This seems to be only about how a college education is used as a gate to filter job applicants. When I went to university I heard a lot about how it was to get a rounded education and be exposed...
This seems to be only about how a college education is used as a gate to filter job applicants.
When I went to university I heard a lot about how it was to get a rounded education and be exposed to different ideas. Then I could have a richer life and be a more informed citizen.
So I have a university degree in computer science but I also took classes in art history and religion and biology and literature and writing and lots of math. Oh and philosophy, including a lot about logical fallacies so I’m not as easy to trick by Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro.
I could probably have the same job now if I went to trade school or took online classes or lied about my education.
I’m not disparaging anyone who just wants a shortest route to the highest pay. And I understand that education is way more expensive now than when I got my degree. But man, as a society we are really losing something here.
I think this is very well put. My hot take is that you can speedrun proficiency (e.g. enough to pass an exam) in many subjects, but you can't speedrun understanding in any of them.
I think this is very well put. My hot take is that you can speedrun proficiency (e.g. enough to pass an exam) in many subjects, but you can't speedrun understanding in any of them.
I can confirm that it would have been quite literally impossible to learn everything I learned in my 5 year degree in just a few months. In fact, I have serious doubts it's even possible to learn...
I can confirm that it would have been quite literally impossible to learn everything I learned in my 5 year degree in just a few months. In fact, I have serious doubts it's even possible to learn it properly in the supposed 5 years, given how dense the course work was.
As with so many other things, this is about how the processes associated with higher education have been co-opted for other purposes while it's "impossible" to do things differently because a lot of people would stand to lose a lot of money.
We should return to a culture of on-the-job training coupled with much more lightweight base certification requirements for junior applicants. A lot of people don't really want or need higher education. But I suppose then an industry's expertise would be held by the senior workers in that field, making layoffs and mistreatment much more difficult, and we can't be having that, now, can we?
You can bet that rich people's kids will continue to get broad educations that take many years, while everyone else has whatever minimum is needed to work in the AI mines. We are apparently aiming...
You can bet that rich people's kids will continue to get broad educations that take many years, while everyone else has whatever minimum is needed to work in the AI mines. We are apparently aiming for a gilded age of a few rich people and everyone else is peasants. For a while there we were working on a middle class, but those types are more difficult to control I guess.
We're really losing something for sure, but it's been lost for a long time. When we're talking about education these days, we're talking about two different things: (1) putting a kid through the...
We're really losing something for sure, but it's been lost for a long time. When we're talking about education these days, we're talking about two different things: (1) putting a kid through the "track", or (2) imparting knowledge and experience in order to foster understanding, critical thinking, and empathy.
For a long while now, we've been no child left behind PISA Singapore -ing our way through Track (1) and gatekeeping financial stability behind it, while exhausting human capital of (eg, burning through) our teachers to also incidentally accomplish (2).
Even back in the day when one "only" needs a high-school diploma for an entry level job, the authentic educating of a young person was slowly sidelined day by day. Studying for good grades for graduation/degree has been a long time coming.
I'd hope that recruiters have a sense for which schools are good and reputable, which are average and which are diploma mills. Like you, my education(s) were very breadth-y and contributed far...
I'd hope that recruiters have a sense for which schools are good and reputable, which are average and which are diploma mills.
Like you, my education(s) were very breadth-y and contributed far more to my sense of the world and my profession than the topic area spelled out on my parchment.
Unfortunately I don't think that's how it will turn out. I'm pretty sure we've had people involved in hiring processes write right here on Tildes that they don't look at education at all. For the...
Unfortunately I don't think that's how it will turn out. I'm pretty sure we've had people involved in hiring processes write right here on Tildes that they don't look at education at all. For the purpose of acquiring a job that provides a livable wage, almost all education is just turning into a slow, expensive waste of time, better skipped and cheated through.
To save higher education we must separate those two expectations again. To be clear, I'm not arguing that it's in any way bad or undesirable for everyone to be educated; I wish everyone could be. But what we have now as a status quo is a predatory scam that ruthlessly exploits the young and the poor alike by creating a massive supply pool of financially precarious, easily replaceable workers who aren't valued for their expertise and whose employer, more often than not, will not even invest in them.
This is, IMO, a narrow view on what types of jobs exist and what kind of prep someone needs for them. And biased the type of work many people here do. Teachers? Social workers and therapists?...
Unfortunately I don't think that's how it will turn out. I'm pretty sure we've had people involved in hiring processes write right here on Tildes that they don't look at education at all. For the purpose of acquiring a job that provides a livable wage, almost all education is just turning into a slow, expensive waste of time, better skipped and cheated through.
This is, IMO, a narrow view on what types of jobs exist and what kind of prep someone needs for them. And biased the type of work many people here do.
Teachers? Social workers and therapists? Nurses? Archivists and librarians? Radiologists? Accountants?
I don't believe everyone should go to college or that it should be a requirement for every job. But there are absolutely jobs - in high demand - that require an education, and not just "job training".
And we end up with folks who learn nothing but "job" and not, say, the sociology that explains historical inequities in general and in the field and why current laws and regulations exist. Or why it's important to critically think and discuss not just zip through things as fast as possible for the grade. If we just prepare people for "job" I think more folks will feel trapped in "job" (just like certain trades) because they will not have the flexibility of an education that prepared them more broadly.
You're not wrong, and especially in the US. We're seeing it in Canada and (from what I've heard) in Europe, too, but to a lesser degree. r/professors feels like a far more hard-up community these...
