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Comment by rbn | Hacker News Reader

Degrees are useless. It's turned into a piece of paper that everybody has to have.

These days having a degree doesn't mean you actually know anything about the field that you have studied in. It just means that you have a degree thus you are allowed to get a job that doesn't require manual labor. This isn't just America, it's everywhere.

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What it means is you were smart enough to get into college and you persevered enough to finish your degree. The first part is critical, and why degrees from academically exclusive colleges are worth more than others.

If the first part is critical, then we should just go back to IQ testing job applicants instead of wasting $100,000 and 4-5 years to skip class and cheer at football games. Unfortunately this practice was banned by the Supreme Court as discriminatory.

Yep. Millions of kids have been turned into debt slaves by Griggs v Duke Power. But it's not just the courts - elite colleges collude to suck the absolute last dollar from every student, and Congress refuses to do anything about it.

Hasn't it always been that way? Human primates want to impress other human primates, so they get themselves titles. Doctor beats Master, Master beats Bachelor, Bachelor beats Drop-Out, Drop-Out beats Secondary School Graduate. Higher Education is part of a schooling system designed to perpetuate a stratified society. Graduating demonstrates agreement.

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