Hard agree. I returned for a “masters” after a long break from undergrad. The lack of any rigor was astonishing, and the forced handholding and nose wiping in what was supposed to be a graduate level program was insufferable. A large chunk of my cohort would not have made it through the first semester of my undergrad.
I can accept that declining standards is making many universities obsolete. I’m not about to blame computer programs for it.
I did undergrad 2007-2011 and masters 2011-2013. I did some university teaching 2013-2015 and then 2024-now. The students now have alarmingly low levels of literacy and almost no emotional resilience. I'm 38 and I sound like an old man but...yikes.
Fellow teacher at uni here. I had to supervise an undergrad that often would start shaking and almost crying when they were pressed about their method for their thesis work. It's a simple question that has a simple answer unless you neither prepared and it's neither really your work (AI). My colleague also had to deal with a genuine hysteria from another student because they were failing the same exam for the second time. It's a masters program, so you would expect that people understand what a fail means (try again, the world wont end, your grades will be fine).
A few months ago I had a student on the verge of tears begging me to let them do a course one their own (its a group-work only class), because their friend was sick.
They are not all emotional, but there is always now at least one in a group of 5 that just has absolutely no emotional resiliency and the worst part is that all of this is genuinely not a dramatic, life-deciding situations and we are never mean or harsh. In fact we keep lowering the bar to levels where I genuinely think an illiterate could do our programs at this point. It's insane how some cannot cope with any discomfort. We have to be examiners, lecturers, now also therapists and nannies to people in their 20s!
I worked at elementary schools, not university level, but they have none either. Kids in 5th grade throwing a temper tantrum like a 2 year old, breaking down in crocodile tears when you don't give them a snack or a toy because they've done zero assignments and tests all year, with such levels of learned hopelessness that they cannot even figure out how to pick up the fucking pencil and write 5 vocabulary words down, and then promptly flipping desks because they've learned there are no consequences.
I'm close to your age and work at a technical college. I'm not sure the lack of resilience is just a 'young un' thing. Plenty of the older students or parents are just, uh, something else
I work in construction, and most of my coworkers are feeling super impressed with themselves because of all of the memes and the data center money.
Our jobsites are hives of laziness, lax standards, functional illiteracy, emotional man-babies, and pure unrefined stupidity.
It's not the schools failing us, or at least not them alone, we're just dumber as a species. Microplastics, COVID crossing the blood brain barrier, persistent lead in the water supply....all kinds of shit we've done to ourselves, I guess. At the end of the day, we're surrounded by idiots.
My wife and I both graduated with master’s degrees while we worked at a pretty good R1 college. It was astounding how poor the quality of work was from some of the students, and this was in 2021.
Because SAT/ACT standards were higher. Showing far better reading comprehension and math skills.
There was a study on this. It seems kids that grew up on Tablets/iPads have made them dumber than previous generations for gen Z and Alpha. Attention span dropped, grit to do deep research declined, and irratability increased when they don't get instant answers. Brain muscle has been weakened when not put to use basically.
This. I refuse to go to another program that doesn’t require the GRE. I hated that test, and it was silly at the time. But now, it’s pretty much the major separator of students who got coddled through the university of AI and students who actually learn, read, and write.
Mine waived the requirement because of the pandemic, and I was relieved but also a little bit bummed. The experience itself was as rigorous as I imagined it would've been, but then again from what I could tell AI was nowhere near as powerful and ubiquitous as it is today, and I never used it. I'm very grateful I was finished with education before AI really started to take off.
The best definition of a generation is a little recursive, but the most useful way to understand what binds them is that they are the cohort of people raised by parents of a certain generation, or at least at a time when that generation was dominant in parenting culture.
In other words, Gen Z got their academic ability from their Gen X parents.
The good news is that it isn't a perpetual linear trend, but more of a trigonometric one.
Their Gen X parents were raised as latchkey kids and they don't want that for their own kids. So now they've gone the opposite way and become helicopter parents or even snowplow parents. At least that's the impression I get.
I wouldn't say they don't want that. It's just that now, for whatever reason, it's expected. People have gotten in trouble with CPS for letting their kids walk back from school in some places in the US.
Are these isolated cases amplified by social media? Probably. But they do still occur, which is insane.
Thankfully for me I live in a country where teaching kids independence is still important so we don't have that problem. I know other societies go even further - like in Japan kids are autonomous at a fairly young age. So it's not universal.
> I wouldn't say they don't want that. It's just that now, for whatever reason, it's expected
It's the same thing. Gen Xers definitely over-corrected from the "hands-off" parenting style they were raised with. It was Gen X police making the arrests, Gen X prosecutors building the cases, and Gen X parents nodding in agreement. Hence why I referred to not just the generational identity of each parent raising each kid, but to the predominant generation defining the mainstream culture around parenting and children.
Millennial parents are absolutely pushing back against this trend, trying to find something of a slightly more sane balance for our own kids. When Millennials are the predominant source of parenting culture in society, it's unlikely we'd see arrests in similar cases (several states have also recently passed laws explicitly allowing children to do things like walk to school and go to the park alone).
Nah. It's that the ultra conservative morons are the vast majority of people having kids. Straight up Idiocracy.
We have hit a point in history where the conventional wisdom is we are leaving a dying world to the future generations. Most intelligence is abstaining.
It's a literal brain drain. It's so bad that entire populations are having a birthrate crisis.
People try to make it an affordability thing, but it's just not the right time to be reproducing without giving it all to "God".
We became too educated and then the smartest of us decided it wasn't that intelligent to continue on anymore.
Edit: As it has been unintentionally pointed out from /u/stocks-sportbikes, the share of homeschooled kids doubling in the last 5 years suggests a rise in the share of conservatism among parents. While we cannot necessarily make any good comparisons on school outcomes between public and private schooling due to selection bias, we can safely say that educated progressives aren't having babies. The fertility divide is among party lines.
It’s both. Too many parents out there that don’t value education, but even for the ones that do, the school makes things too easy for the kids.
My kids are in an IB program, and they still have teachers who let them turn things in whenever or make up bad test grades.
I couldn’t imagine teachers letting me re-take tests when I went through school for no other reason than I got a bad grade on it. I couldn’t imagine my teachers letting me turn in an assignment a week late for full credit. That shit just wouldn’t happen.
But they’re doing this with kids who are ostensibly not just the smartest in the school, but the entire district!
Yea that is definitely one of the things they overcorrected on, the protection vs autonomy thing. But I didn't see any indicators that they over-corrected on education. Many Gen Xers still have bitter associations due to their own experience, and many more look at it as a waste of time & resources. Some who would like to "change course" from how they were raised may want to prioritize education for their children, but don't quite know how (hence the helicopters and snowplows).
I will give them this, though: The Silent/GenX/GenZ cycle in music and art is so much better imo than the GI/Millennial cycle.
Don’t buy it. If anything, the mediocre product we are getting from even so called elite schools with students who have 3.8 GPAs and 1400 SATs tells us that these tests are either a waste of time, the test prep industry has made them irrelevant, or they are simply outdated.
This is before the class graduating during Covid hit grad schools. By and large, the feedback from that cohort is that they really struggled with reading comprehension.
I did not go to a prestige university or anything (mostly an arts school), but I had assignments in college in 2006-2010 that were identical to projects I had done in...grade school.
