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Comment by fullshark | Hacker News Reader

Poor return on investment given risks involved, you're better off offloading that cost of education/training to the individual and then just hiring them when they signal they are worthy of employment.

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At least part of this is because we devalued the high school diploma. We were concerned that many people weren't getting that high school diploma which made it difficult for them to get jobs. Now we lowered the standards and shoved everyone through to the point that 20% of high school graduates are functionally illiterate. Now a high school diploma is no longer a useful signal to potential employers.

I have hired high school drop-outs and academics, both the best and the worst performers came in roughly equal proportions from both groups.

That is because the signal that college is supposed to provide has also been devalued to an extreme degree. It's simple - a bachelor's degree will soon be the equivalent of a high school diploma.

That is why for a lot of roles a motivated, smart high-school dropout is a better hire than a college student.

I don’t know what you hired them for, but if it was a skilled labor task they had some sort of signal in their resume they could do the job (github repo). We are talking about basically taking HS graduates with nothing except grades/extra curriculars and investing N months in training them for some job you have no certainty they will be able to do, and no assurance they won’t just go to your competition afterward.

That's because your interview process is already biasing the result. To get a fairer comparison you should take a random sample from both groups (out of all the applicants) and see (although self selection bias is still in play here).

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