[oldopsguy]

The author makes a lot of great points here but I took issue with this sentence:

All jobs that currently require a degree, should instead require a knowledge test. The employer should not care how the knowledge was obtained, just that the applicant has the knowledge.

I would argue that the degree does provide some value beyond what can be easily tested in an interview setting. I'm not sure if it is the only way but the type of person who completes a degree is the type of person who is able to sit down and start a difficult task and complete it. Often these tasks are not directly related to what the student is passionate about, and sometimes not even necessary without taking into consideration the bigger picture of a multi-year program. In my experience dealing with the drudgery of the tedious day-to-day of most white-collar jobs, this college education degree provides a coarse litmus test for the type of person who will thrive in this environment. A person who will do things well and thorough for their own sake and deal with the bullshit.

[merrywhether]

Just as a hypothesis: is it possible that the sheer number of people we're putting through increasingly bureaucratic college curricula (do this busywork, now go sit in this room listening to a topic you don't care about for a while, etc) is creating a feedback system that encourages the creation of tedious drudge work since that's what we've "trained" people to be good at? Though I'm not sure which is the chicken and which is the egg in this situation.

[tonyedgecombe]

Not only have we trained people to be good at it but we have filtered and sorted them based on that.

[alansammarone]

To me it looks like we asking young people, in their brightest years (from a neurological point of view) to sit through boring classes, under-qualified teachers, just so that afterwards they'll have proven themselves able to stand a boring job too? That seems very perverse. It is _not_ a "skill" to be able to do what you don't like and be happy with it. It is a skill to learn to (genuinely) like it or get out.