That's what happens when you turn college into a money-making enterprise. If they maintained standards and rigor, many students would not get in and therefore would not pay tuition.
The administrators must make their money. They are after all the reason the Universities function. Of course they deserve a 50 percent cut of any grant award and a staff of 1000 paper pushers to send out emails seeking donations.
When they write the epitaph of the USA, say it was killed by the MBA.
> returned for a “masters” after a long break from undergrad. The lack of any rigor was astonishing, and the forced handholding and nose wiping in what was supposed to be a graduate level program was insufferable
To be fair, was your "masters" an MBA, because if so I would hardly consider an MBA a true graduate degree (spoken from the experience of recently obtaining one from a top 50 school). Most MBAs are just overpriced certification programs considering how easy business theory is in comparison to masters in more scientific fields like medicine or engineering.
> I can accept that declining standards is making many universities obsolete. I’m not about to blame computer programs for it.
Couldn't agree more. The poor ROI of many college programs is more an indication of our broken societal incentives around education rather than an indictment of a truly robust educational process itself.
I see a direct correlation between the commodification and finacialization of college and lowered academic standards. The student is both a consumer and the product. Look at bloated academic beauacracies backed with guaranteed loans. The schools are incentivized to keep the customer (student) in school. Ask any professor and they'll tell you. The scary thing is what's happening in certain California medical schools currently.
My “masters” was an MSN. Yes, it is true that nursing education in general is kind of a joke, but it was an appalling experience.
I also agree—first any idiot with a pulse automatically graduated from high school. Then, colleges and universities started accepting and graduating any idiot with a pulse. As always—it is the academically inclined who take the bulk of the pain.
No that doesn't exist, it's a Chartered Financial Analyst. It requires passing 3 increasingly complex exams that are graded on a curve to keep the integrity, a couple years of on the jobs experience, and a couple professional references.
I think like only 10-20% of people that have started it ended up finishing
Undergrad, dual honors in Economics and Finance, Masters in Supply chain and logistics is the route I took. More technical that an MBA but adjacent to a degree. Really the more tangible things it gave me was the business side/POV of macro economic events, and the inverse, while also having the technical foundation in math and statistics and data analytics to do what I do for work.
So at the risk of being annoying because this is the second time I'm responding to you, I've known several nurses, family's full of'em. The older ones (grandparents, great aunts and uncles, etc.) look at the financial assistance available for the newer ones, as well as the sheer amount of work they're expected to do, the breadth of system's they're expected to learn, and largely agree that the expectations are obscene.
My wife who's on the ICU was explaining the program to my grandmother, including the fact that she had work, clinicals, and school all in different cities, and the old lady had her mouth agape. I know this is an anecdote, and plenty of veteran nurses might disagree, but i feel like anyone calling nursing school a joke is just being reductive.
To be fair, where did you go for your masters compared to undergrad? In my experience, community colleges are a joke. It was a “hack” to do math courses and whatnot at your local community college to skip having to do the real thing at the university.
I forget what it’s called but in the corporate world where organizations stagnate or decline because nobody wants to seem mean So in the process of trying to be nice people don’t get real criticism. I wish I knew what that was called.
My associate's at a community college (which was in Boston, but still just a community college) was more fulfilling and challenging than my master's degree from last year. Figured I'd knock it out before I got too old.
I studied poli sci and we had a level 5 course that covered material I had learned in fucking high school back in 2009. And yeah, the kids were complaining that it was boring.
So while a decline in standards is definitely there, there's a prevailing school of thought that it's a consequence and not necessarily a root cause. The breadth of things expected of someone in college and particularly grad school has changed, and keeps changing, usually getting wider. As tools have become more efficient, expectations of how much you can do in a certain time have generally increased. More assignments means more to do means less time to do it.
Further, the cost of getting a college degree just keeps skyrocketting while the increase in income has significantly decreased.
Teachers are paid less so their incentive is lower, college is prohibitively expensive and increasingly stressful so student incentive is lower, and this is all in the 2000s and 2010s, long before AI.
Add into that, shit sucks right now. Just in general. We are mired in a multigenerational funk and have been for a while. Everyone's depressed, everyone's mad, everyone's struggling, no on feels safe, it'a a fuckin mess. And, if we're being brutally honest, college degrees aren't exactly a load-bearing pillar on Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Don't know how long your break from school was, but the world's a different (and for a LOT of people, worse) place.
And to be clear, AI is making it worse. It is, undeniably, adding yet another thing onto the neverending cavalcade of bullshit.
Oh that’s one I would hope would tend to have more competent candidates 😅 cause of the life and death responsibilities but thank you for sharing your experience
yeah my undergrad was in two ‘easy’ majors and while rigor wasn’t expected, what I got was even more dumbfounding. The bar was in the floor and some people were competing with moles in a game of limbo.
This is certainly happening at the aggregate level, but my 10 year old son and 13 year old daughter both read like crazy. Like to the point where I get annoyed we have to go to the library so often to refill their stock. And they have friends that love to read as well, but I am cognizant that this is not likely happening at scale.
My point is that there is a widening gap between highly literate and semiliterate peoples, and while AI may exacerbate it, it’s not the cause. It’s about intentionality and effort; if your kids dont see you reading they won’t read either.
What made these degrees less valuable was when they became narrowly focused on specific careers instead of helping to broaden the person's knowledge base and improve critical thinking skills.
College became a credentialing for jobs instead of a quality of person's thinking skills.
It becomes a race to the bottom too. Once upon a time and English, Philosophy, Math, Political Science, whatever else non-career degree was not a detriment, plenty of massively successful professionals held these degrees. Today though it’s hard to compete in the job market without a specialized degree, because other applicants likely have those degrees.
If you’re an investment fund looking for an entry-level analyst, that English major really needs to show they’re quite brilliant to beat out Data Science + Business double majors who have spent 4 years training for that job.
Its funny you say that because I am currently mentoring an intern at work. We legit had this conversation about university, my biggest complaint about it was that we just throw random facts at people and expect them to get it. Rather then giving them the concepts behind what is trying to be taught.
This was a policy grad. I then taught them how to reason through abstract problems and think about it systematically.
A lot of students see this as what college is as well, though. The pigeonholing I see of young minds on a future, with no regard to supplementary learning or activity and how wholistic these experiences are meant to be
I’m listening to the podcast Sold a Story and it’s heartbreaking. We failed an entire generation of kids. This was decades before AI but these are the Gen Z and Gen A kids. So now that they’re college aged, they had AI allowing for them to cheat at learning and try taking shortcuts.
I also see bad academic performance for young kids being blamed on COVID but I think that’s starting to be an easy excuse. I strongly remember that things were declining before COVID when it comes to academic performance and reading
You are so dead on right, I didn't even think about it. But absolutely. COVID was well after this trend started, COVID didn't help at all, but it certainly wasnt the cause and you are right its looking like the easy excuse.
Yeah I have a relative and she has had different jobs in the school system but nowadays she’s quite influential and gets called in to coach teachers to get standards up. And I think even she is on cruise control buying the COVID narrative and a lot of folks are coasting without accountability because of the it.
That play will eventually expire but it hasnt yet and probably will carry on as conducting clickbait-able research on how the COVID kids got screwed will continue to flourish because it feeds biases of the lockdown revengers.
