Comment Re: Death of Expertise (Score 1) 81
Except if you lower the entry-point to get to Lvl 2 while getting rid of Lvl 1, then you get total morons who wouldn't even be considered for Lvl 1 doing Lvl 2 work... so, what did all that accomplish?
Or, more likely, they both just change in ways you never expected. How precisely they change depends on the job, but I don't foresee businesses putting people into jobs they're unqualified for any more than they already do. It just doesn't make business sense, and any who do that will feel the consequences of it one way or another. If the economy worked the way you seem to think it does, we wouldn't have a functional economy right now.
Higher labor demand? What labor? There's less and less actual labor (y'know... us blue-collar workers) regular jobs and more and more office jobs for those who have the fancy piece of paper.
Actually that youtube video I linked addresses this. I did put it there for a reason.
Of course, us blue-collars could go get us some of that edumacation, but not many of us have $200k sitting around, don't qualify for scholarships, can't afford to have another loan (the ones for the house and ten-year old truck dun used up muh credit), and don't have the time while working our lower-paying jobs and providing for the family of lil' uns'.
Have you never considered simply not taking out the loan and attending lower cost schools instead? This is exactly what I did 12 years ago, when you guys were screaming about exactly this even back then. When I talk about this to younger coworkers, it turns out many of them also did exactly that very recently as well. I also happen to work for a world class company well known for being at the top of its game (and it also doesn't care at all about what college you attended.) It turns out that the cost of your tuition doesn't correlate well with your success after school, rather the strongest indicator for that is the quality of you as a student.
Anecdotally, it seems that if you're the kind of person who needs to take out a loan that big, then you're unlikely to be the kind of person who would do well with the degree that you're spending it on. For the life of me, I can't even fathom how somebody would take out loans on anything without actually knowing whether they'd have the means to pay it off. Though I tend to be a saver rather than a debtor, always have been since I turned 18, got my first credit card, and started working part-time minimum-wage jobs. The only loan I've ever taken out was a mortgage -- I only buy cars that I've been able to pay cash for, and I only spend credit card money that I already have the cash to back.
Almost as if measuring alternatives and their consequences before taking an action has benefits.
irreverentdiscourse and Sethra both have it right.
If they're training to be doomsayers, then they've got it exactly right. Everybody I've run into since graduating who had that attitude...still has that attitude, and they never really made it anywhere. It turns out there's very little economic demand for doomsayers, and nobody wants to work with, let alone hire, a chronic complainer.