Ugh, so depressing... go to college, rack up enormous amounts of debt, and hope to find a job so that you can start paying off the monthly minimums for the seemingly the rest of your life.
Only a fool would think that a degree in underwater basket weaving would provide the same employment prospects as a degree in any of the STEM fields, but fools are precisely the target market for institutions providing such courses.
But it's easy to blame the schools. In my experience, students don't really make career choices (like picking a major) by weighing the economic costs and benefits. Our current culture in college encourages students to take on massive amounts of debt regardless of their field. For many liberal arts degrees, this is probably a foolish financial decision. But for many college freshman, the apparent difficulty of a subject is considered thoroughly, while the job prospects of a career path are a secondary consideration.
My rule of thumb has always been this: Write down all of the things that you're interested in and would enjoy spending four years or so learning about. Then, from that list, pick the ones that are also employable to some extent. At the same time, don't simply pick a degree solely because of employment prospects, since markets are cyclical, even in classical STEM fields.
Right. My point was that this is partly because of the educational culture which promotes "getting a degree will make you earn more" rather than "getting a degree in subject X, Y, or Z will make you earn more". Students who enter college intending to study science but can't hack it would probably be better off dropping out; instead, most end up in liberal arts and are surprised when their degree turns out to be useless because all the advertising they ever saw promoted "having a degree" as the only relevant flag.
Except Chemistry, biology, and biochemistry (massive R&D cuts by the pharmaceutical industry has flooded the market with experienced scientists).
Except CivEng (oops, not much new construction).
STEM degrees are often considered harder by employers, so for many jobs that don't strictly require them, they're used as signalling mechanisms in exactly the way that having a degree at all used to be a signal. That means there's a problem with encouraging more people to get such degrees because you flood the market with STEM degrees and repeat the process of devaluing the signal.
What does that leave? CS degrees are currently very much in demand, but will that remain the case for the next 10-20 years? Will it even be true next year? There were a lot of people who had employment trouble after the first bubble burst, I would hate to see that happen again. Not to mention that this is hardly a solution that will work on a large scale. The industry does not require a million new software engineers every year.
Would anyone have predicted ten years ago that going to law school would be a disastrous financial and career decision for many thousands of people? That was supposed to be one of those "safe" direct-to-career educations. Hasn't worked out that way.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/education/average-student-...
This may have been exacerbated by stupid government targets to get, say, at least 50% of all pupils into university. And in at least some of those cases, you're only going because you're brainwashed into it.
When incentives aren't aligned with human nature, inefficiencies amplify and eventually break whichever system the government stepped in to fix.
Until "official" degrees stop being an unspoken requirement when considering job applicants, startups such as Khan Academy will remain useful, but ultimately powerless to truly disrupt education.
I'm in my 30s, and I have quite a lot of various skills, but spotting areas of opportunity is still not among those skills.