I graduated with an MBA in 2018, along with my wife who attended a different university for her MBA. The difference in coursework between the schools was CRAZY. Going through a grueling training with a heavy workload sucked at the time, but I came out prepared for the workforce. The easier courses at her college did not prepare her enough and this is a scarily common trend.
The issue is that the AI brain of gen z seems to me like the obvious conclusion from the "teach to the test" pedagogy. If tests are just systems for answers. And answers are understood to be this binary thing. Then why not just let AI give you the short cut from A => C.
That's the saddest thing I see in something like /r/ExplainTheJoke or /r/explainitpeter so many times it feels like such a lack of comprehension or basic level of thinking and making it to the front page.
Yeah, I've had "debates" on here on various topics (Flock cameras, Finance, Palantir, Investing) where its so painfully clear that people are literally responding to things I never said, but quoting me and completely not responding to what I actually said. I used to pass some of it off as bots, but you can start to tell the difference at a certain point.
People just dont know how to read and understand what they just read.
Thats a broad brush statement. I use AI all the time for research and some legal things I'm working on. It summarizes well, provides references I can cross reference, and helps develop strategies that I have to re-read, analyze, and make adjustments to.
Depending on your mindset, AI can either make you dumber, or act as a force multiplier and increase brainstorming cycles drastically.
Well per another post, people who like to read, don't know how to pick up after themselves and just leave tents, coolers, and other festival items laying everywhere.
The silicon valley technocrats aren't discouraging their own children from attending higher education, and minimise screen use when raising their young.
You know what’s kind of strange about that? A large proportion of those children of these types of people go to college and pursue liberal arts degrees rather than the “practical” education that other people are told they should pursue.
> If you check out the c-suite of Fortune 500 companies, humanités and social science graduates are vastly overrepresented.
My cynical take would be that it's easier to maintain a high GPA in most of the the humanities/social sciences than in many of the hard sciences and engineering. For example; having to take organic chemistry, the bane of every pre-med student, where the class test average is like 24%. Now, some people are great at OChem, or PChem, or Diff E - but I'd argue a lot more people are going to be able to do well in like modern political economy (they aren't necessarily easy courses, but more tractable for a lot more people). So if you're just trying to hit the hurdle of an "elite" degree, you go the path of least resistance.
Why do STEM guys always do this? Its not cynical you sound like every other person who is totally dismissive of the liberal arts because youre resentful of the homework or whatever
The elites pick these because they cultivate critical thinking, emphasis on culture, society, and the arts. All of these are important when one is networking, and doubly so when interacting with an increasingly impossibly complex world once you get above the IC level.
Yall have got to stop assuming lib arts degree holders are lazy or dumb. It is dead wrong and unbecoming. obsessed with the coasters at the left end of the bell curve while ignoring the high performers on the right end are your boss lol
Assuming you're not an engagement bot, I really would recommend you re-read what I wrote. I'm not dismissing the value of liberal arts degrees; many of my friends who went to law school (elite ones at that) went that path. My philosophy major friends/acquaintances are remarkably good at picking apart arguments and situations, and I'd argue they have one of the strongest grasps on logic of anyone.
That said, please, take a step back. Model the higher education experience not as a chance to improve yourself (yes, incredibly cynical), but as a game to be played and rules you can exploit to hit career hurdles like "ivy league degree". If all you care about is a degree from a name-brand institution and a high GPA that opens high-paying career paths for you, then you're going to 80/20 that super hard. I don't think it's how higher ed should be, but I've met enough people in my time in academia to know that it's certainly a thing (that is unfortunate).
Bud I wanna know what engagement bots you read that have my syntax. I re-read what you said, and the shoe fits. You dismissed lib arts and lifted up STEM, not very hard to read between the lines.
Yeah it's almost as if higher education is supposed to be about expanding your mind and ability to think critically, rather than just a glorified jobs training program that you the future employee pays for.
The conflation of education with training is depressing. So many people don’t want to understand how the world works but at the same time want to be handheld through all sorts of things they could learn in an evening or a weekend of reading.
College isn't even a vocational training program. It's effectively printer that spits out pieces of paper that tells future employers, "I'm not dumb, and I can stick with something."
I think a big part of it is because people don't know what liberal arts education actually means. The most marketable reason for liberal arts education is orthogonal thinking - when you are trying to solve problems (technical, emotional, political) having a widely arrayed variety of knowledge to draw from helps you approach problems in different ways. If you're an engineer in a company with 100,000 other engineers, being a good engineer doesn't make you stand out. Having a background in psychology that helps you persuade and influence people on the other hand, does (speaking from experience as a former engineer in a fortune 50).
But you use the word "liberal" and republicans immediately recoil because their propaganda networks have instilled that behavior.
they also have the luxury to pursue that because they don't have the immediate possibility of being broke. they can likely just bank on their parents.
a family member went to college and got a nice internship/job in a law firm doing something they wanted to do. decided on the side to pursue art/talent. Spent earned money on the talent. Then after one self-publishing decided to quit said career and focus on the art which to date is not supporting any kind of lifestyle, but can went home to their parents because they make great money and can continue to support her. And that's like.....a non-rich case.
all the truly wealthy don't have to do anything and can "start up their own business" on mom/dad's money after getting an art history degree.
Or, for example, a more educated person might be able to read one of the many many lifelong studies that have been done that show we have a very good measurement of how much more college grads make.
Reddit seems to understand this until it comes to college vs trade school and then all of a sudden everyone thinks college is a scam and learning to be a nation of hvac repair techs is what will save us
It benefit the wealthy who are still overwhelmingly sending their kids to college. Making everyone else believe college is a waste of money is a great way to create a labor pool for their college educated children to exploit.
if college were free go for it, taking on a ton of debt to set you up for jobs no one can find is not the smart move right now. unfortunately there is no smart move right now which sucks.
A good chunk of people who go to college/uni, shouldn't. They are not interested in the subjects they're studying, and those subjects don't lead to careers.
If you want to learn art/history/English, etc absolutely university is a great place to do it. If you're just doing it because mom wants you to, maybe don't.
Ah yes my friends who are stuck without jobs, and with debt from their computer science programs, are actually just bought by big tech, to convince me to not send my kids, that I don't have, to college.
Or maybe the impact of an emergent technology on specific employment sectors should be chalked up to just that - technology driven disruption of a subset of the labor force.
Imagine how dumb it would be if people who majored in "printing" decades ago convinced us all that education was pointless because their profession was made obsolete.
Bro, if you can’t see how depressing highly paid labor and forcing you and your friends out of the domestic market to justify offshoring benefits the billionaires, you may want to look at the bigger picture.
Also, I second everything the other person said to you. It absolutely sucks that y’all got solid the “coding/STEM is the only viable career option” shit and that it landed you here. That’s also a systemic thing and not indicative of higher education overall. In fact, I’d say it’s even more evidence of the need for accessible retraining and economic diversification overall.
If someone tells me that AI is a better writer or researcher than they are, I'm inclined to believe them. I just don't see what their skill issue has to do with me.
The other is that the ROI is seen as diminishing (obviously won't be able to verify this for years to come) especially because new grads are struggling to find work in their field and entry level wages are very low compared to the price of college.
It probably hasn't made degrees obsolete, but it has made it possible for teams to wrap up their output within their current teams, meaning they need fewer junior positions.
