Should Wall Street pay off student debt

[Dill]

(06-28-2019, 02:27 PM)Au165 Wrote: The real issue in terms of businesses impact on the college crisis is that they turned college degrees into check boxes in the application process. Jobs that should require no degree do for no real reason. You will see jobs that simply say you need a degree of some sort, but they don't even care what it is, why? The original intent of college and the cultural use of it today have splintered and that is why I proposed options that tie employment to the degree because that is the relevance to a large majority of those who attend college today.

A college degree is not needed to have knowledge of a subject. If I want to go to college to learn about something I most likely can acquire that same knowledge from the internet, the main difference being I won't pay someone to then test me on my understanding of the knowledge I have gained. College today has essentially become a service for vetting knowledge for potential future employers. 

In the past college was required to acquire knowledge for many because of the limited access to some of the more detailed nuances of a subject and those who possessed it, however that information today is easier to acquire then ever because of the internet. Colleges themselves already price themselves based on the value of their degree in terms of clout, which in turn improves employment prospects. If this wasn't the case you wouldn't see employment statistics plastered on EVERY college's recruitment literature. 

I agree with most of what you say here about how the business environment/job market has impacted college and how colleges have responded by "marketing" themselves.  I believe  I deplore this even more than you do.

Whether a college degree is needed certainly depends on the subject, however.  I doubt I can learn neurosurgery or classical Greek on the internet. And there is a good reason why colleges require even students learning a narrow discipline to get breadth as well as depth. Few really have the knowledge to guide themselves in such matters, or the will to study something they don't think directly related to their interest.

Higher education in the US was mostly caste based until after the Civil War. Most people could learn "professions," from the ministry to law to dentistry, without going to college.  Skilled workers learned their skills on the job.  After the Civil War, as business and government expanded exponentially in size and complexity, they needed chemists and social scientists and engineers and managers who could no longer just get their knowledge on the job. And US higher ed responded, moving from a Latin-based curriculum to the "elective" system of disciplines and departments we have today (I.e., from "college" to "university"), when the demand for kinds of knowledge which cannot be learned on the job, or even from the internet, are in higher demand than ever.

College today has indeed become a vetting service for employers, as you say.  And this has substantially narrowed the curriculum. Knowledge for them, not you.

But the response to that is not then to make market demand the determiner of what is necessary and what is worthless. That drives the "vetting service" conception of higher ed.  It leaves students scrambling to pay for what their employers want them to learn--and the less about history and politics and critical thinking the better.

A final comment. Many employers rightly see college degrees as indices of more than a quantum of specialized knowledge to be plugged into their organizational chart here or there. A degree means you can set a long term goal and reach it. Others have monitored and certified your work. If your degree is in English or philosophy, then likely you are a better reader and writer (communication skills!) than that business major applying for the same job; your ability to retrain and to grasp differing conceptual models and to adjust to changing, international business environments might be better as well.  All that "new" stuff the business major learned because it was in demand 8 years ago may be already outdated. The ability to write a researched and readable report is not.