Good article on "Dwindling Power of College Degrees"

[Walter Mitty]

In other words, the customer is always right. Unfortunately.

I once heard an interesting variation on this old saw.

The customer isn't always right.  But the customer is always the customer.

I think it's deep.

In the context of this discussion, I wonder whether the student really is the customer.  Maybe it's the person who contributes to the endowment.  Or the person who pays for season tickets for all the home football games.   Or maybe the taxpayers. 

In any event, there are really two discussions going on here:  why do people choose to go to college?  (And how is that working out for them?)  And why does society support colleges?  (and how is that working out for society?)

I accept the point that people can choose to go to college for what ever reason is in their mind.  At the time I enrolled, my parents had me so thoroughly brainwashed that another alternative never even entered my mind.  For better or for worse.

[The Gorn]

We live in a fast-changing ambiguous world and technology has made it impossible for anyone to keep up in just about every area of life.

Agreed.

The only adequate tool to cope with fast pace and ambiguity is reasoning and critical thinking and analysis skills, combined with some knowledge of the past and past patterns of human, economic and social behavior.

Specific technical skills will be obsolete quickly. They are of limited use in understanding and coping with life today.

Example, dissecting why social media will or won't work for attracting business. Those who are steeped in that tech culture consider this kind of conversation useless, stupid or backward.

They're wrong and they're extremely shallow for reasoning that way.  Technology culture in general promotes shallow critical thinking skills.  That shallowness of reasoning pervades social media. Social  media promises "everyone can be a star". The reality is that this is simply not the case.

[TechTalk]

The only adequate tool to cope with fast pace and ambiguity is reasoning and critical thinking and analysis skills, combined with some knowledge of the past and past patterns of human, economic and social behavior.

My way is easier.   

The primary reason (but not the only reason) I say that is that it seems as if everyone nowadays is trying to influence you or separate you from your money in some type of fraudulent or unethical manner.  It isn't just the poor and uneducated people that get preyed upon, there are plenty of well-educated people who get taken advantage of in some manner on a daily basis.

Ambiguity and lack of control are two things that people simply have to learn to accept about life.  I should probably add ignorance to the list as well.  There are many things that I would like to know more about but cannot because of: opaqueness, lack of information, I am not smart enough, I do not have enough time or it is not important enough to me to make the time, etc.

[The Gorn]

My way is easier.   

The primary reason (but not the only reason) I say that is that it seems as if everyone nowadays is trying to influence you or separate you from your money in some type of fraudulent or unethical manner.  It isn't just the poor and uneducated people that get preyed upon, there are plenty of well-educated people who get taken advantage of in some manner on a daily basis.

Ambiguity and lack of control are two things that people simply have to learn to accept about life.  I should probably add ignorance to the list as well.  There are many things that I would like to know more about but cannot because of: opaqueness, lack of information, I am not smart enough, I do not have enough time or it is not important enough to me to make the time, etc.

Actually, we aren't that far apart. I don't go around having Socratic debates with myself about whether someone is trying to con me or influence me badly.

Critical reasoning is one life skill but granted it only goes so far as being able to gather objective facts in front of you and make some judgements about them.

Intuition plays a key role ... the brain is a kind of analog computer that weighs things as to their plausibility and likelihood. Intuition says things like, "this is really not a good thing" or "this person seems to be dishonest".

When one's "BS detector" triggers, you then employ your critical reasoning powers to validate the BS detector.

The BS detector (intuition) is a rough intuitive guide that operates at high speed. Critical reasoning is a fine toothed comb that operates much more slowly.

And yes, you have to accept the fact that life is uncertain and unfair stuff happens just because someone planned to get the upper hand.

About well educated people who get taken advantage: the saying goes, you can't cheat an honest man.

Maybe critical reasoning doesn't really fit in a list of skills that college provides. Educational systems don't as a rule teach "looking for what is not there" effectively. A lot of individuals with street smarts don't even have a high school diploma.