You're not wrong, and especially in the US. We're seeing it in Canada and (from what I've heard) in Europe, too, but to a lesser degree.
r/professors feels like a far more hard-up community these days. It's rough to see educators (especially in the US) having to leave the profession because the screws are being tightened too much.
That all said, education is a means for proving effort and expertise and will never completely go out of fashion. For now, it's just sleeping unfortunately.
I'm one of those people for the most part. Having a degree mostly proves that you had time and money in your early adulthood. I think there's an exception for me if someone has a notably elite...
I'm one of those people for the most part. Having a degree mostly proves that you had time and money in your early adulthood. I think there's an exception for me if someone has a notably elite school on their resume, but just having a degree isn't particularly meaningful for the types of jobs I hire for.
I care mostly about experience, but most of all, enthusiasm. Not enthusiasm to have a job, but enthusiasm for the field I work in. I'm not really interested in hiring people that are just looking for a livable wage. I'm interested in hiring people that think what they do is cool, and who would do something similar with their free time if we lived in a star trek future where all of their needs were provided for, like I would. Unfortunately that's extremely hard to determine outside of an interview, and interviews are very time consuming, so hiring is always painful.
Education, expertise, social skills, and organizational context can all be developed. I don't think I've ever seen someone go from just painting by the numbers to enthusiastic about their field though.
Who would go hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt to get a "well-rounded education" if it were just for personal growth and not to get a job so you can pay it back? People who don't end up...
Who would go hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt to get a "well-rounded education" if it were just for personal growth and not to get a job so you can pay it back? People who don't end up with good jobs after graduating have good reason to dissatisfied. They got a bad deal, no matter how "well-rounded" they are in other respects.
Personal growth is great, but it doesn't pay the bills and the amount you pay for it should be limited.
Colleges get away with charging high prices with a sort of motte-and-bailey argument where sometimes it's about careers and sometimes it's about personal growth. It's a cross-subsidy. If you could get a good job by passing an exam and skipping the classes then this scheme would fall apart, much like happened to newspapers after Craigslist and eBay took away the classified ad business.
As it should, but I'm afraid of that that will do to the reputation of higher education as a whole. I think we're on the same page, but as an European, allow me to point out that these are...
If you could get a good job by passing an exam and skipping the classes then this scheme would fall apart
As it should, but I'm afraid of that that will do to the reputation of higher education as a whole.
Personal growth is great, but it doesn't pay the bills and the amount you pay for it should be limited.
I think we're on the same page, but as an European, allow me to point out that these are fundamentally separate problems. I would hope that if the higher education scam were to fall apart, this would make education cheaper, but in a capitalist society wouldn't it make it even more expensive? If fewer people were to seek it out, it would turn into a luxury, niche "product".
We already have cheap and subsidized higher education in Europe, so I greatly recommend doing things out way in order to accomplish that goal. Unfortunately, the relationship between degrees and jobs on this side of the pond remains just as dysfunctional.
I mentioned in my comment that college is much more expensive now than it was when I went. I was able to pay for (state) college by working part time and living at home. But there are currently...
I mentioned in my comment that college is much more expensive now than it was when I went. I was able to pay for (state) college by working part time and living at home.
But there are currently multiple states in the US that make community or state college largely free for residents. It's possible to get a lot of the personal growth benefit from this path. Not everyone needs to go to Harvard. The main cost is lost opportunity where you are working part-time jobs during school years.
And the fact we think it's normal to wait until college and for people to pay for it is the part that is completely insane. College should not be about "oh and now you learn anything actually...
So I have a university degree in computer science but I also took classes in art history and religion and biology and literature and writing and lots of math. Oh and philosophy, including a lot about logical fallacies so I’m not as easy to trick by Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro.
And the fact we think it's normal to wait until college and for people to pay for it is the part that is completely insane.
College should not be about "oh and now you learn anything actually useful". The rest of the world expects school long before higher education to teach that, and yet every time someone points out it's absurd that college degrees are multiyear monstrosities people act like no one will ever learn about Descartes or whoever.
This entire argument has always reeked to me of the "well how do you learn morals if you're not religious", and it bothers me because it continues to justify probably the largest class barrier out there.
Folks should absolutely learn about this stuff before college too, but the same issue of teaching to the test, to the skill, leading to the job is at play in K-12, probably worse than in higher...
Folks should absolutely learn about this stuff before college too, but the same issue of teaching to the test, to the skill, leading to the job is at play in K-12, probably worse than in higher ed. If anything the outcome of K-12 ditching art and music and recess is the child sized mirror of colleges that ditch the humanities in favor of job training only.
Also college shouldn't be stupidly expensive, since we're fixing giant systems, but much like how lower state funding leads to higher property taxes leads to inequitable outcomes based on zip code (and thus race and class) in public primary/secondary education, lower state funding leads to higher tuition leads to inequitable outcomes on debt and success in higher education.
But it doesn't make sense to me to copy/paste the problems to higher education nor to create a bunch of folks only trained for [job] snd not for life.
Well, yeah, when degree costs this much and all employers treat it as a barred gateway to earning any sort of living, of course nobody can well afford the college experience. We all do. But guess...
Well, yeah, when degree costs this much and all employers treat it as a barred gateway to earning any sort of living, of course nobody can well afford the college experience.
“We want diplomas that mean something,”
We all do. But guess what we want more than a diploma that means something? Be able to financially survive.
the program is designed to help older [...] students who don’t need the traditional longer college experience on campus that many young adults crave. “They literally just need a certificate” to help their careers,
When society makes a degree the minimum threshold for ANY career (not just a precarious job or, barf, a gig), when tuition rises like crazy and student loans not forgivable, when politicians blame young / poor people [1][2][3] that that's why they're poor instead of addressing automation and vast inequality, then the time or / is money cost of a degree simply becomes a hurdle to hack past .
