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Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

Sadly, this sounds like Yet Another Reason for businesses to have an "ignore all college credentials" policy. No matter how much the kid & his family paid for a diploma - having one is very weak evidence of the kid having learned much, or of being able to function in the real world.

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I think this whole thing is as stupid as the next person, but let's be real about it. This is a small handful of students at a small handful of universities in one country being overly weird. There is no way this is in any way indicative of the vast vast majority of university students in the world. Most of them are just putting their heads down and diligently studying their chosen subject, and will come out smarter and better equipped for working in the real world than when they went in.

I agree that a college credential has long lost any value signal to employers, but I think the more terrifying issue is that you’ve had a generation of kids grow up without any forcing function or skills around handling uncomfortable life situations around conflict, and so they default to the path of least resistance enabled by these institutions. This harms the targets of these no contact orders in the short term, but when these people hit the real world, they’re fucked and we’re all going to have to deal with them as the filter into society and the labor market.

The real world is not Tinder and Tiktok as it relates to humans interactions and conflict resolution, and they’re going to find out the hard way.

Sadly, yes.

I'd like to pretend that "employers disregard most diplomas" will somehow act as a forcing function on the universities, and that will feed back (at least moderately) into HS/youth culture/parenting.

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