[Walter Mitty]

The only adequate tool to cope with fast pace and ambiguity is reasoning and critical thinking and analysis skills, combined with some knowledge of the past and past patterns of human, economic and social behavior.

My way is easier.   

The primary reason (but not the only reason) I say that is that it seems as if everyone nowadays is trying to influence you or separate you from your money in some type of fraudulent or unethical manner.  It isn't just the poor and uneducated people that get preyed upon, there are plenty of well-educated people who get taken advantage of in some manner on a daily basis.

Ambiguity and lack of control are two things that people simply have to learn to accept about life.  I should probably add ignorance to the list as well.  There are many things that I would like to know more about but cannot because of: opaqueness, lack of information, I am not smart enough, I do not have enough time or it is not important enough to me to make the time, etc.

I agree that it isn't the only the poor and uneducated that get taken advantage of.  The poor and uneducated get persuaded that happy meals are good food.  The wealthy and supposedly informed get bilked by Bernie Madoff.  This gets compounded by what I like to call "the age of deception" or "the age of disinformation". 

The age of information has advanced the art of deception just as fast as it has advanced the propagation of truth.  As an example,  Madoff's statements looked just like the real thing.  Fake resumes are just as cheap to make as real ones. So what Gorn calls the "BS detector" has to work in overdrive these days.

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I think it's worth exploring the boundary line between fraudulent and unethical behavior on theone hand, and honest ptches on the other.  Actions like manipulation or seduction lie in a gray zone somewhere between the two alternatives.

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Management is fundamentally the art of decision making in the absence of sufficient information to make a rational decision.  I tend to wait until I have enough facts to make a rational decision.  I usually find out, at the end of the day, that I waited too long.

I agree with your assessment about things you would like to know more about but can't.

[David Randolph]

One big reason that college degrees have lost their value is a lack of understanding what their value was. When only a few people went to college, the value of their degree is not just in the learning, but also in the connections that were made then. When all your classmates wound up in management of larger companies or in influential positions in politics, then your degree was very valuable. You had access to a lot of powerful people.

When everyone has a "college degree", nobody has the same access as the degree had earlier.

Story reported in the local paper: A girl was in a sorority at a Southern Millionaire's University. She was trying hard to make good grades and learn something. She was berated by the sorority leader for choosing to study instead of participating in some social event. "The girl needs to get her priorities in order." For one person, the priorities were to learn the school material. For the other, the priorities were to make the social contacts that would bring the good income later.

When we don't realize that the connections made during the college years are valuable, then we think that the degree is the most valuable. Events over the last few decades have proven that to be wrong. But parents still think that it is the degree - because they don't know better.

Basic science degrees are still valuable. To get to be a researcher at CERN, you gotta have one (or more).

[DarkHumour]

Interesting that the 'connections' from college are important. I have wondered about this as I have few friends from college that I talk to or at least email on a regular basis.  Kind of lost contact as they got married and had 'real' lives.  WasteBook or Stinkedin could help me get in touch with them again but I fear some have gone off the 'derp' end.  There are critiques of social networking sites reviving relationships that are *supposed* to end.  Looking back I wince a lot as Asperger's wasn't widely known and I remember things that were bad attempts at humour interpreted as being a tactless a-hole.  Of course it is unfair maybe to expect the 20 years ago me to have any clue about "the big picture".  I don't think anyone I know became a "captain of industry".

Seems like employers want it both ways. Don't make a degree mandatory for a position (cheap on the front end) but require it to *stay* employed - easy metric for reducing staff.

Graduating into a recession in the '90s made me take my degree for granted and bitter (of course)...but later in life where you're expected to have one just to be between square 0 and 2 it has helped me more than I realize.

I took a second shot at another engineering undergraduate degree but figured I'd have another "worthless" piece of paper and thousands of dollars of debt and dropped out after I ran out of money.  I paid $2900 a quarter in 1992 (out of state tuition ~$4600 in 2011 dollars) at OSU.  I can only imagine what it is now.  (Looked it up. $8200?!?!)