[1] (Ontario, Canada provincial premier) Ford tells students to not pick 'basket-weaving courses' in wake of OSAP cuts : Premier says students should focus on 'jobs of the future' as Ontarians express concern over OSAP grant cuts (CBC, 2026)
[2] (At a failed presidential run rally, Former US President) Biden tells coal miners to “learn to code” (The Hill, 2019)
[3] (convicted felon and failed business man Donald J) Trump Admin Faces New Pressure Over Nursing Not Being ‘Professional’ Degree (larson.house.gov, 2026)
Many U.S. schools have been experimenting with ways to speed up traditional college programs to reduce the burgeoning cost and help students move into the workforce faster. Some offer three-year bachelor’s programs, reducing the number of credits needed for a diploma by one quarter. Many more allow students to enroll in college classes while still in high school.
But the breakneck pace of the fastest online programs concerns some academics, who say there is a big difference in what students can learn in weeks or months compared with three or more years.
The phenomenon — sometimes referred to as degree hacking, college speed runs or hyper-accelerated degrees — has spawned a cottage industry of influencers making videos about how quickly they earned their degrees and encouraging others to follow suit.
[...]
The University of Maine’s Presque Isle campus has more than 3,000 students in its online YourPace program, according to the school. The school’s president said the program is designed to help older, nontraditional students rapidly obtain an affordable degree they may need for a raise, promotion or new job — students who don’t need the traditional longer college experience on campus that many young adults crave.
“They literally just need a certificate” to help their careers, said Raymond Rice, president of the Presque Isle campus. He said the program is open only to students age 20 and older, in part to avoid competing with its traditional four-year program on campus.
Of the nearly 300 students who earned a bachelor’s in the YourPace program in fall 2024, the vast majority finished in less than a year. More than 1 in 4 finished their entire degree course load in a single eight-week session, half the length of a traditional academic semester.
Under a system known as competency-based education, students typically must finish several assignments or pass a test to prove they learned the material, regardless of how long it takes. In a philosophy class Rice oversees, students have to show they learned the online material by completing five five-page essays and one longer paper that’s up to 10 pages.
There are no class meetings. No group discussions. No weekly assignments. Nothing to slow students down.
[...]
At some schools, students can sign up for as many classes as they want for a flat price per term.
For instance, the YourPace program in Maine charges $1,800 per eight-week session for undergraduate programs and $2,450 for graduate degrees. That gives students a powerful financial incentive to push through the programs as quickly as possible to limit the cost and avoid taking out significant student loans. And low-income undergraduate students may be eligible for Federal Pell Grants that help cover the cost.
[...]
The head of the New England Commission of Higher Education, which oversees the accreditation of the University of Maine system, told The Washington Post that he had never heard of students completing a bachelor’s degree in only a few months — either at the Presque Isle campus or any other accredited university. He said that is something his organization may decide to investigate.
Feel like this would probably just lead to employers being more selective about the degrees they look for. It’s not enough that you have a degree, it needs to be from a school that’s known and has...
Feel like this would probably just lead to employers being more selective about the degrees they look for. It’s not enough that you have a degree, it needs to be from a school that’s known and has some legacy. In the age of AI ATS it’s not a hard additional filter to add.
Agreed, but to take it another step I think that's likely a net negative for society as well as the students of non-elite universities themselves. There's a limited number of prestigious...
Agreed, but to take it another step I think that's likely a net negative for society as well as the students of non-elite universities themselves. There's a limited number of prestigious universities and a limited number of slots at those schools. The broader the gap, in a high-demand employer's mind, between those schools and everywhere else, the harder it becomes for students who couldn't get in to an elite uni to compete with those who did. That seems like the more likely trajectory to me.
There's an alternate timeline too where college degrees become less important for employment overall, employers having recognized that skills and knowledge are more important than the piece of paper, but that world is harder to get to.
That’s mostly about the state of the employment market. In a hot market employers are absolutely willing to do that. At the peak of the software hiring frenzy, companies were willing to hire boot...
There's an alternate timeline too where college degrees become less important for employment overall, employers having recognized that skills and knowledge are more important than the piece of paper, but that world is harder to get to.
That’s mostly about the state of the employment market. In a hot market employers are absolutely willing to do that. At the peak of the software hiring frenzy, companies were willing to hire boot camp grads, or even non-grads with some coding experience (open source, for instance).
That evaporated now. But it’s mainly because there’s a colder market where every company gets their pick of the litter.
All else being equal, why not filter for college grads? Why not filter for good colleges? When you have 3 open spots, and 10,000 applicants, anything you can do to cleave the hiring pool to a more manageable state is a win.
Because then these companies operate in an extractive society where they only hire the best elites and don't foster any giving back into society, and then even these elites die or retire or leave...
All else being equal, why not...
Because then these companies operate in an extractive society where they only hire the best elites and don't foster any giving back into society, and then even these elites die or retire or leave for more equitable societies where these elite's children have any shot at life, these companies run out of potential talent.
This is where we are now, before the collapse
The question maybe isn't why shouldn't these companies, but why should our society allow these companies to.
I’d like to challenge you a bit on this. I agree completely that this is a problem - it’s a rational decision by the firm but compounds elite problems in society. But I think the cure is worse...
The question maybe isn't why shouldn't these companies, but why should our society allow these companies to.