Seems to be a conclusion the author added. Fortune is sort of a shit publication with clickbait like this that front page reddit is rabid for though so it's not surprising.
The real conclusion here isn't that degrees are worthless or made obsolete by AI, there are tons of occupations that necessitate study. What the real takeaway is that the social contract of "get a degree and you'll be hired and make a living wage" no longer exists, and it is in no way exclusively because of AI, the current effects we are experiencing are actually the results of the last 10 years, not what's currently happening.
Yes, my college years could never be replaced by AI. Maybe simple knowledge but not the synthesis and using it for other things. And I wouldn't be the person I am without those experiences. It gave me time to figure out what I value in life.
This is anecdotal. I was at the gym a few months ago and over heard two young people who just finished college. They were saying they can't find a job because it seems like AI is doing the entry level positions. I don't where they went to school or majored in. But I have heard this before from a few others.
It's not just AI My generation (millennial) have been saying this for many years now. I got my degree in computer networking, when I was looking for IT work , I never got asked about my education at all they just wanted you to have the degree for I assume legal and liability reasons. What they did care about was work experience, they wanted people graduating college with at least 2-5 years of work experience.
I now work in a kitchen, if I could go back in time and never go to college I would in a heart beat. I would lose nothing but gain several years of time and thousand of dollars back.
Honestly haven’t read the article, but I just dat down last night with two of my cousins who are 30 year lawyers and they were ecstatic at the progress of their AI clients to help with writing, proofreading, and citing case law and it terrified me that they were excited at the prospect of these techno fascists being in charge of everything. They explicitly were okay with the future where Elon and Peter Thiel are at the top of everything and AI is doing all the work… it was bizarre and unsettling
An online survey amongst people who are trying to find jobs is a terrible way of evaluating the worth of a college degree. Actual data consistently shows big advantages both in salary and employability for college graduates. Are all majors affected evenly? No. But using this to push a doomer agenda is really disingenuous.
I don't think it's about a doomer agenda. It's just that a lot of higher earning positions require college, so naturally, humans funnel into them. But, unfortunately, we are currently left with a "remainder", a statistically significant amount of people that didn't get that higher earning position, but are still left with this massive debt.
No problem! We'll just get a mid level job to balance things out while I...oh know, that didn't work either.
So now we're stuck as a society with all of these consumers who can't produce. I know that as a person who works hard and has "made it" it's almost impossible to understand or accept that what I'm talking about is real. But I think it is.
And before you think I'm just complaining, I didn't go to college. And I make plenty of money, it probably wouldn't be enough for most normal people who aspire to a middle class sort of life, but I make it work and I'm frugal af.
I think middle class guys with decent office jobs, CPAs, etc have a pretty big blind spot to this issue. I say this as someone who has waaaaaay less farther to fall before hitting the bottom. What happens when this problem becomes exacerbated further? All the finance guys and other corporate job guys just get to stay on the gravy train? I'm not so sure, I hope so for their sake, but it strikes me as hubris when I see so many brushing this off as "avocado toast".
I mean, I'm trying to be respectful about this. It's just a trend I'm noticing, to hand wave away this growing class of non-producing consumers. Or we write off their lack of production as laziness when they earned a degree. Obviously this isn't a laziness issue.
Sure, college is not for everyone and it doesn't work for everyone. But it has opened doors and brightened the futures of so many more. And it certainly doesn't get refuted based on an online survey like this.
yeah on average they’re better, but is the value of the $100k price tag for public universities making up that difference? would that money be better invested and grow money in other ways?
ai isn’t the problem, student loans and predatory lending to 17-18 year olds is the main problem with college, and colleges are going to blame the new buzzword instead of decades of bad policiez
I actually have an expensive degree in a bullshit major but it helped me get good jobs that I wouldn’t have had without it.
I’m luckily at the point where experience matters more than the degree but I wouldn’t have gotten the jobs that gave me the experience without the initial degree.
Or to say a degree is for everyone, I’ve seen plenty of people in trades or who just had a high school degree and made it work, but it was devotees a net positive for me.
Idk I’m a software engineer. I just replaced someone’s AI generated PR that was 55+ files and 25k lines of code with a single file and 400 lines of code. AI without a brain behind it is useless still.
Also a software engineer here. The problem is that if senior leadership is not technical, they don't give a shit if it's a single file and 400 lines of code, they are okay with 55 files with 25k lines, as long as it works and it was done fast.
Technical debt? These people don't care. It's all about getting it done now.
Even then a lot don't. They just throw some ramshackle of a Rube Goldberg machine together that 'works' and get mad at you when you plaster their glorious work with more comments than there were lines of code because its just that bad.
One guy on my team actively yells at me, even called me disrespectful once, because I dared to clean up some code that wasn't directly related to the issue I was working. "IT WORKS! WHY ARE YOU TOUCHING IT?!", I dunno, because it's incomprehensible and I made it shorter, more streamlined, and about 100x more comprehensible to readers?
I can see why it would be, and a lot of it depends on details that I'm just not going to take the time fill in here because too much, but its not like I'm coming up behind all the changes and rewriting them the way I think they should be.
I give loads of feedback during code review. I will give the version of how I would write something and explain why I would write it that way and why I think it should be preferred over what they wrote. If they really don't want to heed the suggestions and others also don't see a problem, I move on with my life.
But then some of this code is years old that none of wrote, or it is code that was copy-pasta from another teams, and I go in and modify it, I get the same response.
I used to be that way but that guy...he's probably right. If it works and doesn't need optimizations, you should probably leave it alone since you most likely have other fish to fry. If you have free time though and testing is in place, go for it.
Y2K wasn't kludge...it was saving precious memory when it cost a fortune.
When memory got cheaper: then things were fixed.
I had a code base that I wrote and it died on Y2K. Yeah, it was unfortunate, but management didn't think it was worth to repair and off to the trash heap it went.
Beautiful code that doesn't work, or drains the budget before it's complete is useless. It was a main takeaway from a business class I had in engineer and it was how coding was marked, with heavy emphasis on it MUST work first and foremost, 60% of the grade and then anything beyond that was for how it was implemented. Clients really doesn't give a shit how elegant it was going to be, if it doesn't work or blew through their budget.
And then you ship and then in 2 years every new feature that "works" takes double the time to implement and test because it was implemented on top of a heap of kludge
Beautiful code to me is code that I don't have to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out WTF is going on so that I can use it or change it. The harder it is to read the code, the harder it is to understand the code, the harder it is to use or change the code and the more likely it is to introduce defects.
It being able to 'do the thing', is the bare minimum. After than it needs to be able to be understood as easily as possible.
We don’t care about “clean” code, whatever you think it means. We care about code that is reliable, stable and doesn’t make erroneous assumptions. You are far more likely to introduce bugs and erroneous assumptions in 25k lines than in 400.
“Cleanliness”, beaty or elegance is sometimes a side effect of that and is subjective anyway.
Engineers who know they might have to work on that code later care about clean code. I've had to restart work from scratch because my co-worker's quickly LLM-generated bloated code was not easy to work with when changes had to be made.
> Technical debt? These people don't care. It's all about getting it done now.
To be fair this has always been the case. The pendulum swings from maximal "getting it done now" to "quality actually matters" every decade or so. Right now, it's getting it done, but after a decade of 25k line PRs like the one OP mentioned, and after a few major failures, they'll have to come back to quality.
