I'm surprised that nobody in this thread has brought up economist Bryan Caplan's 2nd most recent book, "The Case Against Education".

This economist has looked at economic research on the effects of education, such as:

* How well students retain information

* How well students apply their knowledge in contexts outside of the classroom

* How much college graduates make versus how much someone makes after dropping out of school at the last minute

* How much more productive nations are after educating large swaths of their population

* How many companies outright tell their new hires that the knowledge they gained in school needs to be forgotten, and that they need to start learning everything from scratch.

And the conclusion Caplan comes to is that college education is a social signal, i.o.w. it's a zero-sum game where getting a college degree comes at the expense of everyone else with a college degree since the signal is degraded and is not as special as it once was.

> If you're going to actually be a doctor or an engineer then a college degree is worthwhile. But some people are going to be retail clerks and factory workers.

The WSJ article linked up at the top is literally about how factory work increasingly requires professional education like a college degree.

> The WSJ article linked up at the top is literally about how factory work increasingly requires professional education like a college degree.

But does the job really require a degree in order to do it, or is it only the employer that requires the degree, as a filter, because now they can get away with it as a result of the oversupply of college degrees?

Can you explain how an employer gains any advantage by pointlessly requiring degrees today, when they did not previously? What would that do other than raise their labor costs?

Anyway, the article is clear that increasingly automated factory work requires more educated and independent employees.

This is starting to happen in retail too. Thanks to self-checkout machines, there are now more employees in the pharmacy at a local CVS than in the rest of the store combined.

It is an easy filter for job applicants, who are also likely in debt and desperate for stable work. If they had or could get a decent job in their field of study they wouldn't be applying for factory work unless they were an automation specialist.

> Can you explain how an employer gains any advantage by pointlessly requiring degrees today, when they did not previously? What would that do other than raise their labor costs?

Suppose that people with a degree are significantly less likely to quit shortly after you've spent a lot of money training them on your equipment, regardless of whether what they studied in college has any application to the job. If you have to pay the person with a degree a lot more money then maybe it isn't worth it just for that, but if everybody gets degrees and there is an oversupply such that there are more people with degrees than jobs that actually require them, now maybe you can get someone with a degree for a low enough price to be worth requiring it.

> Anyway, the article is clear that increasingly automated factory work requires more educated and independent employees.

That's just the signaling value again. They're not looking for someone with knowledge of GAAP or materials science or economics, they're looking for someone with the proven capacity to earn a degree by studying those things, because it implies they can also learn to run the machines well.

If not as many people had degrees then it wouldn't be worth paying the premium for one of the people who do, and then people who are going to be machine operators don't have to burn four years of their lives and incur significant student debt just to engage in signaling behavior. Instead the employers would have to bear the (lower, but unsubsidized) cost of more attrition as a result of not having the degree to use as an early filter against low quality employees.