I’d like to challenge you a bit on this. I agree completely that this is a problem - it’s a rational decision by the firm but compounds elite problems in society. But I think the cure is worse than the disease. The scenario is a company that has 3 spots, 10,000 applicants, and needs to decide who to hire. What could society actually do, here, to produce a more egalitarian result without immediately causing a series of awful side effects? I’m not just messing with you; I’ve given it a couple of minutes of thought and I can’t think of something. Here’s an example: ban companies from considering which school you went to? They just shift to even more opaque signals like personal networks, which is even less meritocratic. It’s harder, I think, than “we should just make them not do that.”
It sucks, but the problem here isn’t really with the company in my opinion. It’s that not everyone who deserves access to an elite institution has it, and so that’s where the energy should be focused.
Hey thanks for the friendly challenge. And, Haha you've activated my trap card. In a society is a monopsony: (NPR, Planet Money, 2026) In a world where people are basically housed and fed and have...
What could society actually do, here, to produce a more egalitarian result without immediately causing a series of awful side effects?
Hey thanks for the friendly challenge. And, Haha you've activated my trap card.
In a society is a monopsony:
employers face limited competition for workers, they gain power to pay them less and treat them worse than they otherwise could. [...]
in a new book, The Wage Standard: What's Wrong in the Labor Market and How to Fix It, the economist Arindrajit Dube offers a theory — drawing on a growing body of peer-reviewed research — that monopsony power is much more widespread throughout the economy than previously thought, even in markets that at first blush seem rather competitive. And that matters because monopsony power could be used to suppress wages.
"The truth is employers have a lot of real power over setting wages, and when that power goes unchecked, paychecks stay smaller than they should be," Dube says.
Without fierce competition checking how employers treat and pay workers, companies may need something else to check their power.
In a world where people are basically housed and fed and have some medical backup, people become entrepreneurs and create their own jobs for themselves as well as others.
When anti competition rules are actually enforced, companies actually need to offer more to workers instead of lockstep their pay and have non poaching agreements.
When we once again disallow companies to buyback their own stock, they have to pay more taxes or invest in their own people again.
When we limit C Suite pay, when we tax the ultra wealthy, suddenly we have a lot more wiggle room for people to go, y'know what screw you I'm working for myself.
When we have unions again who can make sure they don't just fire people to make this quarter more attractive to stocks, or you don't just leave someone on 3 year probation or can fire at will, when we make companies train for skills instead of making kids pay out of pocket, when we eliminate free intern labour, the water rises and raises all ships.
When we mandate paid overtime, paid on-call, paid holiday compensation, paid 4 week vacations, we all win.
There's many many many things society HAD done successfully in the past that had been stripped away in favour of the lie that we never had it before. Don't buy in to zero sum lies.
Thanks for the article, I enjoyed it. I'm struggling a little bit to draw the connection. We were talking about companies who have 10,000 applicants for 3 roles. That's not a union job at the...
Thanks for the article, I enjoyed it.
I'm struggling a little bit to draw the connection. We were talking about companies who have 10,000 applicants for 3 roles. That's not a union job at the pipefitter or something, it's a senior SWE position at Google that probably pays >500k in total comp. I don't really get how paid overtime, better housing standards, etc. affects that position at all.
For the highest-demand employers, absolutely. It’s reminiscent of the old joke about throwing out half the applications in the pile to weed out the unlucky applicants. I was thinking more for...
All else being equal, why not filter for college grads? Why not filter for good colleges? When you have 3 open spots, and 10,000 applicants, anything you can do to cleave the hiring pool to a more manageable state is a win.
For the highest-demand employers, absolutely. It’s reminiscent of the old joke about throwing out half the applications in the pile to weed out the unlucky applicants.
I was thinking more for everyone else - regular employers - and phrased things confusingly. Non-elite employers use the presence of a college degree as a signal that an employee will be good, but it’s an imperfect signal. Not completely wrong, obviously (it does show long-term commitment of time and money towards accomplishing something, which is important in and of itself), but imperfect nonetheless. For them, being able to dispense with the imperfect signal of the degree and assess candidates on better signals like skills etc. would be a huge positive.
Theoretically, there’s no difference between high-demand employers and regular employers because we’re holding all else equal. But in practice, it’s only the high-demand employers which have enough applicants to actually be able to hold all else equal. Regular employers don’t have 10k applicants per job where they can afford to filter so carelessly. In that sense, ironically, they need to be choosier.
Non-elite employers still have the pick of the litter right now, outside of a few industries (like healthcare, but, uh, you definitely need a degree for healthcare roles, simply for safety reasons...
Non-elite employers
Non-elite employers still have the pick of the litter right now, outside of a few industries (like healthcare, but, uh, you definitely need a degree for healthcare roles, simply for safety reasons if nothing else).
Regular employers don’t have 10k applicants per job where they can afford to filter so carelessly. In that sense, ironically, they need to be choosier.
Do we have any evidence that employers are being "unreasonably" (as in, self-detrimentally) choosey? We've seen in hot job markets companies absolutely drop the college requirements. I don't think there's any reason to believe there's some kind of psychological barrier.
We're straying a bit far afield and it depends to some extent on what you'd consider evidence, but yeah, I think so. There's been reasonably replicable research on racial and gender biases in...
We're straying a bit far afield and it depends to some extent on what you'd consider evidence, but yeah, I think so. There's been reasonably replicable research on racial and gender biases in hiring, for example. Logically, at least sometimes, companies have been self-detrimentally choosy. (Or conversely, see the way elite universities were self-detrimentally choosy against Asian-Americans.) Certainly it suggests that there are psychological factors at work.
