| I don't understand American's new-found fascination with vocational training. Why is it they expect education to now provide people with narrowly focused job training over the more traditional broad education? Take everything you know about how nonsense the tech hiring/interviewing process is, and just for a second play with the idea the problem is deeper than anyone thought. What if barely any employers have the faintest idea what they need from the workforce? No real understanding of how to screen for it at all? Limited ability to assess what portions of those needs are most effectively created through self-organization among the workforce at no line-item cost to the employers (school, etc...)? If we, for a moment, assume that was true, we'd probably expect to find a world that has cargo-culted a definition of what a qualified applicant looks like. A person who is smart in general, and knowledgeable in a domain with a surface-level resemblance to what they would be expected to do at work. Enter the bachelor's degree. Like any other metric standing in for something the user doesn't know how to (or can't) measure directly, the metric started getting gamed. Once "BS degree" = "employable" was well-known, and a generation run through that system from birth through college, then you have respectable news outlets writing thinkpeices about the value of a BS. And if the person doing the hiring doesn't really know what they want, the population of people that just want to find a way for everyone to pay their bills doubly don't. So the next step of the dance is absorbing the on-the-job training that employers don't want to pay for, and rarely figure out how to do properly anyway. What happens after flushing a generation of kids through the new process without really figuring out what we're trying to accomplish in the first place will be _______________________. |