I wonder if that "million dollars more over a lifetime when you have a degree" is now lost up front.

DarkHumour

[Walter Mitty]

Seems like employers want it both ways. Don't make a degree mandatory for a position (cheap on the front end) but require it to *stay* employed - easy metric for reducing staff.

That's an ultimately stupid employer.  The people you hire are unknown quantities.  A degree can help reduce the the uncertainty.  The employees you have are known quantities.  The right way ot prioritize firings is based on who is doing the most for the company.  That's a combination of how valuable the job is, the job performance of the employee,  and yes children, how the employee affects the rest of the team.

I am  hoping that smart employers will gain a competitive advantage over stupid ones.  The smart ones aren't always the kindest ones, but the ones who are both stupid and cruel deserve to be weeded out.

[TRexx]

The right way ot prioritize firings is based on who is doing the most for the company.  That's a combination of how valuable the job is, the job performance of the employee,  and yes children, how the employee affects the rest of the team.

But that would require managers to make a decision and ultimately defend it.  It's much safer to say "Fred has a degree, Joe doesn't. Get rid of Joe" or  "Mary took 3 sick days, Susan took 2.  Fire Mary"

   

[DarkHumour]

The right way ot prioritize firings is based on who is doing the most for the company.  That's a combination of how valuable the job is, the job performance of the employee,  and yes children, how the employee affects the rest of the team.

But that would require managers to make a decision and ultimately defend it.  It's much safer to say "Fred has a degree, Joe doesn't. Get rid of Joe" or  "Mary took 3 sick days, Susan took 2.  Fire Mary"

 

Also taking the Peter principle into account.  The boss might know who is of value and that head cutting metric is bad but his boss might be an idiot who pushes for stupid decisions (or *his* boss). Would the 'smart boss' defend or buck the system when his job could be threatened by not following orders from above ? 

DarkHumour

[Walter Mitty]

The right way ot prioritize firings is based on who is doing the most for the company.  That's a combination of how valuable the job is, the job performance of the employee,  and yes children, how the employee affects the rest of the team.

But that would require managers to make a decision and ultimately defend it.  It's much safer to say "Fred has a degree, Joe doesn't. Get rid of Joe" or  "Mary took 3 sick days, Susan took 2.  Fire Mary"

If competition works, the people who make bad decisions should lead their companies into oblivion faster than the people who make good ones.

[Carrie Cobol]

You would think so.  Having run into my share of idiocy and corporate politics that actually prevented me from doing my job, I became very interested in this kind of thing.  So I started finding and reading books about how corporate culture affects the bottom line.  I learned that if a company suddenly realized it had a poisonous culture and was hemoraging money (think very large corporation), if they hired a new CEO today to turn it around, it would take the CEO at best about 15 years to do so.  They actually described some case studies.

I saw it kind of first hand when I worked for the defence contractor.  On many occasions I'd suggested (and been ignored) ways to save money, and I was also able to suggest a way to earn more money.  My earning idea would bring in $15,000/year per customer who bought the product - a product we already sold, my idea was a support contract.  I had to fight tooth and nail to get it implemented, and after I left I'm sure they're not bothering with it.  Think about it this way, though:

When the annual report has numbers so big they have to shorthand them (99 = 99,000,000), you can trickle away quite alot of money completely invisibly.

[Walter Mitty]

When the annual report has numbers so big they have to shorthand them (99 = 99,000,000), you can trickle away quite alot of money completely invisibly.

To big to succeed, eh?

Your response started me thinking.  (always dangerous).  The bigger the ship, the longer it takes to turn it.  What if the US is so big that  it takes 12 years to turn it?  What if the economics and the geopolitics we are enjoying () today are mostly the result of actions that were taken 12 years ago?  What does that do to our 4 year election cycle?