But really what I meant was more like this. Let's say 10% of everyone who went to Harvard (etc) is actually skilled, talented, and will succeed in a given role. At a decent school, call it 2%. Separately, let's say a percent of all applicants for the job in question are from Harvard and everyone else is from decent schools.
If you're an in-demand employer and have 10,000 applicants for your 3 roles, you're still getting 100 from Harvard, so you may as well throw everyone else away, all else equal. Even though there's only a 10% chance each of those applicants is good, you've got 100 of them so who cares. But if you're a lower-tier employer and only have 100 applicants for your 3 roles, you can't just select on the Harvard thing alone, because you've only got 1 applicant from Harvard and there's still only a 10% chance your Harvard person is any good. Instead you need to be more careful about actually assessing the candidates.
Obviously that's all bullshit napkin math and you should disregard it immediately, but that's what I was getting at about regular employers having to be choosier.
And what would happen, then? There would be lots of open job positions that aren't getting filled, right? That's how it would manifest statistically. That's not what we see, though. Job openings...
But if you're a lower-tier employer and only have 100 applicants for your 3 roles, you can't just select on the Harvard thing alone, because you've only got 1 applicant from Harvard and there's still only a 10% chance your Harvard person is any good. Instead you need to be more careful about actually assessing the candidates.
And what would happen, then? There would be lots of open job positions that aren't getting filled, right? That's how it would manifest statistically.
If it was the case that employers were being "too choosey", it does not seem to reflect in positions that they can't fill.
If a hypothetical small employer did insist on only hiring for Harvard, what would happen is that as they continue to not hire anyone, they would continue to lower the requirements until they do.
The implication of OP at least is that the requirement for college degrees is in some sense unwarranted or irrational, but IMO it’s a perfectly rational requirement in a cooler job market where...
The implication of OP at least is that the requirement for college degrees is in some sense unwarranted or irrational, but IMO it’s a perfectly rational requirement in a cooler job market where you can afford to be choosier.
It’s also a symptom, not a cause, of a problem. There’s nothing inherently wrong with employers requiring college degrees - but it can point to a lagging employment market.
Set a reasonable, fair standard and then pick randomly is the best thing I can come up with for that scenario. It would save a lot of time studying for the Big Exam if it's not unreasonably hard...
Set a reasonable, fair standard and then pick randomly is the best thing I can come up with for that scenario.
It would save a lot of time studying for the Big Exam if it's not unreasonably hard to ace it. Also, the people chosen know they got lucky (so don't let it go to your head) and the people who passed the exam and didn't get picked have some consolation in knowing that it's not their fault.
I'll just double down and say i'm not surprised. The biggest barrier to finishing most my classes was...the classes. This isn't always the case, as I was polysci, but at the same time most...
I'll just double down and say i'm not surprised. The biggest barrier to finishing most my classes was...the classes.
This isn't always the case, as I was polysci, but at the same time most material is skewed for the slowest learners, even in college. Obviously some people are going to struggle and need the in person teaching and talking to the professor. Others aren't.
Clearly AI is playing a huge role in this (how do you know who understands the material vs who's just riding AI output), but at the same time the "gating" of classes that can be done in a week as a semesters worth of course material to justify a $10,000, minimum, graduation is also a huge problem (as is the forced 4 year degree for half of these). Once you decide that degrees are a gate to success it becomes a major problem with padding them.
The university I work for is considering/in the process of putting together a school for non traditional students to help them get their degrees and the main factor they point to with these older...
The university I work for is considering/in the process of putting together a school for non traditional students to help them get their degrees and the main factor they point to with these older students is that many are were previously in progress with a program already (they never completed the requirements when they first attempted due to a variety of reasons) and just need a clear pathway to finish so they can have the degree for their resumes. I wonder if the students finishing the YourPace program in just 8 weeks are maybe in a similar boat?
The primarily-online school I've been attending (which generally has a decent reputation) has allowed this kind of acceleration for quite some time. Their marketing has timelines on the line of a...
The primarily-online school I've been attending (which generally has a decent reputation) has allowed this kind of acceleration for quite some time. Their marketing has timelines on the line of a few months to a couple of years, but people have figured out ways to game the credit transfer system and speed through courses to get their degrees in a matter of weeks in some cases.
I can definitely see how it's possible theoretically, but there's been a limit to how far I've been able to push that simply because I don't have the energy and focus due to juggling it with a full-time senior SWE position, plus the impetus isn't nearly as strong since my employment situation is already great. I'm mainly getting my bachelor's degree so 1) my credentials and worked experience are more aligned and 2) some countries make one a prerequisite for a visa.
This seems to be only about how a college education is used as a gate to filter job applicants.
When I went to university I heard a lot about how it was to get a rounded education and be exposed to different ideas. Then I could have a richer life and be a more informed citizen.
So I have a university degree in computer science but I also took classes in art history and religion and biology and literature and writing and lots of math. Oh and philosophy, including a lot about logical fallacies so I’m not as easy to trick by Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro.
I could probably have the same job now if I went to trade school or took online classes or lied about my education.
I’m not disparaging anyone who just wants a shortest route to the highest pay. And I understand that education is way more expensive now than when I got my degree. But man, as a society we are really losing something here.
I think this is very well put. My hot take is that you can speedrun proficiency (e.g. enough to pass an exam) in many subjects, but you can't speedrun understanding in any of them.
I can confirm that it would have been quite literally impossible to learn everything I learned in my 5 year degree in just a few months. In fact, I have serious doubts it's even possible to learn it properly in the supposed 5 years, given how dense the course work was.
As with so many other things, this is about how the processes associated with higher education have been co-opted for other purposes while it's "impossible" to do things differently because a lot of people would stand to lose a lot of money.
