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Originally Posted by ImSavy
I do agree that getting someone to spend two years (or whatever) of their life doing a subject that only has soft transferable skills for what that person actually WANTS to be doing is incredibly stupid.
It's cart before the horse. We're training people before we have much clue what training they need or want. Barriers to employment are so high and the subsidization of school so much that the natural course of things has been flipped on its head. I'm not sure if I can succinctly explain this, but I'll try:
Let's say we have a society with no welfare programs and no regulations on business. That means no funding for education, no minimum wage, low costs of doing business, etc. In this society, parents are responsible for their kids. If parents believe their kids should have classes and have the money to send them, they will. If parents don't wish that for their kids, then the kids are taught what the parents can teach them and they seek employment. This employment would mostly be with family or friends or regional acquaintances. The cost of that employment for kids is next to zero because they're still kids. They do simple tasks, build skills, build relationships, build loyalties. They move up as they find what they want and demonstrate their value.
This is how it has always worked. This is how it works today in many places. My cousin has an awesome career captaining a fishing boat. he got into it because his dad and uncles do it. He makes bank and loves it. He graduated high school, where he learned kinda nothing. He was problematic until he got out of that system and his dad finally started teaching him the business. I know a lot of people with stories like this. For them, schooling is nothing but a life-delayer, capital-waster, that teaches nothing as much as it does cynicism
In this world, education is very cheap and direct. It comes at the behest of what parents think best for their kids and businesses think best for its employees. Even the most technically complex industries would operate like this. Because costs would be so cheap, they would do things like hiring every applicant for 0 dollars willing to pay for the company's preferred textbooks. Then when those hires prove that they can learn the right things and do the right things to bring in profits, they start getting paid. We do this today (internships) but only after taxes and loans have spent ungodly sums on the person, not including the gargantuan opportunity costs of wasted time. The actual cost of learning programming skills that you'd use at tech companies is probably less than $1000 and could probably be learned to a payable degree in 6 months. If somebody wished to do this, it would be very hard for them not to.
Compare this to what we have now. There's no more loyalty between employers and employees and it's hard to get work or move up if you don't have a bachelors. This is entirely a product of the mass push of subsidized education. Instead of building relationships from a young age, everybody hops around from company to company after twenty years of school. Due to such major increase in supply of bachelors degrees (since loans are not denied anybody), companies no longer even bother looking at applicants outside of the pool of graduates. Whenever you hear politicians say that welfare just makes more people poor, they're right and this is why.
Add to this that all the schooling needed to get decent work teaches you almost nothing important. One of my close friends is an accountant in the construction industry. He got a bachelors in accountancy from a good state school with a 3.7 GPA, yet tells me that when he got the job, he had no clue what he was doing. Everything was just different than what he was taught in school. He had to relearn everything on the job. He says they have the exact same problem with every intern or new hire. None of them have any clue what they're doing because employment tasks are very specific whereas college is not. He says there's one accountant in the firm who doesn't have a bachelors yet has been there longer than anybody and knows the material better than anybody, yet she is continually passed over for advancement. All because she doesn't have a bachelors. I asked him what would happen if applicants were to learn all the specific accounting practices needed yet don't have degrees, and he said their applications wouldn't even be reviewed
None of this practice makes sense unless you look at what the incentives and sensibilities created by incentives do. Because of the mass subsidization of education, it is in companies' best interest to have hamfisted practices like this since the state is already sorting talent for them. The problem is it's majorly inefficient and expensive, and it makes everybody poorer and worse off. Furthermore, it just encourages the belief that education is holy. I thought it was holy as well until I got into the system and found that people in college are just as dumb as everybody else. The only difference is that those who get educations are the ones that can listen to lectures without squirming. The education system spits out those who prefer doing things then calls them stupid for it
Well that turned into a monster and probably unclear. Sorry
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