[esk]

Considering the tone of these letters (especially the last one—wow!), it's a bit difficult to summon empathy with their authors.

And I think that's unfortunate, because they have an exceedingly valid point—American universities are making a killing churning out graduates with very few relevant skills for today's economy.

That's not to say these students are completely innocent—many, many American students view college as their "last gasp" of living without any real responsibilities, and they make make the most of that opportunity (rather than making the most of the opportunity to better themselves and prepare for today's economy).

Now and forever, using only the internet, it's possible to learn... well, nearly everything. Once employers accept this, the cost of a degree will plummet, and universities will be forced to offer something well beyond what Wikipedia, web forums, and online instructional videos can provide. That's the only way they'll stay relevant and worth the investment. I think the universities can do it, but they are going to fight tooth and nail to avoid having to change.

All large institutions do.

[patio11]

This assumes that employers see value in colleges in terms of teaching and not, say, as outsourced pedigree verifiers which are socially permitted to discriminate along axes that employers are not permitted to.

A degree from Harvard in Commercially Valueless Trivia with a minor in Not Comprehensible Outside Your Specialty and a thesis in Not Even Good Cocktail Conversation still tells employers that you were good enough to get into Harvard. (Or, more insidiously, that you're the kind of people who get into Harvard.)

[esk]

You're right—employers are being lazy.

It's safe for people in HR to mindlessly prefer mediocre Candidate A with a degree over stellar Candidate B without one, so instead of actually examining the values the candidates can bring to the company, they take the easy, defensible path.

Part of the process of employers' recognizing that someone learning online can easily learn more than someone going to a university will be to empower HR departments to honestly examine candidates' value to the company rather than looking at increasingly irrelevant badges on their resume.

In short, employers lazily prefer people with degrees. People want employment. People seek degrees. Universities see tons of demand and little pressure to improve, so they don't. Most graduates skills are irrelevant for today's employers, so they don't get hired. Employers can break this cycle by empowering their HR departments.

[patio11]

I think you are thinking of a fairly different phenomenon than I am thinking of. Let's take two candidates, A and B. A has a degree in Anime as Literature (a degree which fairly few people have but which is available if you want it from at least one university, and which we'll stipulate has fairly little commercial relevance in the United States) from, without loss of generality, Washington University in St. Louis (my alma mater). B has equivalent knowledge regarding postmodern interpretations of Evangelion but gained it all through self-study.

You are describing that companies discriminate against B in favor of A because their hiring processes are broken and doing so is organizationally safe. I agree that in many cases their hiring processes are broken, but think that it doesn't matter because companies do not care about anime. It is utterly irrelevant to them. Knowledge of anime does not make you more efficient at filling out TPS reports. However, the degree from WashU brackets you as Top X% of Valued Quality Y distribution, where Y might be "intelligence" or "ability to follow through on moderately complex tasks with long time horizons" or simply "success in a highly selective process" if you're feeling charitable or "social standing" if you're not. Prospective employers aren't allowed to effectively discriminate based on intelligence (no, really), so they can use possession of a degree as a proxy for it. By comparison, the actual contents of the education received post-matriculation are irrelevant, so the fact that Candidate B has objectively equivalent knowledge of anime is not meaningful to the prospective employer.

[m-photonic]

>Prospective employers aren't allowed to effectively discriminate based on intelligence (no, really), so they can use possession of a degree as a proxy for it.

Yep. Amy Wax has an excellent take on it here:

"The combination of well-documented racial differences in cognitive ability and the consistent link between ability and job performance generates a pattern that experts term “the validity-diversity tradeoff”: job selection devices that best predict future job performance generate the smallest number of minority hires in a broad range of positions. Indeed, the evidence indicates that most valid screening devices will have a significant adverse impact on blacks and will also violate the 4/5 rule under the law of disparate impact.

Because legitimately meritocratic (that is, job-related) job selection practices will routinely trigger prima facie violations of the disparate impact rule, employers who adopt such practices run the risk of being required to justify them – a costly and difficult task that encourages undesirable, self-protective behaviors and may result in unwarranted liability."

Source: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1795443

[SandB0x]

> well-documented racial differences in cognitive ability

The what??

[mkr-hn]

Some people confuse poor social and economic mobility with inherent capacity.

[nazgulnarsil]

before you start getting downvoted I'd like to ask that people who object to this at least take a moment to consider the difference between positive and normative statements before you respond.

[antoncohen]

> I agree that in many cases their hiring processes are broken, but think that it doesn't matter because companies do not care about anime. It is utterly irrelevant to them. Knowledge of anime does not make you more efficient at filling out TPS reports.