We should return to a culture of on-the-job training coupled with much more lightweight base certification requirements for junior applicants. A lot of people don't really want or need higher education. But I suppose then an industry's expertise would be held by the senior workers in that field, making layoffs and mistreatment much more difficult, and we can't be having that, now, can we?
You can bet that rich people's kids will continue to get broad educations that take many years, while everyone else has whatever minimum is needed to work in the AI mines. We are apparently aiming for a gilded age of a few rich people and everyone else is peasants. For a while there we were working on a middle class, but those types are more difficult to control I guess.
We're really losing something for sure, but it's been lost for a long time. When we're talking about education these days, we're talking about two different things: (1) putting a kid through the "track", or (2) imparting knowledge and experience in order to foster understanding, critical thinking, and empathy.
For a long while now, we've been no child left behind PISA Singapore -ing our way through Track (1) and gatekeeping financial stability behind it, while exhausting human capital of (eg, burning through) our teachers to also incidentally accomplish (2).
Even back in the day when one "only" needs a high-school diploma for an entry level job, the authentic educating of a young person was slowly sidelined day by day. Studying for good grades for graduation/degree has been a long time coming.
I'd hope that recruiters have a sense for which schools are good and reputable, which are average and which are diploma mills.
Like you, my education(s) were very breadth-y and contributed far more to my sense of the world and my profession than the topic area spelled out on my parchment.
Unfortunately I don't think that's how it will turn out. I'm pretty sure we've had people involved in hiring processes write right here on Tildes that they don't look at education at all. For the purpose of acquiring a job that provides a livable wage, almost all education is just turning into a slow, expensive waste of time, better skipped and cheated through.
To save higher education we must separate those two expectations again. To be clear, I'm not arguing that it's in any way bad or undesirable for everyone to be educated; I wish everyone could be. But what we have now as a status quo is a predatory scam that ruthlessly exploits the young and the poor alike by creating a massive supply pool of financially precarious, easily replaceable workers who aren't valued for their expertise and whose employer, more often than not, will not even invest in them.
This is, IMO, a narrow view on what types of jobs exist and what kind of prep someone needs for them. And biased the type of work many people here do.
Teachers? Social workers and therapists? Nurses? Archivists and librarians? Radiologists? Accountants?
I don't believe everyone should go to college or that it should be a requirement for every job. But there are absolutely jobs - in high demand - that require an education, and not just "job training".
And we end up with folks who learn nothing but "job" and not, say, the sociology that explains historical inequities in general and in the field and why current laws and regulations exist. Or why it's important to critically think and discuss not just zip through things as fast as possible for the grade. If we just prepare people for "job" I think more folks will feel trapped in "job" (just like certain trades) because they will not have the flexibility of an education that prepared them more broadly.
You're not wrong, and especially in the US. We're seeing it in Canada and (from what I've heard) in Europe, too, but to a lesser degree.
r/professors feels like a far more hard-up community these days. It's rough to see educators (especially in the US) having to leave the profession because the screws are being tightened too much.
That all said, education is a means for proving effort and expertise and will never completely go out of fashion. For now, it's just sleeping unfortunately.
I'm one of those people for the most part. Having a degree mostly proves that you had time and money in your early adulthood. I think there's an exception for me if someone has a notably elite school on their resume, but just having a degree isn't particularly meaningful for the types of jobs I hire for.
I care mostly about experience, but most of all, enthusiasm. Not enthusiasm to have a job, but enthusiasm for the field I work in. I'm not really interested in hiring people that are just looking for a livable wage. I'm interested in hiring people that think what they do is cool, and who would do something similar with their free time if we lived in a star trek future where all of their needs were provided for, like I would. Unfortunately that's extremely hard to determine outside of an interview, and interviews are very time consuming, so hiring is always painful.
Education, expertise, social skills, and organizational context can all be developed. I don't think I've ever seen someone go from just painting by the numbers to enthusiastic about their field though.
Who would go hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt to get a "well-rounded education" if it were just for personal growth and not to get a job so you can pay it back? People who don't end up with good jobs after graduating have good reason to dissatisfied. They got a bad deal, no matter how "well-rounded" they are in other respects.
Personal growth is great, but it doesn't pay the bills and the amount you pay for it should be limited.
Colleges get away with charging high prices with a sort of motte-and-bailey argument where sometimes it's about careers and sometimes it's about personal growth. It's a cross-subsidy. If you could get a good job by passing an exam and skipping the classes then this scheme would fall apart, much like happened to newspapers after Craigslist and eBay took away the classified ad business.
As it should, but I'm afraid of that that will do to the reputation of higher education as a whole.
I think we're on the same page, but as an European, allow me to point out that these are fundamentally separate problems. I would hope that if the higher education scam were to fall apart, this would make education cheaper, but in a capitalist society wouldn't it make it even more expensive? If fewer people were to seek it out, it would turn into a luxury, niche "product".
We already have cheap and subsidized higher education in Europe, so I greatly recommend doing things out way in order to accomplish that goal. Unfortunately, the relationship between degrees and jobs on this side of the pond remains just as dysfunctional.
I mentioned in my comment that college is much more expensive now than it was when I went. I was able to pay for (state) college by working part time and living at home.
But there are currently multiple states in the US that make community or state college largely free for residents. It's possible to get a lot of the personal growth benefit from this path. Not everyone needs to go to Harvard. The main cost is lost opportunity where you are working part-time jobs during school years.
And the fact we think it's normal to wait until college and for people to pay for it is the part that is completely insane.
