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Increasingly, anyone who wants to do anything better-compensated or more-dignified than working at McDonald's or stocking shelves at Walmart. But that's only if we exclude trade apprenticeships or 2-year technical degrees, which I'd count under "college."
But the road to success for non-college-educated has eroded.
Isn't that a bit far-fetched?
I'm not completely sure what you mean. You could make a good argument for trade apprenticeships not being college, but people who get associate's degrees in HVAC or IT or aviation maintainence get them at community colleges, and they're counted as college degrees.
I know I worded it weirdly, what I was trying to say is, "While four years may be unnecesary for many, some sort of post-secondary education (whether an apprenticeship or two-year degree) is ultimately necessary for most people who want to progress farther in a career than low-skill service jobs." I'm not saying we should get rid of 2-year degrees, or anything like that. In fact I think they're a great alternative to a lot of four-year programs for many people.
I meant that it doesn't fall into the category of overall life experiences and phase that average people normally associate with the word.
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Sure. But even cutting a lot of degrees down to 2-years would be a not-insignificant gain.
And I'm unconvinced that certain non-technical fields especially need a long stint in college.
I definitely agree that a lot of white-collar jobs don't actually require higher education -- just some interpersonal skills and Microsoft Office expertise. IMO very few non-technical fields actually require the level of education provided by 4-year degrees. Very little of it is retained, anyway, particularly if it isn't being used.
Ultimately what I believe is going on is that employers are using college education as a proxy for conscientiousness and IQ, whether consciously or unconsciously. You want to hire people for your office positions who are genuinely better employees than fry cooks. And testing directly for the desired traits is either illegal or too gauche. You try convincing Linda the HR lady you want to ignore qualifications and hire based on IQ tests. So college performance becomes the acceptable proxy, and it includes the relevant payoffs to interest groups like under-represented minorities and women that are the cost of doing business.
Yes. This is the standard response I get, and it seems plausible (though one wonders why less "woke"/diverse nations don't simply institute IQ tests).
I guess the only real response is "I said 'most viable', not 'easy'". Yes, cutting away whatever makes businesses unwilling to do straight IQ testing and starving the large administrative sector attached to colleges is not going to be easy. And huge swathes of the educated populace are not in favor of it for both self-interested and ideological reasons.
But, if the government is going to be involved in backing and forgiving loans, there has to be rationing. Much stricter rationing.
I can see employers get more legal leeway on IQ tests and other disparate impact bait before you actually roll back women in the workplace or actually pay to fully compensate people for their perceived economic loss they suffer when they have kids
It's not just about IQ. I know plenty of smart people -- people smarter than me -- who couldn't finish college, because they kept on sleeping through class and missing deadlines. It's about IQ, and conscientousness, and either having low neuroticism or enough coping mechanisms to maneuver through the neuroticism you have, and being pro-social. Heck, conscientiousness might be more important than IQ for most things.
They do! We're talking about South Korea's fierce competition down below. And East Asian Confucianist competition is nothing more than an elaborate proxy for IQ, conscientiousness... and all of the aforesaid traits.
It needs to be grueling and competitive, because we know of no other way to test for industriousness other than actually putting people to work and seeing who sticks to deadlines and persists and who doesn't. There is no lab test we can do to measure that value, everything in the short term reduces to IQ. But for employment, it's the long term we care about.
The only other way we have to measure that part of people's personality is by straight up asking them -- "Do you keep deadlines?" "Is it important for you to work?" "Are you lazy?" -- and the second we try to measure a property by self-report and tie it to outcomes anyone with an above-room-temperature IQ will start simply lying.
College is just the West's version of Confucian examinations. Only the actual competition comes in secondary school, before anyone submits an application to any university, and we don't publicize the fact beforehand so most of the population doesn't realize how much their petty high school activities and extracurriculars will define the course of their life. And unlike the Confucian system, it's explicitly designed to favor children of the elite, while letting in some token minorities so the college brochures don't look 'too white.' China can point to the Western university and say, "not only is this fundamentally less valid as a measurement than our traditional form of examination, but it is an affront to our socialist value of equality." And I'm sure they do. A lot.
Not to make a snide quip, but I doubt they do, because they seem fine with sending their kids to our colleges--because, for all of Western education's sins, there's still enough value in it for it to be a potential matter of geopolitical strategy.
For all its problems on the student side, Western universities are still on top when it comes to research quality. I tend to think of our universities as top-tier research institutions glued precipitously to crappy status-stratified indoctrination centers and finishing schools. I mean, I can't tell you how many professors my peers had at university who very clearly hated teaching (particularly undergraduates). Chinese students come to the West to study because, unlike most local students, they're motivated to actually participate in research and aren't repelled by disagreeable professors.
The goal of the Chinese is a) to participate in the status system of Western universities and therefore enhance the prestige of China (even if they believe it's not as meritocratic as it should be, they still want in on that sweet status while it's for the taking) and b) to bring knowledge and expertise from the West to China.
Their geopolitcal strategy is to use Western institutions to springboard Chinese research. I have a friend who works for a technology firm out of a non-Western country, that has satellite locations in the US placed in strategic locations specifically to pull away talent from American R&D divisions and enhance their homegrown research. My belief is that Chinese students at American universities are there for very similar reasons. And that's particularly why a lot of the geopolitical debates concern Chinese students who study at American instutions and return home.
I have no doubt the eventual goal of the Chinese is to make their own universities better than Harvard or Yale, and presumably a combination of Han supremacism, Confucianism, and Communist ideology motivates their belief that they'll come out on top.
Fair assessment! I don't know if that's how they try and mold their own universities back home, but that is all plausible, I think.
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