I think it is both. The education system is broken, and has been for a long time. Degrees in Sociology and Communications have always been useless knowledge. The economic downturn has only brought that fact to the attention of people. At the same time employers are requiring job applicants have college degrees--any degree--for jobs that absolutely do not require degrees. I feel sorry for the people who got Business degrees, it was probably a wise choice when they started college, but by they time they graduated no one wanted to hire people with Business degrees.

I know one YC startup that requires the receptionists to have a college degrees, and they only pay them $12/hour in San Francisco, which frankly is not a living wage in SF. The letter "Serving people drinks was more rewarding" sounds a lot like the non-techie people I know. Get a Masters in Business Administration, think you did everything right with your 4.0 GPA. Then you graduate and can't find work. Maybe take a job in retail. After job hunting for a year you take that receptionist position, because hey, there's growth opportunity, which is better than retail. But it turns out there is no opportunity, the predatory management won't give raises because in this economy they can just fire you and hire another college grad at $12/hour.

Education has failed because they don't teach useful skills, yet they tell students that they are useful throughout their education. HR has failed because they haven't figured out how to find that diamond in the rough without putting up arbitrary requirements.

[epistasis]

Regarding the last letter, I think we've only seen the tip of the iceberg with regards to generational hatred for the Baby Boomers. Inheriting such a structurally messed up government and economy will not leave a good taste in people's mouth, and as times get desperate, having to pay large Social Security and Medicare entitlements to a generation that stopped investing in the future will become more and more questionable.

[tallanvor]

I hate how people have latched onto using the term "entitlements" to discuss Social Security and Medicare and always say/write it as if it's a bad thing.

Social Security and Medicare are earned benefits. People pay into the system through payroll taxes so that they receive a benefit based on the length of time they paid into the system and their salary. Much like a 401k or an IRA, the money is invested (albeit in government debt at low interest rates), and even now (well, maybe not with that idiotic payroll tax break they enacted) more money is going in than coming out.

[_delirium]

I think that's closer to being true for Social Security than Medicare. In particular, stuff like Medicare Part D is providing very expensive benefits for baby boomers which wasn't part of the original understanding of what they were paying for (and they haven't retroactively kicked in higher payroll taxes to make up for the cost).

[epistasis]

I meant 'entitlement' as a value-neutral term as a legal program. Looking into it a bit more, Social Security may not fit the definition precisely, but I still did not intend for "entitlement" to be a negative. I'll keep that in mind before I use the term again.

However, Social Security is most definitely not like a 401k, IRA, or annuity, as Supreme Court cases have firmly established. Not only can you be denied payment, you're not guaranteed to out what you put in, and may very well pull out more than you put in. It's "insurance" and not a retirement account.

[anamax]

> Social Security and Medicare are earned benefits.

"Earned" maybe, but the relevant question is the relationship between the payments and the benefits. For some folks, it's a good/great return. For others, it's a lousy return.

> the money is invested (albeit in government debt at low interest rates), and even now (well, maybe not with that idiotic payroll tax break they enacted) more money is going in than coming out.

The problem is that current cash flow isn't the right way to determine whether such schemes are economically sound.

For example, Ponzi schemes have good cash flow initially.

The right way involves balancing the current "contributions" against the NPV of the benefits "promised".

No, I'm not saying that SS is a Ponzi scheme. No one is forced to participate in a Ponzi scheme and the only folks who lose money in a Ponzi scheme are folks who bought into the promise.

[diogenescynic]

"The beauty of social insurance is that it is actually unsound. Everyone who reaches retirement age is given benefit privelleges that far exceed anything he has paid in...How is it possible? It stems from the fact that the national product is growing at compound interest ... More important, with real incomes going up at some 3% per year, the taxable base on which ebenfits rest in any period are much greater than the taxes paid historically by the generation now retired.

Social security is squarely based on what has been called the eighth wonder of the world--compound interest. A growing nation is the greatest Ponzi game ever contrived."-- Paul Samuelson

[anamax]

Except that demographics change. We've known that the demograhics were going to make SS untenable for decades.

> Everyone who reaches retirement age is given benefit privelleges that far exceed anything he has paid in

That's not actually true of folks who max.

[ddw]

Although I haven't read it, Albert Brooks' new novel seems to be about this very thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2030_%28novel%29

Cancer has been cured and the younger generations increasingly feel resentment towards the "olds" that they have to support. He really isn't that far off considering how large the Baby Boomer generation is that are retiring everyday.

Since the beginning of the United States, every next generation has lived more comfortably than the last, until now. And the young people are realizing this.