College should not be about "oh and now you learn anything actually useful". The rest of the world expects school long before higher education to teach that, and yet every time someone points out it's absurd that college degrees are multiyear monstrosities people act like no one will ever learn about Descartes or whoever.
This entire argument has always reeked to me of the "well how do you learn morals if you're not religious", and it bothers me because it continues to justify probably the largest class barrier out there.
Folks should absolutely learn about this stuff before college too, but the same issue of teaching to the test, to the skill, leading to the job is at play in K-12, probably worse than in higher ed. If anything the outcome of K-12 ditching art and music and recess is the child sized mirror of colleges that ditch the humanities in favor of job training only.
Also college shouldn't be stupidly expensive, since we're fixing giant systems, but much like how lower state funding leads to higher property taxes leads to inequitable outcomes based on zip code (and thus race and class) in public primary/secondary education, lower state funding leads to higher tuition leads to inequitable outcomes on debt and success in higher education.
But it doesn't make sense to me to copy/paste the problems to higher education nor to create a bunch of folks only trained for [job] snd not for life.
Well, yeah, when degree costs this much and all employers treat it as a barred gateway to earning any sort of living, of course nobody can well afford the college experience.
We all do. But guess what we want more than a diploma that means something? Be able to financially survive.
When society makes a degree the minimum threshold for ANY career (not just a precarious job or, barf, a gig), when tuition rises like crazy and student loans not forgivable, when politicians blame young / poor people [1][2][3] that that's why they're poor instead of addressing automation and vast inequality, then the time or / is money cost of a degree simply becomes a hurdle to hack past .
[1] (Ontario, Canada provincial premier) Ford tells students to not pick 'basket-weaving courses' in wake of OSAP cuts : Premier says students should focus on 'jobs of the future' as Ontarians express concern over OSAP grant cuts (CBC, 2026)
[2] (At a failed presidential run rally, Former US President) Biden tells coal miners to “learn to code” (The Hill, 2019)
[3] (convicted felon and failed business man Donald J) Trump Admin Faces New Pressure Over Nursing Not Being ‘Professional’ Degree (larson.house.gov, 2026)
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Oh no, people educating and credentialing themselves without the powers that be getting their cut? Can’t have that.
Feel like this would probably just lead to employers being more selective about the degrees they look for. It’s not enough that you have a degree, it needs to be from a school that’s known and has some legacy. In the age of AI ATS it’s not a hard additional filter to add.
Agreed, but to take it another step I think that's likely a net negative for society as well as the students of non-elite universities themselves. There's a limited number of prestigious universities and a limited number of slots at those schools. The broader the gap, in a high-demand employer's mind, between those schools and everywhere else, the harder it becomes for students who couldn't get in to an elite uni to compete with those who did. That seems like the more likely trajectory to me.
There's an alternate timeline too where college degrees become less important for employment overall, employers having recognized that skills and knowledge are more important than the piece of paper, but that world is harder to get to.
That’s mostly about the state of the employment market. In a hot market employers are absolutely willing to do that. At the peak of the software hiring frenzy, companies were willing to hire boot camp grads, or even non-grads with some coding experience (open source, for instance).
That evaporated now. But it’s mainly because there’s a colder market where every company gets their pick of the litter.
All else being equal, why not filter for college grads? Why not filter for good colleges? When you have 3 open spots, and 10,000 applicants, anything you can do to cleave the hiring pool to a more manageable state is a win.
Because then these companies operate in an extractive society where they only hire the best elites and don't foster any giving back into society, and then even these elites die or retire or leave for more equitable societies where these elite's children have any shot at life, these companies run out of potential talent.
This is where we are now, before the collapse
The question maybe isn't why shouldn't these companies, but why should our society allow these companies to.
I’d like to challenge you a bit on this. I agree completely that this is a problem - it’s a rational decision by the firm but compounds elite problems in society. But I think the cure is worse than the disease. The scenario is a company that has 3 spots, 10,000 applicants, and needs to decide who to hire. What could society actually do, here, to produce a more egalitarian result without immediately causing a series of awful side effects? I’m not just messing with you; I’ve given it a couple of minutes of thought and I can’t think of something. Here’s an example: ban companies from considering which school you went to? They just shift to even more opaque signals like personal networks, which is even less meritocratic. It’s harder, I think, than “we should just make them not do that.”
It sucks, but the problem here isn’t really with the company in my opinion. It’s that not everyone who deserves access to an elite institution has it, and so that’s where the energy should be focused.
Hey thanks for the friendly challenge. And, Haha you've activated my trap card.
In a society is a monopsony:
(NPR, Planet Money, 2026)
In a world where people are basically housed and fed and have some medical backup, people become entrepreneurs and create their own jobs for themselves as well as others.
When anti competition rules are actually enforced, companies actually need to offer more to workers instead of lockstep their pay and have non poaching agreements.
When we once again disallow companies to buyback their own stock, they have to pay more taxes or invest in their own people again.
When we limit C Suite pay, when we tax the ultra wealthy, suddenly we have a lot more wiggle room for people to go, y'know what screw you I'm working for myself.
When we have unions again who can make sure they don't just fire people to make this quarter more attractive to stocks, or you don't just leave someone on 3 year probation or can fire at will, when we make companies train for skills instead of making kids pay out of pocket, when we eliminate free intern labour, the water rises and raises all ships.
When we mandate paid overtime, paid on-call, paid holiday compensation, paid 4 week vacations, we all win.
There's many many many things society HAD done successfully in the past that had been stripped away in favour of the lie that we never had it before. Don't buy in to zero sum lies.
Thanks for the article, I enjoyed it.