I think many assume future superior models will wipe the technical debt by cleaning up earlier generation slop code. Based on how things are advancing, that's a real possibility.
This is going to cause so many problems long term and the management responsible will be left clueless scratching their heads what went wrong with no semblance of proper reflection whatsoever.
That argument would completely fall apart in almost any other domain, imagine if you get an AI built building that looks the same as the ones built by experts, but internal structure is full of issues.
Dude, just get an AI to make another program in 1/100th the time it would take a team of people, and the AI will inevitably be better in 2 years than it is now and may even be superior
The AIs fucking blow most of the time right now and they're still seem as a viable alternative. I'd be learning another career if I did anything even remotely at risk this is only the beginning
The key is to become more of a technology generalist so that you can be the person responsible for implementing these systems once actual dev jobs start drying up (if that happens).
It's never a good idea to pigeonhole yourself, anyway. A lot of people who have spent their careers specializing in one specific thing are going to have a rough time if this stuff continues to get better and better.
If ai becomes better than humans in general at writing code (like it can actually make long term maintainable code that runs at scale with no oversight) we’re all fucked anyway doesn’t matter what you do
As yet another software engineer, I appreciate every day that at least 4 layers of management above me all came up from technical roles. It simply makes life easier for everyone involved.
I think the real problem is that AI is getting better at coding and resolving buggy code at an exponential rate. Humans correcting AI mistakes is a thing today, but will be much less of a thing in the future.
Leadership will see large numbers and be impressed by the metrics ... And then expect even larger monstrosities to track how great AI was. It will be someone else's problem that things are not efficient, buggy, impossible to debug and maintain ...
They will care when they try to make any changes to the code base or add a new feature to the app and it breaks something else and AI can’t figure out where the problem is.
Exactly. I'm well capable of proving I know how to use AI as a tool to for coding responsibly - god knows I've been doing it freelance for years now - but for a more traditional hiring process, a HR person will see "graduated 202X" on my CV and automatically reject it assuming I just used AI for my degree etc. Or worse, assuming AI can manage a full scale project better then myself.
It's the age old problem of HR hiring for things they don't run, but made 1000x times worse
Anyone pushing a PR with 55 files with 25k lines of code is always going to be putting out bad code. Fire that person now. It's an ID-TEN-T error, not an AI error. This just allows that person to pump out tons more bad code.
Problem is, it’ll get better in leaps and bounds. I have a friend that works at Amazon, and some international launches takes a full team 6 months to complete from start to finish. He got put on a Skelton crew AI team as a test case and they did the same work in 5 weeks.
Speed over quality is what they expect from AI for now.
It’s also shitty because he now knows his job is somewhat safe as he’s on the spearhead team, but everyone else that were left behind on the legacy teams are now at risk.
I'm not saying you're wrong. I've got no clue. But there's no guarantee it will continue improving at the same rate, or even keep improving at all.
There's a semi-famous story from the 90s where some researchers looked at the improvement in women's running times over the prior 20 years or so. Women didn't get to start competing in long-distance running events until the 60's or 70's, so for a while their record times were showing massive improvements year over year, as training and sports science improved. The researchers predicted that women would be outperforming men in the marathon by 1998. This didn't happen. It turned out that all the easy gains had already been made, so the improvements pretty much stalled out (at least relative to men).
I'm not saying that's necessarily what's going to happen with AI (or, at least, not going to happen immediately). But saying "AI has improved over the past 4 years so obviously it's going to get way better" is a bit like saying "my baby has doubled in height over the past 4 years so obviously he'll be nearly 7 feet tall by age 8"
Just go browse thirst traps on IG. 2 years ago it was not possible to run an imaginary OF pimp farm. Now you have millions of horny dudes believing these women are actually real and shelling out hundreds every week for AI generated porn while nerds in India rake in millions.
I have a 5070ti that can run ALL of the latest image models and Minimax H3 for videos, as well as Qwen for coding.
The unfortunate reality for all of you hidden accounts hyping a technology they don't understand, is that there is no moat and this won't be a billion dollar industry. Because there is no money to be made when your costs to stay ahead of open source increase exponentially.
I think his point is that the model he's running on his local machine is free. He's not paying openAI or anthropic for the tokens. If his free model can do that on local hardware, how do these companies recoup their billions / trillions of dollars in investments?
It's clear that it will get better at some things - like it seems to be pretty good at enhancing productivity at programming and software development tasks. Will it ever be good enough to fully take humans out of the loop? That remains to be seen. But very likely that we will be able to do more with smaller teams in this area.
Will it get good enough for large-scale replacement of human labor across the board, or at least at a broad array of different jobs? That's unclear at this point. I think it can be helpful for office work outside of the software/IT space, but so far not in a game changing way. Like it could make me 10% more productive after accounting for the amount of time I have to spend training and refining. Maybe with some improvements it gets to 25% or even 50%. That's enough to make a real difference in productivity, but not nearly enough to start cutting a lot of headcount.
And that doesn't even begin to consider the cost. I don't think we have a good sense yet of where AI costs will eventually stabilize relative to the cost of paying people to do the same work.
We are in a very weird time right now where it's ok to make huge mistakes because everyone is, but that's not always going to be the case.
Fail fast has its limits and we are continuously pushing at it because we are in a runaway economy where nothing actually matters.
It's not just the legacy team at risk, we are all at risk from the fallout and the switch when we stabilize into the new paradigm, whatever that may be. We haven't figured that out yet.
Since we are no longer recommending kids become software engineers, I feel pretty good myself. I'll probably make some good money retired as a contractor when the time comes.
They know what they’re doing and they know AI’s limitations. It’s bad faith. They’re always looking for a reason to do layoffs and AI handed them the biggest, sexiest excuse they’ve ever had
It's very easy for the tools to go down a path because of certain instructions being interpreted different ways.
Just as a general example, "Add caching to the called API" vs "Add caching to the new API call". One of those may trigger a change to the entire codebase (and beyond if your AI tools have access to Confluence or other systems) while the other may be limited to a specific function.
It's also been my experience that these tools like to over test, make "do nothing" tests (where they are testing fully mocked systems), and struggle with optimizing tests. ex: 15 test that do the same thing, but with different data vs 1 test that has a data provider.
If you don't know (or don't care) what you are doing, you won't know something is wrong.
AI without context is also limiting if not error prone if not dangerous. Had someone from work just ask me to use AI for something AI won’t have all the context for and will lead developers down a rabbit hole of nonsense on the daily.
The LLM will be like ... We're using this library and we're going to pull data from this url blah blah blah blah
But then if the URL is broken then we go in and correct the issue, and the AI will sit there and hard code synthetic data instead of pulling the actual data when it can't 😭 and then lie to me and say that it's the real data stream lmao
Academics has always been hit or miss with software engineering. Some of the best sw engineers I’ve known were welders or truck drivers before. I’ve been disappointed in PHD holders more often than not. That’s because all they know is school and in the real world there is actual reality, not a project for a class.
> I’ve been disappointed in PHD holders more often than not. That’s because all they know is school and in the real world there is actual reality, not a project for a class.
