[throwaway399]

I think treating (1) by lowering requirements is bad because now people will stereotype that that person got there on ez mode.

(2) is bad because people will inevitably make accidental genuine mistakes and it perpetuates the whole hostile PC culture where people are afraid of talking about anything and everything. If there is no social punishment then enforcing is impossible.

I think the solution is in changing culture. I.E.: make it like China or former USSR. People got jobs in in-demand fields, not in what they were interested in.

Most qualified people rose to the top primarily based on aptitude alone. That way there would be no need for thought police.

[aaron-lebo]

I think the solution is in changing culture. I.E.: make it like China or former USSR. People got jobs in in-demand fields, not in what they were interested in.

That sounds like a totalitarian state that nobody wants to live in. That might get rid of the thought police but you then you have job police, yeah?

[throwaway399]

The whole point is changing it in such a way that everyone "wants" to do these in-demand jobs. Chinese students aren't unhappy with their job choices.

Edit:

I think the easiest way is to simply not force people to self-answer an abstract question of "What are you interested in?" First of all, it's almost impossible to answer it correctly because there is no way you can sample all possible career paths. Secondly, if they don't ask themselves this question, they'll find interesting things in the general job area they're given.

[aaron-lebo]

We could similarly restrict all food production to rice and people would get used to it and even enjoy it, but that doesn't mean it is a solution towards a more diverse diet.

You are fundamentally talking about increasing diversity in one area by reducing choice in another. Isn't that antithetical?

edit: your edit makes more sense :)

[throwaway399]

Thanks!

Regarding food vs jobs, I think it's not a very good analogy because

a) almost every job has a lot to it that could be interesting for anyone

We are not limiting all jobs to "Wordpress site template maintainer for small e-commerce sites" or "MySQL DB engineer specializing in scaling and indexing databases with mostly JSON-based tables". If you are a front-end web dev, you could choose to end up specializing in front-end driven analytics or SVG drawing or something higher-level like d3 plotting or anything in HTML5 games or photoshop-to-code conversion or migrate to photoshop-based design etc etc

B) The goal is not to maximize diversity of food or diversity of jobs. I am not implying avoiding increasing specialization.