I'm struggling a little bit to draw the connection. We were talking about companies who have 10,000 applicants for 3 roles. That's not a union job at the pipefitter or something, it's a senior SWE position at Google that probably pays >500k in total comp. I don't really get how paid overtime, better housing standards, etc. affects that position at all.
For the highest-demand employers, absolutely. It’s reminiscent of the old joke about throwing out half the applications in the pile to weed out the unlucky applicants.
I was thinking more for everyone else - regular employers - and phrased things confusingly. Non-elite employers use the presence of a college degree as a signal that an employee will be good, but it’s an imperfect signal. Not completely wrong, obviously (it does show long-term commitment of time and money towards accomplishing something, which is important in and of itself), but imperfect nonetheless. For them, being able to dispense with the imperfect signal of the degree and assess candidates on better signals like skills etc. would be a huge positive.
Theoretically, there’s no difference between high-demand employers and regular employers because we’re holding all else equal. But in practice, it’s only the high-demand employers which have enough applicants to actually be able to hold all else equal. Regular employers don’t have 10k applicants per job where they can afford to filter so carelessly. In that sense, ironically, they need to be choosier.
Non-elite employers still have the pick of the litter right now, outside of a few industries (like healthcare, but, uh, you definitely need a degree for healthcare roles, simply for safety reasons if nothing else).
Do we have any evidence that employers are being "unreasonably" (as in, self-detrimentally) choosey? We've seen in hot job markets companies absolutely drop the college requirements. I don't think there's any reason to believe there's some kind of psychological barrier.
We're straying a bit far afield and it depends to some extent on what you'd consider evidence, but yeah, I think so. There's been reasonably replicable research on racial and gender biases in hiring, for example. Logically, at least sometimes, companies have been self-detrimentally choosy. (Or conversely, see the way elite universities were self-detrimentally choosy against Asian-Americans.) Certainly it suggests that there are psychological factors at work.
But really what I meant was more like this. Let's say 10% of everyone who went to Harvard (etc) is actually skilled, talented, and will succeed in a given role. At a decent school, call it 2%. Separately, let's say a percent of all applicants for the job in question are from Harvard and everyone else is from decent schools.
If you're an in-demand employer and have 10,000 applicants for your 3 roles, you're still getting 100 from Harvard, so you may as well throw everyone else away, all else equal. Even though there's only a 10% chance each of those applicants is good, you've got 100 of them so who cares. But if you're a lower-tier employer and only have 100 applicants for your 3 roles, you can't just select on the Harvard thing alone, because you've only got 1 applicant from Harvard and there's still only a 10% chance your Harvard person is any good. Instead you need to be more careful about actually assessing the candidates.
Obviously that's all bullshit napkin math and you should disregard it immediately, but that's what I was getting at about regular employers having to be choosier.
And what would happen, then? There would be lots of open job positions that aren't getting filled, right? That's how it would manifest statistically.
That's not what we see, though. Job openings are low, relatively speaking: https://www.reuters.com/business/us-job-openings-fall-february-hiring-lowest-since-pandemic-2026-03-31/
If it was the case that employers were being "too choosey", it does not seem to reflect in positions that they can't fill.
If a hypothetical small employer did insist on only hiring for Harvard, what would happen is that as they continue to not hire anyone, they would continue to lower the requirements until they do.
Yeah, we agree. That's why they don't do that. I'm not sure where we're talking past one another.
The implication of OP at least is that the requirement for college degrees is in some sense unwarranted or irrational, but IMO it’s a perfectly rational requirement in a cooler job market where you can afford to be choosier.
It’s also a symptom, not a cause, of a problem. There’s nothing inherently wrong with employers requiring college degrees - but it can point to a lagging employment market.
Set a reasonable, fair standard and then pick randomly is the best thing I can come up with for that scenario.
It would save a lot of time studying for the Big Exam if it's not unreasonably hard to ace it. Also, the people chosen know they got lucky (so don't let it go to your head) and the people who passed the exam and didn't get picked have some consolation in knowing that it's not their fault.
I'll just double down and say i'm not surprised. The biggest barrier to finishing most my classes was...the classes.
This isn't always the case, as I was polysci, but at the same time most material is skewed for the slowest learners, even in college. Obviously some people are going to struggle and need the in person teaching and talking to the professor. Others aren't.
Clearly AI is playing a huge role in this (how do you know who understands the material vs who's just riding AI output), but at the same time the "gating" of classes that can be done in a week as a semesters worth of course material to justify a $10,000, minimum, graduation is also a huge problem (as is the forced 4 year degree for half of these). Once you decide that degrees are a gate to success it becomes a major problem with padding them.
The university I work for is considering/in the process of putting together a school for non traditional students to help them get their degrees and the main factor they point to with these older students is that many are were previously in progress with a program already (they never completed the requirements when they first attempted due to a variety of reasons) and just need a clear pathway to finish so they can have the degree for their resumes. I wonder if the students finishing the YourPace program in just 8 weeks are maybe in a similar boat?
The primarily-online school I've been attending (which generally has a decent reputation) has allowed this kind of acceleration for quite some time. Their marketing has timelines on the line of a few months to a couple of years, but people have figured out ways to game the credit transfer system and speed through courses to get their degrees in a matter of weeks in some cases.
I can definitely see how it's possible theoretically, but there's been a limit to how far I've been able to push that simply because I don't have the energy and focus due to juggling it with a full-time senior SWE position, plus the impetus isn't nearly as strong since my employment situation is already great. I'm mainly getting my bachelor's degree so 1) my credentials and worked experience are more aligned and 2) some countries make one a prerequisite for a visa.