I'd argue that a good portion of the time, it's due to a role mismatch. Sometimes, you need someone to figure out how to flesh out a wholly-new thing for a business need; find out what the right questions to even ask are, and build out something that addresses at least some of them. That's a job that someone with a research background is likely going to be good at. Other times, you just need to implement a feature that marketing or sales demands; your competiors' product has it, you need it too. The needs are well-defined, it just needs done. You need a "line cook" developer to bang out a good, solid codebase. Research people can do this, but they aren't necessarily going to be great at it.
I'll tell you what though 🥺 I was someone who studied emergent complexity and systems and all that, never been a good programmer at all
But since the robot understands the systems allegories and metaphors, it has made me into a decent engineer 🥹
The people who don't know how to plan for contingencies a through z, don't understand multi order causation and technical debt etc... they'll always produce bugs with vibe coding
yeah but you could just put that code in an AI and say, make this no more than x lines of code, and it'll do that and it'll do it so much faster than any human ever could.
Yup, after looking at the solution it presented I suggested just changing one line at startup. The AI was like, oh you are right that would be less changes and still follow the architectural standards.
That being said I switched to Opus and it told me I wouldn't have to do anything if the rest of the code followed the standards to begin with 😅... I had to save that plan as tech debt 😭
How is this possible? I’m a software engineer too. What was the scope of the task? And how did they manage to go off on such a quest without anyone checking in on their progress?
Easy. The person didn’t know whether or not the LLM was hallucinating or not. I knew the code base from years and years of reading it. They went and used a hallucinated design/assumption.
Attention-grabbing headline... but is it true? Was it actually a waste for so many of them, or are they just exaggerating the upside of the counter-factual?
About two-thirds of millennial college graduates took out student loans. The average loan amount among those borrowers was around $30,000; the median was around $27,000.
And these are just for the millennial graduates who borrowed at all. They don't include the one-third of graduates who did not borrow. If you include those who borrowed $0, average debt at graduation was approximately $20,000 and the median probably somewhere around $15,000 to $18,000.
So the debt-at-graduation numbers for millennials are likely something like below
|Group|Median|Average|
|:-|:-|:-|
|Millennials graduating with bachelor's degrees|$15,000 to $18,000|$20,000|
|Borrower millennials graduating with bachelor's degrees|$27,000|$30,000|
And what earnings outcomes did the typical millennial graduate get with their bachelor's degree?
For full-time workers aged 25 to 34, annual earnings in 2024 were
|Highest educational attainment|Median|Average|% earning $100k or more|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|High school diploma or GED|$46,380|$55,000|7%|
|Bachelor's degree|$74,480|$92,740|30%|
and for full-time workers aged 35 to 44
|Highest educational attainment|Median|Average|% earning $100k or more|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|High school diploma or GED|$50,310|$61,910|13%|
|Bachelor's degree|$85,290|$114,000|40%|
These are all estimates for employed adults, so it's also meaningful that workers with college degrees tend to have materially lower unemployment rates than those with just a high school diploma.
They do not. I believe you are thinking about this data from the New York Fed, which shows that the unemployment rate among recent college graduates is now higher than the unemployment rate across all workers.
The emphasis on "recent college graduates" and "all workers" is important. Two facts about unemployment are
Younger Americans tend to have higher unemployment rates than older Americans.
Americans with higher "educational attainment" tend to have lower unemployment rates than those with less educational attainment.
The New York Fed defines "recent college graduates" as
>recent college graduates are those aged 22 to 27 with a bachelor's degree or higher
This group is both younger and more educated than the average worker. Historically, the employment "boost" from their education has been larger than the "penalty" from their age, which is why their unemployment rate has been lower. However, the demographics of the "average worker" has been changing in two important ways
the average worker's age has been increasing
the average worker's educational attainment has been increasing
In other words, the educational gap between "recent college graduates" and "all workers" has been decreasing while the age gap has been increasing. At some level, it almost seems inevitable that the two unemployment rates should cross.
But crucially, you cannot choose your age. You can choose your level of education. And among people of similar ages, those with college degrees have lower unemployment rates than those without. Just take a look at the charts below that show the unemployment rates of high school graduates versus bachelor's degree holders for
Close. You may have seen unemployment for recent grads that is higher than non-degree holders overall (all ages) or the overall labor market, but if you control the age group, it's lower for those with a degree than without.
The purpose of higher education is to develop critical thinking skills and understanding of complex subjects. Degrees becoming vocational was the wrong move IMO
Issue is higher education coming with an insane price tag. When you sink people into debt then they're going to start gauging how fast they can pay it off and what degree can do it.
The insane price tag is because we made it so the loans federally backed. Banks see student loans as guaranteed money so they approve anything, and schools see that banks will approve anything so they charge insane amounts of money.
You are totally right, but the thought was that we have to federally back loans to make sure people can get the degrees needed for us to function as a society. We need engineers, accountants, historians, statisticians, teachers, nurses, etc. If we didn't have federally backed student loans, only those already with money would be able to get those degrees, which would likely lead to a shortage in the workforce.
The real problem is that there are no more free and low-cost options for higher education like what was available before the 70s. (Thanks again, Reagan.)
It becomes the ultimate opportunity cost. I never went. Saved the $100k, made more than my peers for over a decade. Then because I worked a practical job with lots of overlapping skills, got moved into management right as they were coming out of their junior roles.
We make roughly the same now, but I’m debt free and ahead on retirement savings and very secure in my employment. I started collecting certificates a few years back from local colleges and it keeps me moving forwards.
Congrats, but your anecdote doesn’t change the fact that college graduates earn more than a million dollars more than non college graduates over the course of their careers.
It sounds like you would have been successful regardless. But many people struggle to justify their worth without a degree.
How much of that is because of the paper they print your diploma on? Yeah, presumably it's because networking in university for 4+ years is how to turbo start a career.
I think this is going to change as people like op and myself move up into management who try out degrees and degree holders have roughly similar salaries later on. I’m 25 and dropped out of engineering school to work, after getting my natural gas license 3+ years ago I have never been unemployed not have I made less than my peers who graduated (a lot of the guys who went the software path have been unemployed for 2+ years).
It’s hard to argue this when most of the dropouts I know are preparing to buy property around my age whilst my educated compatriots are still looking for entry level employment. I agree with you they might make more in the future but the opportunity cost of a degree is astronomically high and isn’t conducive to success imo
What’s that million worth though? The best part of my job is a guaranteed 40 hour week. Lots of the grads I know are doing 60 per week. I could easily do OT and make even more, but I don’t really give a fuck about money. It doesn’t bring happiness past a certain point.
Also how many opportunities are lost because of student loan debt? I have remarkable levels of freedom. If I want to move and take a lower salary for better living conditions I can.
The obsession on earnings is a huge part of the problem. People who are obsessed with accruing wealth can’t comprehend that there are people who just don’t care.
“Your peers” all earn the same salary, paid the same tuition etc. and are sharing these numbers with you? You sure that isn’t some sort of confirmation bias?
How much do you think a college education should cost?
Keep in mind that a public high school education (managed and paid for by local taxpayers) is around $20k, and a private high school education (no public subsidies) is around $25-50k.
Also keep in mind that independent living expenses (food & lodging) for a young adult are around $16k/year.
I am not sure, but I can say that the financial model for high schools isn't the same as colleges. For example, charging international and OOS students more tuition, which is totally fair to do, having a much larger professor-to-student ratio which are good in terms of money. However, universities have more things that can sink their money, like graduate students. The US is general has had many places with nice competitive PhD stipends which countries like Canada can't really match, which is something we can lose out on if we decrease the costs.
