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greyenlightenment  investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...  2yr ago (greyenlightenment.com)   3109 thread views

Why the college bubble won’t pop

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It seems like there is a growing opportunity for some bright entrepreneur who can figure out a legal way to sort employees cheaply, and hire good people directly from high school (splitting the college premium with them). I wonder how big it would have to get before someone decides to try to exploit it.

Part of the problem is that employers don't want to spend money training employees. They want work-ready people right now, who can fit in to the job with the shortest amount of bedding-in time.

Get a good employee from high school, and the first question will be "Can you use this machine/piece of equipment?" The answer will be no, and in the old days, that was expected: you took on apprentices, or you trained up people. Maybe you waited until the high school graduate then did a year or two in a vocational school learning how to do the basic tasks.

Now, employers want "six years of experience with this, that and the other, must be able to do accounts and plumbing, work from home and fly off to Tunisia week-on/week-off basis as required". College is a short-cut to "yes, X has been trained in to do the job". Maybe X can't do it first thing, but the assumption is that at least X has heard of, or knows about, triple phasic blancmange back-end coding die assembly, rather than taking on Y out of high school and training them how to do that.

Maybe X can't do it first thing, but the assumption is that at least X has heard of, or knows about, triple phasic blancmange back-end coding die assembly, rather than taking on Y out of high school and training them how to do that.

Training someone takes time and and money. Having a degree confers higher IQ, which is correlated with trainability.

Yeah, I agree but I am surprised there isn't some space for pay between entry level and starting plus training would be cheaper than the premium for an already trained employee. Maybe the gap isn't quite wide enough yet, but I have to imagine the rising cost of college isn't purely the college capturing more of the wage premium they bestow.

that would be something like the wonderlic test . Unfortunately, despite the widespread use of the test, it has not been enough to disrupt the 4-year degree hegemony.

People here often bring up legal issues with relying on IQ tests etc but I don't think it's the real problem. The legal issues basically only apply to employers in America, but other countries without those laws are still experiencing the same sort of higher education signaling spiral.

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