[y-c-o-m-b]

It's very telling about what kind of people make up this community when all the up-voted comments are attacks on the author and very limited actual discussion on the topic itself yet the down-voted comments are speaking to the actual problem. You don't have to like the author or their demeanor, but to flag this thread is neglecting how the topic itself is a good fit for HN. What I'm seeing right now is reflective of the elitist attitude on this platform that rears its ugly head from time to time. Clearly this article hit a nerve for a lot of degree holders, it's just a shame they're emotional about it rather than constructive. Go ahead and down-vote me, but that won't make your insecurities go away.

[blueblob]

The argument wasn't strong in any way, in my opinion. The article itself limited the discussion by taking a demeanor that is effectively an attack on all college graduates because of anecdotal evidence misapplied as representative. There was no discussion as to what alternatives are to a college degree that employers might find attractive. The writing highlighted the insecurity and hypocrisy of the author. Mostly, the article was a waste of time to read.

[y-c-o-m-b]

> It falsely signals to employers that you’re better than the average Jane just because you have a piece of paper

> I preceded to tell him that it doesn’t matter if you have a college degree anymore to do today’s jobs and that he was basically bragging about his family’s socioeconomic status, not his son’s actual achievements. I tried to elaborate about the inequalities of higher education and why it’s an outdated metric of future success. I explained why employers are absolutely wrong for thinking his son is better than someone without a degree or a degree from a public university.

These are important points to consider and I don't see how it's a "waste of time to read". The author provided data from different sources to backup their claim. Do you have any sources to counter those claims?

> anecdotal evidence misapplied as representative

Such as? Did you happen to skip over ALL the other sources they used to prove their point?

> There was no discussion as to what alternatives are to a college degree that employers might find attractive

So? This discussion section is a good place for that. Why don't you offer some alternatives since you've thought on it?

You're taking an article with enough substance to have a valuable discussion around it and poo-pooing it away because the author is inferior relative to your subjective standards. That's what I'm getting from your comment.

[blueblob]

> It falsely signals to employers that you’re better than the average Jane just because you have a piece of paper

This is a reductionist argument stating that everything you learn in college is just a piece of paper. It's a bad faith argument. If you believe it, you weren't convinced and if you don't believe it, you still weren't convinced. The whole intent was to be polarizing.

> I preceded to tell him that it doesn’t matter if you have a college degree anymore to do today’s jobs and that he was basically bragging about his family’s socioeconomic status, not his son’s actual achievements. I tried to elaborate about the inequalities of higher education and why it’s an outdated metric of future success. I explained why employers are absolutely wrong for thinking his son is better than someone without a degree or a degree from a public university.

This is a clear example of hypocrisy and an opinion that is regurgitated over and over in the article. The man being discussed never asserted that his son was better than everyone else, that was the author's excessive bias. Believe it or not, many fathers are proud of their childrens' achievements. The whole argument being peddled is that nothing of value was gained and that this man needed to be put in his place by the author because she's better than his son.

The "data" that the author provided was mostly correlation (not causation) with wealth and people doing well in college. That doesn't imply in any way that people that have strong support systems but not wealth cannot do well. The argument is fallacious.

The tone that the author set for the article in the very beginning is that people are supposed to be enraged, like the author is, that employers want some indication that the candidate is a good quality candidate. In the current system, that often means getting a college degree. Employers want the closest thing they can get to a guarantee that the candidate knows something. Without proposing an alternative this was just a poorly supported rant by the author. Your devil's advocate that I must stimulate discussion because the author did not is again, fallacious.

>> anecdotal evidence misapplied as representative

> Such as? Did you happen to skip over ALL the other sources they used to prove their point?

Such as using specific schools when talking about corruption but then using all schools in the later points about performance. Presumably, people with the prestigious degrees would have better job performance but no stratified data was used in that discussion. To me, it appears as though the author had a point they wanted to make and did the bare minimum research to make that point without questioning whether it was right.

