article in todays SLATE. on college bubble.[/quote]
…Famed entrepreneur Peter Thiel, for instance, insists that just about every degree is worth little more than the paper it is printed on: Schooling is not education, he says, and ambitious kids should drop out and skip forward to the workplace…
I read the article, scaredy. I think employers are trying to reward new hires who have a college degree … any degree, just so they can start making payments on their college loans. This is foolhardy.
Entry level “white-collar” county jobs used to be filled by workers with a high school diploma or GED. Even though the hiring criteria on the job announcements have not changed or changed substantially, it seems that now these jobs are ALL filled by college degree-holders. Most are very, very monotonous and moving up and out of them could take years. Even the next-level job to get promoted to isn’t very challenging. The only difference between the duties of those lower-educated entry-level workers of yesteryear and the more highly educated workers of today is that yesterday’s workers used to dress more respectfully and did nearly all their tasks manually and on a Burroughs CRT tied to a mainframe. Now, nearly all of it is done by PC and there is very little need for moving out of the worker’s cubicle or customer service area. These computer tasks could easily be performed by a 5th-8th grader today. I hear young college-educated county workers state they’re bored out of their minds and don’t like answering to managers with far less education than themselves. Some don’t even stay long enough to pass probation or vest (which now takes longer for half the benefit). The ones that do stay do so only to live at parents’ houses a little longer and attempt to retire their student loans or pay them way down. When that is accomplished and/or they’ve had enough, they quit. They don’t have the dedication to service or loyalty that we had and I don’t believe the county cares anymore about this.
The only reason a vastly overqualified worker would want these jobs is because steady work is hard to come by right now and they can live with parents and pay down student loans and for no other reason, IMO. It is ridiculous to go thru all that getting a degree entails and then do grunt work all day in a political environment, IMHO.
edit: I’ve heard that a 4-year Bachelor Degree is now the *new* HS Diploma!