Regardless, if an education costs someone, it's only natural that there's some "vocational" part of it, which is my main point. You can't expect "college" and "career" to be separated when it costs money to attend college.
I'm just trying to make the point that people say that college is expensive (which it is) with an implication that it is needlessly expensive.
If high school instruction, from public to private, is in the $20-$50k range, and the cost of living/eating somewhere independently is $16k, then it is nonsense to think that college priced at only a few thousand dollars per year is achievable without some kind of subsidy. I would say that non-commuter college probably costs $35k/year to provide.
Sticker price is ridiculously expensive, but that is what allows individualized pricing - charging wealthier and international parents more money so that they can charge others less money. Most people shouldn't be complaining about that because they most likely are being subsidized, and are not subsidizing others.
Yeah it will be interesting to see what happens when colleges are only worth their education itself again. Education standards may actually improve if there are only people there that want to learn for its own sake, nor will colleges be able to able to charge their current rates without being able to pretend it is "worth it" monetarily.
If I were going to college purely for the joy of learning, I wouldn't mind the fluff classes they tack on to the degree program. But because it is a financial barrier to myself and better employment, I find it really hard to buy their justification for making me take Mythology, Philosophy, Anthropology, etcetera when my degree has nothing to do with those things. I'm past all the fluff classes now but a third of my overall college requirements are made up of of bullshit fluff to drive the price of a degree up.
Edit: I'm a STEM major so I did consider actual returns on my education. I'm in my junior year now.
Yes 100%. A lot of my college professors said exactly this. A liberal education means an open education, where you expand your mind on various topics. Student loan program has ruined/severely tainted the experience and purpose of college
When students are required to take on home mortgage levels of debt for the degree, they need to consider return on investment in addition to everything else.
It is irresponsible not to treat college like an investment when you are spending so much time and money to pursue it.
None of that means that AI has made a degree obsolete. I have literally never worked in the field of my degree, but it absolutely informed how I solve problems and think about complex issues. It gave me a set of tools for thinking about the world that apply to many areas well outside my degree.
AI's utility is heavily informed by the person using it, and their ability to see where its flaws are, to know when its treading into shaky ground, to understand which pieces of what it tells you need to be fact-checked. Without the ballast of methodical reasoning, AI will take you wherever you let it, even if that's way off course.
Saying AI has made degrees obsolete tells me that all your time in college ever got you was accumulating facts without learning how to solve problems, in which case I'd say your degree was always rather useless.
Ultimately, it’s still the best way to increase your overall lifetime earnings, and those particular skills are vital not just in jobs but also in everyday life. People need to sign contracts, read legal/government docs, manage their finances, etc.
I side-eye anyone who wants to dissuade people from improving themselves and their prospects. It’s funny how much this anti-higher ed shit benefits a very small handful of very rich people looking to undermine critical thinking skills. You ever paused to question that critically or nah?
But an investment depends on the cost as much as the earnings.
If the degree gives you an extra $10k of earnings per year, but you are paying $1k a month in interest on the loans it was probably not a good investment.
You also need to consider the 4+ years of opportunity costs to get the degree when you could've otherwise entered the workforce earlier.
They're not unless their parents are wealthy or at least pretty well off or are chasing a degree for the piece of paper and not caring about the institution. All of the best schools have pretty solid need based aid that brings the costs way down. The challenge on those isn't paying for it, it's getting in.
The only thing going up on many schools is the sticker price, not what people actually pay.
The average total amount borrowed by 2023-24 bachelor’s degree recipients who took out loans to pay for college was $29,560. And that average does not even include the roughly 1/3 of graduates who borrowed $0.
Most people can't learn to think critically, let alone learn in-depth knowledge about a wide variety of topics, simply by watching youtube lectures and reading books they get for free. There's a lot more to education than that yaknow
I don’t disagree, but if the rest of the world can do it for <$5000 per year, if we in the US used to do it for the equivalent of <$5000 per year, there’s no reason it should be costing 10x that
Yes, but we do have the option of changing our conversation toward better topics, not just be reactive. Society has made decisions, and will continue making decisions, and we have some ability ro influence its direction.
Nah man it was never about helping people think. Universities turned higher education into a commodity and put an entire generation into crippling debt. That was the wrong move.
Nope. My mother didn't finish high school and my father worked in automotive manufacturing after completing a few years in the Air Force.
I ended up having several full rides to civilian colleges. Went to one of the service academies and studied electrical engineering & computer science. Finished my time out there and later got an MBA part time with my GI Bill.
I knew my father wouldn't pay for me to gain a university education so worked in high school to earn scholarships.
It's what I see nowadays in my field of technology. People aren't actively interested in it, only for the money.
Occupation is important and so is vocation. I've met very skilled IT professionals who never went to college yet are knowledgable in their craft.
I love higher education and constant learning for the record. People who utilize generative AI for educational pursuits are shortchanging themselves.
Unfortunately society pushes people into fields they don't like, leading to multitudes of issues, including apathetic workers that impact quality, because society fails to provide a strong enough social safety net. Allow people alternative means to make a living instead of selling themselves out to jobs they hate and we dont have these issues.
The goal should always be to align occupations to our aptitudes. Johnson O’Connor was a research psychologist who worked at General Electric and noticed some employees had greater facility for tasks than others
His foundation tests aptitudes. If I ever had children I would send them there when they are freshman in high school. I did testing when I was active duty and it was quite informative
How far back do you have to look when higher education was teaching people HOW to think and not WHAT to think?
This, to me, is the entire breakdown in academics and also shines light on why STEM degrees are still so valuable. The sciences are mostly objective, so teaching someone WHAT to think is still useful. Teaching WHAT to think on subjective matters has mixed results, but ultimately best grooms someone to also become a professor or other academic vs. tackling the professional world.
No it wasn't? The degrees aren't the problem. "AI" and the jakal like mentality of moderm business is. Degrees becoming vocational was absolutely the right move as it incentivises people to become more educated which is highly valueable to business.
Society is better off because it means more (educated) people working. Educated workers make better business and desicions and typically are able to invest in the market.
I sort of don't think that's true for kids currently trying to decide what to do about their future. I think if you choose your education path based on the idea of predicting what will get you a job in the future, you'll probably be wrong, and then that path will end up having no value, either to you or to any business.
Certainly not software engineering. Probably not most kinds either, and being a lawyer is probably at a good deal of risk too. Doctor is much more difficult to predict, but that's basically my point. If you choose to do those things, do so because it is truly what you want to learn, vs because you think it'll pay back over a career.
You objected to education that valued critical thinking and understanding complex topics, and you prefer vocational because it gets jiobs. I'm saying, that time in our history is likely to end, and vocational training might leave you with no job, and no education that enriched you as a human being.
And your reply is to say its this change in history that's the problem. Maybe so, but you may as well complain that the sun rises too early.
Getting drunk and getting turned down by many women at shitty college bars turned me into the salesman I am today. Without those rejections, I would not have the ability to bounce off the mat for another sales call
Generally speaking, I agree with your first take, that universities should be giving you and focusing on the tools and critical thinking mindset to be a lifelong learner and intellectual. Something akin to how Oxford operates.