With this in mind, I don't find that the article had all that much substance other than cherry-picked statistics and made no effort to to have any nuance. The takeaway was supposed to be that all people with college degrees got no value because the author had no nuance.

>You're taking an article with enough substance to have a valuable discussion around it and poo-pooing it away because the author is inferior relative to your subjective standards. That's what I'm getting from your comment.

You're asserting that I am assessing that the author is inferior because she doesn't have a college degree? I actually don't know whether the author has a college degree, but don't find the points particularly convincing either way.

I am stating that I don't believe the article to have much valuable substance beyond the clickbait title. You're asking me to invent substance for the article in the comments because of your opinion that the article hits some critical point.

[y-c-o-m-b]

> This is a reductionist argument stating that everything you learn in college is just a piece of paper. It's a bad faith argument. If you believe it, you weren't convinced and if you don't believe it, you still weren't convinced. The whole intent was to be polarizing.

Don't you think you're being too literal here? You're honing in on something that is ordinarily irrelevant. The point was to convey how employers falsely believe people with a degree are more skilled than those without. Once again, focused on the author and these arbitrary granular issues than the broader subject...

> This is a clear example of hypocrisy and an opinion that is regurgitated over and over in the article. The man being discussed never asserted that his son was better than everyone else, that was the author's excessive bias. Believe it or not, many fathers are proud of their children's' achievements. The whole argument being peddled is that nothing of value was gained and that this man needed to be put in his place by the author because she's better than his son.

Not at all how I read it. That's extrapolating a lot from a simple paragraph. Funny, I think you're asserting your own excessive bias here; especially if you take in your last sentence. That's really stretching the intent. All of which is understandable if you're reading this while you're pissed off or offended. Have you tried reading it from a neutral perspective?

> The tone that the author set for the article in the very beginning is that people are supposed to be enraged, like the author is, that employers want some indication that the candidate is a good quality candidate. In the current system, that often means getting a college degree. Employers want the closest thing they can get to a guarantee that the candidate knows something. Without proposing an alternative this was just a poorly supported rant by the author. Your devil's advocate that I must stimulate discussion because the author did not is again, fallacious.

It's rich how you call everything fallacious when it doesn't fit your poorly understood narrative of what the author is saying. The author was enraged by the comment by the man because of the underlying idea of discrimination against those without a degree. If this subject was about skin color, the outrage would be understandable, yes? That's the entire point of this article. Case in point: the fact that you think a discussion is beneath you only validates an elitist attitude.

> The takeaway was supposed to be that all people with college degrees got no value because the author had no nuance.

Yet that's not what the takeaway was supposed to be after-all. The takeaway was supposed to be about discrimination against those without degrees, not discrimination on those with degrees as you've apparently taken it.

> You're asserting that I am assessing that the author is inferior because she doesn't have a college degree? I actually don't know whether the author has a college degree, but don't find the points particularly convincing either way.

Here-in lies the problem with everything you've said. It's clear from my comment that's not at all what I was asserting. Just like you did with the author, you're fabricating these false narratives and extrapolating information from thin air. I mentioned nothing of her having a college degree. Go read that quote again. What I said is you're imposing some arbitrary set of rules on the author and using it to brush away the vast amounts of effort she put into the article. I'm not asking you to invent anything, you're doing that on your own already. I'm asking you to read the article from a neutral point of view instead of brushing it off as fallacious or arguing semantics.

The fact that you don't think this article is worthy of discussion and yet you engaged in all this effort debating me is amusing.

[blueblob]

To be clear, you think that going out of your way to go on a self-righteous tirade against a guy because he's proud of his kid graduating college is on par with racism? You're being intentionally obtuse and it's readily apparent by the fact that you have to attack me and "my understanding." Your critiques ignore all of the arguments that I made about the substance of the article in favor of attacks. You complain that we can't have discussions and yet you're the person who makes it so we can't have discussions.

http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html