College has become a barrier for smart poor kids | Hacker News Reader

College has become a barrier for smart poor kids

whatprivilege.com

As soon as employers made college a necessity for jobs of any significant income (and even some of shockingly low income, such as “receptionist”) back in the 80s or 90s, college started increasing tuition costs into the stratosphere. The cost for a four year degree at even a modest state school is now, in technical economic terms, fucking ridiculous.

Other way around, bro. Big federal aid started ~1980, THEN everyone went to college, THEN since everyone has a degree, you may as well hire up overqualified recent grads, THEN it becomes a semi-requirement you have a degree to be a receptionist.

C'mon, man. Whole nations worth of individuals don't just up and decide everyone needs a degree for no reason. That wouldn't make any sense.

For me, the most important part I think is this:

The problem is that employers are too lazy to take on the work of apprenticeship. That duty has been passed onto colleges. And yet, the people who actually work with 23 year olds know apprenticeship still goes on.

Not just in the tech industry, but I think many industries would benefit from a strong entry-level apprenticeship program. I have a few friends who became electricians through the IBEW, and the mixture of mentorship, classrooms, and on-the-job training always seemed like such a great system that a lot of companies could really benefit from.

I'd love to see it in software development, I think it could work out really well.

Informal apprenticeship programs are how SysAdmins are made. It runs deep in our culture... A BOFH isn't a real BOFH until he he has a PFY.

I don't know why this is missing from programming culture. Perhaps the education one can get at school is sufficient?

It's hard, I think, to learn some aspects of the SysAdmin job on your own with your own hardware. You need larger clusters of systems and real users, and nobody is going to let someone without experience touch a large cluster without supervision.

Apprenticeships were traditionally tied to family and social connections, e.g. Ben Franklin apprenticed for his brother. Within modern employment markets apprenticeship is infeasible due to the conflict between the contractual obligations required and standard employment at will practices.

Among the advantages of a college degree are that it is to a considerable extent tied to merit and, in the US, it is largely accessible to people from all economic backgrounds.

Vocational education is important, and is successfully implemented in places like Germany. But not by leaving it up to the goodwill of individual employers.

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