[bargl]

Your parents didn't give you bad advice at the time (that is without the hindsight of current knowledge). At that time it was GREAT advice. The problem with advice is it only works in hindsight.

I'd suggest anyone going into college right now get a CS degree, but in 20 years that may be automated away.

Who knows. People gave you advice in good faith, they weren't trying to steer you wrong. It's what they were told was the best thing for their kids. Blaming parents or kids or even mentors is the wrong thing. It's how everything entwined that created the situation. No one tried to create it and society couldn't see it coming.

[rjf72]

I'd like to agree with you, but how could "society" not see what would happen if you increase the percent of college graduates from e.g. 5% to 35% in a matter of just several decades? And this started to happened about the same time that we nearly doubled the labor force by first "allowing" and gradually starting to effectively require that women also work.

Skills are valued for their rarity. Get rid of the rarity, get rid of the skill's value. The most realistic concern for the value of a CS degree is not automation, it's other humans. Add far more people pursuing CS degrees, without a proportional growth in the job market, and you'd see wages and demand for it plummet.

And there also factors like China in the future. Outsourcing only really stuttered because the quality of the outsourced products was consistently poor. But there's no inherent reason this must always be the case. If China can start being a source that companies can turn to for high quality software solutions at a low cost, run of the mill software development could go the way of industrial manufacturing.

[bargl]

I think the best way to see how society could not see what would happen is to watch any TV show that has ever tried to predict the future ever.

Smartphone? Rarely seen but critical to our society.

Twitter? Ha.

Facebook? People actually spoke to one another.

Global warming? Didn't see that coming...

Flying cars? Nope not yet.

Pervasive Nuclear? Nope not that either.

Humans suck at predicting the future. We're so terrible at it. Market crashes, war, etc. We just have no idea. While what you're saying make sense to an economist, that's not how society works. The best ideas don't always win out the most popular ones do. People WANTED their kids to be better off, so they sent them to success factories that told the parents they'd be better off because in the past people were better off.

Until they weren't.

EDIT: I'm not saying no one saw this coming. I'm just saying a most people (society) didn't.

[rjf72]

I don't really think any of those were comparable. The situation with the devaluing of an education is an extremely simple case of supply + demand. When usable skills are rare, they have a high value - when they're not, they don't. Again the same thing that makes it easy to predict what the longterm outcome of 'get [everybody] in computer science' will be. It'd devalue the skill to the point that it'd be worthless, much the same way that when you 'get [everybody] a college degree' those degrees, in and of themselves, become worthless.

Put another way, I can't imagine how anybody could predict anything else besides exactly what has happened.