be good for everyone, right?

    possibly disrupting your chances to have biological children

While statistically, I'm sure this applies; I see many examples of successful tradesmen making greater than a middle class life for themselves because of their hobbies during high school; things that shop class and apprenticeships in high school teach; no degree strictly required.

Were you talking about hose who left at 16 and went straight into a trade? Still no need to pay through the nose to have a good life and be a solid citizen.

I personally think all grades across all levels of education should be pass/fail. This would give everyone a fair chance at competing, and job interviews would be based on your portfolio of work (or internships, etc), rather than HR gate-keeping of GPAs. Oh, you had to work in school so you got a couple C's in stupid-filler-class, guess you're not good enough to work for us?

We need to start at the grass-level and remove Bachelors degrees as a credentialing requirement for as many positions as we can. Why should one have a Bachelors degree to become a CPA? Why can't you just attend a CPA trade school, or self-study? It's gate-keeping by the academic class.

I get the cosmic justice sentiment behind this, but if there is somebody else who didn’t get any C’s, and that’s all they know about the two of you, how is it unreasonable for them to just pick the higher-on-paper achiever? If everybody had a 2.0 GPA, then employers would have to pick from somebody with a 2.0 GPA, but that’s not the case.

On that note, perhaps we should remove school names from degrees, and you simply get a degree from an institution that has x accreditation.

Interviewer: So how did you enjoy your time in school?

Interviewee: Oh Cambridge was a great place!

Every time I participate in one I wonder the same thing.

>If you need to just get some generic "good job", then the answer is to learn what you need in the first twelve years of school.

One issue here is "advancement", "innovation", or whatever else you would like to label it as. Schools can't know when a student starts 7th or 8th grade, what technologies will be in use 10 or 20 years later. So schools have to teach general subjects that confer a broad foundation for later trainers to build on. That's just schools doing what makes sense. They can't teach tools and techniques that have a very good chance of not having been invented yet.

The fact that employers are expecting employees to be able to use tools and techniques that are becoming more complex and requiring a bit more abstract thought to use with any sort of facility is exactly the reason employers are asking for college grads. They know there is no way anyone in high school could have been trained on a lot of those tools.

Finally, none of this movement towards universal undergrad precludes high performers from going further in their educational pursuits.

So in short, I do see the whole movement towards universal undergrads. I understand it from the perspective of employers. But I also see where people who maybe got undergrads before everyone had to have them might feel a bit hoodwinked. It's like they were told, "this is the advanced training." And now are learning, "No, that was just the normal training. You have to do more if you want to advance."

The problem with this thinking is that it is individualistic, zero-sum, and reeks of "I got mine, fuck you". Society itself gains an advantage when the labor force has a higher level of education, it also contributes to economic dynamism.

The major issue with higher education is the amount of debt that students face, aside from that hurdle we should be doing everything we can as a society to encourage students to consider higher education.

This isn't the 50s anymore, you can't build the economy on folks with a high school degree who get a union job at a factory for 30 years.

Or perhaps high school should be teaching more advanced subjects. Compare US high school against the equivalent education level in Europe for example

It literally is; the Blair government specifically had their 50%-go-to-university goal to monkey with youth unemployment figures.

I guess it kind of works in Europe and Japan. But then, Americans reject a lot of things that work in Europe and Japan.

No advantage? Everyone would have a much broader education including a specialty. Even if they don't directly use that specialty it in their future career, it's still useful.

>The lower performers just end up with more debt.

Hmm if only there was a way to solve something like that....

For example, a lot of regular/consumer banking jobs today require a college degree, but did not 15-20 years ago. The job has not changed; The people that work there still mainly help people with savings accounts, mortgages, loans, etc.

But since there are so many applicants for these positions, you now need a Bachelors degree in Economics, Business Administration, or similar.

I've seen job ads for bank greeters and receptionists that required a bachelors.

No, there is a large set of people who go to college to get the paper they need, and do not end up with any more broad of an education at all, or no more broad, possibly less, than work experience would have given them.

Going to college doesn't ensure broad knowledge or a quality education, but it sure is a prerequisite to those things in this day and age. And we should try to give that opportunity to as many smart, motivated people as we can find in our country, irrespective of their ability to pay. The alternative is a return to deep class stratification. There's no guarantee that anyone will receive a quality education even at a quality school. Demanding that as a prerequisite to subsidies is like demanding that farmers not lose crops as a prerequisite to subsidizing corn.

No. People inclined towards that kind of thing would go to college anyway.

Compelling others to also go to college won't have those positive results unless the high school already failed them, in which case college is just a "sorry four years of your life were wasted, let's have a do-over".

But it seems like the better answer is to fix broken high schools.

I knew my comment would get downvoted though. :P

I would place the origin of this thinking in the crusading social reform movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, or perhaps more broadly in Protestantism, and later, in emerging nationalist projects (with a few outliers of course).

I think it is important to examine the origins of our ideas on compulsory education, and the crucial questions of what purpose an education system actually serves, what purpose it should serve, and how its purpose has changed over time.

I would advocate a paradigm shift in how we think about education and its place in modern society. I am of course not the only person who advocates this, but I disagree with those who would carry on the tradition of imbuing education with a social and moral mission. I would not argue against the benefits of a broad humanistic education, or the necessity of technical and vocational education in an advanced economy, but rather point out that we collectively allocate a vast amount of resources to education, and place an almost religious faith in its value. The latter points are worthy of debate.

I could write a book on the subject, and I've read quite a bit in the area over the years. I'd really love to continue with the historical side of things, as well as my own suggestions and reflections, but it's too much to properly explain here.

I agree with this;

Somewhere where high schools started "college prep" curriculums, students forgot that they were working towards a job. A high school diploma means something; it signals you're trained in core subjects more than ~40% of peers who didn't graduate with one. You should have more job prospects that being a server or cashier as you have a formal education in professional writing and even complex math.

I assume this was lost in the transition to "college prep" curriculum; where trade classes and apprenticeships in high school clearly show you are some degree of about to be an adult and able to enter the workforce in a trade.

If you need to just get some generic "good job", then the answer is to learn what you need in the first twelve years of school. I think that's enough time."

Some guy on the internet said 12 years is enough to get a good job so I guess its true? A number other than 12, the product of history and chance, must be a sinister plan to uh extend childhood indefinitely by some cabal for some mysterious reason.

(Full disclosure, I went to school till I was 28. It fucking ruled and I think everyone should do it if they want to).

Not everyone wants to spend a third of their life in school. And I have proof that it is not necessary in all cases by the existence of at least one counterexample:

I have a friend who did not receive a college degree. He is now a professional fabricator, and a better mechanical engineer than most of the mechanical engineers I went to school with

If they want to, sure. Hurrah for education-for-its-own-sake.