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Comment by ok123456 | Hacker News Reader

It's Goodhart's law in action.

If having a four year degree becomes just a checkbox, there will be easier and easier ways of getting that checkbox. There will be rent-seeking entities that will facilitate this like degree mills and dubious online programs. It no longer becomes a qualification that the person has gained any skills, but only that they were able to finance paying tens of thousands of dollars to participate in a few discussion threads.

It was only a matter of time for people to realise that requiring degrees for jobs that don't really need them is just cargo-culting.

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It's not just degree mills. It's mainstream colleges and universities. They are all staring a demographic "enrollment cliff" in the face and are having to drop admissions standards to keep their enrollment numbers up. Academic requirements are going by the wayside; if you can't complete an assignment, you'll be given more time, or an alternative. Nobody fails anymore unless they just absolutely don't show up, schools can't afford to lose students.

Not all. I definitely believe large numbers of liberal arts schools are having problems. But my school (University of Waterloo) has only seen dramatic surges in enrolment over the past 5 years. They're putting up new buildings like crazy just to accommodate all of them! And we're not talking sports centres or rec complexes, we're talking about big lecture halls and buildings full of classrooms and study spaces!

I don't know Waterloo's situation but I know that money for new buildings is largely decoupled from need for capacity and is mainly tied to government make-work projects. I remember during the 2008 "economic action plan" universities got all kinds of buildings. It was entirely because the government was giving free money away to stimulate growth.

This phenomena doesn’t apply to elite institutions.

We have a bimodal distribution. Elite universities whose prestige is already established have an "embarrassment of riches" in terms of applicant pool, whereas middling and low ranked universities without a moat are facing enrollment cliffs.

Applicants are trying to go big or go home (and learn online instead)

I'm not sure a drop in admissions standards to address the enrollment cliff and a surge in admissions are necessarily mutually exclusive.

I'm worried that the same logic might cut the other way: "the easier it is to get that piece of paper, the worse you look for not getting it."

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