why the college bubble really needs to pop
College in America is the ultimate solution to any problem involving income. We’re told to go to one to get a four year degree, and suddenly, we’ll have lucrative jobs, fulfilling careers, and just as a bonus, make an extra million dollars over our lifetimes. Or at least that’s how it works in an oft-repeated fairy tale told to teenagers every day across the country. The reality is that college nowadays isn’t just an expensive guessing game, but leaves half of its graduates unable to get enough money together to start their independent lives while saddling them with debt.
Not only that, but some 57% of people with jobs say that the work they do simply doesn’t need a degree at all in a trend that held steady for the last decade. And if you think working in a job that needs one will put that sheepskin to use, you’re in for a rude surprise. Just 27% of people actually use their degree in their daily job as it was intended. Things get even worse when you’re actually in your new office because many employers view college degrees with thinly veiled contempt.
Even if you got a job in the field to which your degree is relevant, be prepared for your future to include applying for new jobs with ridiculous, unrealistic requirements, and companies praising college graduates while complaining bitterly about them, refusing to train new workers and then expecting colleges to act as their apprenticeship programs.
Even if we do make public colleges free of charge, as some are proposing, all we’d be doing is increasing access to something that has been oversold to the public as a cure for all that economically ails us, and fails to anticipate what happens as automation continues to crater job growth. Companies have already turned a four year degree into a prerequisite for higher paying jobs, but do not seem to care much about whether the degree their require is actually relevant to the job, as we can see by the practice of constantly employing people with irrelevant degrees. And that prompts the question of why we’d spend our own or taxpayer money on traditional four year programs unless we actually need to for the job at hand. Demanding a $30,000 check mark on an application is utterly asinine.
Consider that 70% of people either couldn’t care less about, or outright hate their jobs, then just factor in that between them is something like a trillion dollars in student debt, fewer than a third of them are actually doing what they studied, most taking all those courses and tests, going into all that debt just to get a piece of paper in the grand scheme of things, and pile on the stagnant wages, rampant automation, and managerial indifference of today’s workplace, and suddenly it all makes sense.
People are miserable because they’re being asked to jump through expensive and painful hoops only to end up somewhere they didn’t want to be, bosses included. They too are every bit not happy with their jobs as their subordinates, filtering their noxious attitude down until the cloud of toxic ennui consumes the workplace. The drive to get everyone to go to some sort of college, any college, and study something, doesn’t matter what, just something because hey, a million dollars, created a lot of over-educated graduates whose skills can’t be relevant to what employers need, because colleges insist on existing in their own economic vacuum. They don’t cater to the marketplace, they say, because their job is to educate rather than train.
What we need isn’t even more education, or better education, whatever that means, we need a flexible, responsive, and relevant higher-education system with real world apprenticeships and internships as required parts of the degree program. Instead of rushing kids into college armed with a BLS report that was stale by the time it was published, we should encourage them to get some real world experience in a year off from school, and companies should help.
It’s just plain irrational to expect the kind of workers they want to appear ex nihilo; they should be exposing a new generation to what they actually do day in, day out when they’re still living with family, able to take lower paying jobs and still deciding what they want, and not relegate them to busy work that no one wants to do. If a teenager wants a philosophy or history degree only to find out that no one is going to give him or her a job even when it costs pennies to do so, that would be one hell of a wake up call to reconsider. And if the job doesn’t require specialized skills you can only learn in college, why require a degree? Just let the new apprentice advance up the ladder. How would that not make sense? Why force him to her to waste time instead of learning the job?
College as we know it today was started to give a liberal arts education to the wealthy and their children, people not really concerned with how they’ll make a living after they graduate, though perpetually in the habit of asking for more spending money. Widespread public literacy and the requirement for all kids to be educated is barely a century old, as is the concept of a steady job with a regular schedule.
Most of our ancestors never sat in offices for 250 days a year and got paychecks on a regular schedule. In many ways, the so-called gig economy was the norm until the industrial revolution created an insatiable demand for jobs as we understand them today. In the last 150 years, we’ve adapted colleges to teach skills relevant to many professions, such as medicine and applied sciences, aka the STEM majors, but we haven’t changed how many four year programs still exist simply for the sake of education and aren’t offering attractive incentives to keep these vocational programs up to date and relevant with the marketplace. Education for education’s sake is still the order of the day, which is really bad for current vocational majors.
It’s not that education for the sake of self-betterment is somehow wrong or should be seen as a waste of time and effort, quite the opposite. It’s just that we can’t have it both ways, demanding that colleges turn into vocational schools that also teach expansive theory and general classes for expanding one’s mind, while deriding vocational schools as a refuge for C and D students to perhaps make something useful of themselves, seeing as how they weren’t good enough to go to a four year institution.
Milennials have a chip on their shoulders precisely because they had a childhood filled with warnings that flipping burgers and fixing cars was for losers, then after over a decade and a half of education, finishing with strong GPAs, they’re now derided for being “too proud” to flip burgers and fix cars. Which they were told was a punishment for incompetence. If they had been gently tracked, if vocational schools were presented to them as a viable and just as honorable of an option as four year colleges, and if we stopped demanding college degrees for things no college needs to teach, is it somehow unreasonable to think we would all be much happier and have more ways to find gainful employment while remaining fiscally solvent?
