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by omarkatzen
4577 days ago
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The purpose of the college degree is to provide insurance against economic change. Learn a trade, and you're good as long as that trade is valued (and not outsourced). College is supposed to provide general-purpose skills that guarantee residence in, at least, the middle class. That's no longer true, because college degrees have been overproduced and there's a shortage of people who (a) can actually do things and (b) want to do them. The real problem, though, is that society doesn't train people up in the trades (and help them relocate) when their jobs go away. They're just discarded, and the fear of that happening is what keeps middle-class people going into college-- which is designed to insure against the ups-and-downs of specific trades (e.g. plumbing). Widespread college is a partial solution that is now clearly failing. |
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It's the same concept in programming. No one learned COBOL and stopped (at least most didnt). You are constantly learning new skills to stay relevant. The business world is indeed moving faster and it used to be true that you could learn a single skill and have a career (e.g. assembly line workers). Clearly that is no longer the case and if you havent realized this you've been asleep at the wheel of life.
You are right, college is not solely about learning discrete skills as it is about learning efficient ways to gain new skills. I am sure most people on hacker news would agree with my experience that the first 6 months of working in the "real world" post graduation I learned more discrete skills than my 4 years in undergrad. However undergrad gave me a solid base from which to build those skills on.