for most careers outside of really technical areas like engineering & medicine, education is a waste of time.
it's a way of signaling high iq.
if we allowed employers to simply test applicants for general employment, they could identify & fast track gifted people, & lots of people could be saved years of time & exam anxiety & student loans. it's been a while since i read about the history, but i believe the broad-based use of iq tests was phased out due to disparate impact in the early 70s in the us. it can still be applied to technical jobs - google tests their engineers, etc. but for your typical white collar career or any kind of career, employers are on shaky ground using them.
so since employers need a way to find the most mentally adept, degrees are the default means of doing that. it's very inefficient & really a terrible waste of time. i know in my field, where i spent years studying, falling asleep in libraries, hounded by exam terror so i could get a piece of paper saying i'm qualified to do stuff, everything i do could have been learned by working for a year or two in a work-place with experienced people who knew what they were doing. there are lots of people in IT for eg who spend a year or two in some diploma mill to get a piece of paper & (often most important) get a job placement which will send them on their way.
it's all very inefficient & wasteful.
people will always throw out the stats showing that the more years of education & pieces of paper you have, the more money you'll make, which is undeniably true of course. but those people were already the cognitive elite & were very likely going to do well whatever they attempted.
& of course, that so many of the best careers require licensing of some kind is a way of limiting competition. it's in the interest of members of professional groups to draw up the gates once they're inside to prevent more people from coming into their field, which would increase supply & dampen their big salaries. by imposing regulatory requirements or just creating a culture of requiring degrees to be taken seriously, they keep competition out, they make their services more valuable, they increase costs to consumers, & they keep a lot of people from improving their lives because they might not have the time, money or cognitive skills needed for getting pieces of paper.
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