However, I strongly disagree with the need for vocational degrees. There absolutely needs to be a certain level of “foundational” knowledge and skills for a lot of professions.
The system needs to find an appropriate balance between the two, which frankly speaking, the majority or big name universities already do. The disconnect largely comes from students who have absolutely no desire or incentive to engage in these aspects and universities that are more focused on the the financials than anything else.
I’m sure completely crushing the hopes of the majority of young people won’t have negative economic or social implications at all. Doesn’t Gen Z understand their investment portfolios are increasing in value? Doesn’t Gen Z understand our economy is driven by greed, short term thinking, and accounting tricks? Why do they care so much about jobs? God it’s so annoying. All they do is complain!
If they just got off their asses, walked down to the nearest estate agent, bought a house with cash, they could save a fortune on rent and have an appreciating asset. But no, they just want to stay at home, be on their phones, and complain.
There has been conservative anti-intellectual astroturfing and propaganda for a while now. Authoritarian conservative oligarchs want you to think that education, academia, and expertise are not just pointless but your enemy.
This is interesting. My step-father the actual epitome of the conservative bootstraps rhetoric. He was an addict who turned his life around and made an incredible life for himself and the family by being the top of his field in his particular trade. ANYWAY, he has started using those talking points recently: "We need tradesmen not IT. IT is dead. The only real jobs now are trade jobs." Now, free from the fact that I'm a software dev, I don't understand why it matters to him if IT dies? I always read the subtext as "fuck the industries that look down on blue collar work."
But from what you say I can see the propaganda as being more socially destructive than just giving blue collar workers their comeuppance. It's the structures and institutions that provided the ability for IT and its ilk to exist that are the real enemies.
Yeah, it serves a dual role for the conservative authoritarian oligarchs driving this type of politics. The first is that it drives a wedge through the middle of society. It makes educated people a scapegoat for less educated people and pits them against one another. This allows these oligarchs to carve off a large section of society for votes. It's classic divide and conquer tactics. The second thing it does is disconnect many people from education and experts. This makes them more vulnerable to disinformation and propaganda, which are a very valuable tool for the conservative authoritarian oligarchs.
The intellectual value of a degree was decimated the moment it cost tens of thousands to attend school, only to be met with a hyper-literal job market that underpays and refuses to understand the concept of transferable skills. The monetary value simply outweighs the educational value.
My math degree opened a lot of doors when I graduated in 2011 (millennial). I spent 2 years at Community College and went in-state while staying with my parents. I know I'm very privileged to be able to do that.
Now that I'm a senior engineer, I don't know what it would be like looking for an entry level job in this economy. Wish our government would give a shit about the working class because businesses aren't going to take care of their employees unless they're forced to.
This just means focusing on strengthening soft skills is all the more important now. Gen Z in my workplace struggle heavily with this. We had a colleague in a meeting sit and stare while our manager asked a direct question. It's like he was loading or something. He isn't the only one either.
I made another comment in this thread... basically the reading comprehension and ability to critically think have been in serious decline for at least a decade,well before AI as we know it today.
The results are showing up now in the workplace and AI is magnifying it.
What makes matters worse is that we work in sales. Half of the new hires can't even look clients in the face when discussing the deal or make eye contact with them. I honestly don't understand how they were hired.
Unfortunately COVID really did a number on the social skills and just general professional readiness on a segment of Gen Z. I have noticed this in scholarship interviews. It has since gotten better. But those that graduated high school between say 2022-2024 or so really seemed to struggle.
You play with the hand you were dealt. My brother has autism so he avoided jobs where he has to socialize. He is great with his hands so he fixes cars as a mobile mechanic.
AI just exposed the people who actually pay attention in class versus those who just coast by in college. All it really did was show the difference between students who actually chose their degree with some intention and students who just attend college hoping it’ll luck them out into a job. That’s never what college was for or how the system was intended to be used. Having applicable skills and practical knowledge is what got people jobs, not a paper credential saying this is what you “learned.”
many/most were pressured to attend out of fear of being destitute or being forced into manual labor jobs (the horror of working with your hands!). the degree marketing itself as some cheat-code for a comfortable upper middleclass life has been a lie for some decades now. the reality is many/most do-nothing professional labor jobs require on the job training anyway. the degree is just artificial gatekeeping some employers still use because it proves you played the game for 4 years and can follow basic instruction.
100% this. I did my engineering degree from 2007-2011 and a concerning amount of my classmates did shit work and just wanted to do well enough to graduate for the piece of paper so they could get a well paying job. I can count on one hand, and still name names, the people in my degree/program whose work I actually respected. One kid was even thrown out for blatantly cheating/copying another classmate's assignments; he's still been working in engineering roles since 2011.
Elder millennial here. My undergrad experience lead me directly to the career I am in now, and more than paid for itself. Having said that, I did a masters degree some years later and that has not made any difference whatsoever. I did it for my own satisfaction, but looking back, I could have gone without.
My own two cents: an associates or bachelors degree from a community college or state school is enough for many professional careers. Unless your chosen field requires it, however, graduate degrees are not nearly as valuable as they once were.
I’m also not convinced expensive degrees from “flagship” state schools and Ivy League institutions are worth it.
Edit: good comments below offering different perspectives!
Unfortunately my career requires graduate and post-doc training to get an entry level position. Doesn't really pay, cause earning ceiling is about the same as that ditzy cheerleader who used charisma to climb the ladder to a figurehead HR position. Except she got a 10 year headstart
I wouldn’t have my current job without my masters and making the amount of money I make today. I’m sure it depends on the degree, the person, and the industry.
100% anything leadership at my hospital requires a Masters degree.
15 years front line experience and 3 years in community health management?
Not even an interview.
When 200+ candidates apply for a single role, the credentials are the first thing they filter by, which is how you end up with people who’ve gone high school->undergrad->masters in positions of leadership with zero fucking clue on how to actually engage with people and understand why programs work and why other programs don’t.
The flagship and ivy/private school degrees are only worth it if you network with the highly affluent people in those programs. On linkedin you don’t have to go far to see a 20-something in a prestigious role that went to a no-name private college that charges $60k+ yearly tuition. They usually go for the connections.
I graduated in 2007 from a top 50 liberal arts college, and their tuition was like 45k a year back then. I got a degree in Psych, and my first job was making 30k at an electrical distributor, then I was a personal trainer (prob made 10k, worst economic time of my life), and then worked in retail (32k). Then I got fired for some BS, and my step dad happened upon a one year business masters from a well regarded school down south. Maybe 40k for the year (and they gave me a 15k scholarship) and my job out of it was 65k, and soon I was making 6 figs
All that to say that yes, undergrad is too damn expensive, has almost no bearing on what you do after, and they prob should charge you less for majors that don't have a clear job path, or where you need to go to grad school to make any money
Oh, and they hound you for more money the rest of your life. It would be like buying a Porshe 911,, not being able to afford the gas, and then the dealership sending you emails monthly for the rest of your life asking if you want to donate to Porshe
A bachelor degree in psych? Psychologists need a doctor degree to practice. Sort of common knowledge I thought. So yes your degree was worthless. But lots of bachelor degrees make good money. Engineering. Finance. Nursing. Etc. It was your choice and maybe really bad advice from someone that caused your issues.
If you went to a top 50 LA college, then you went to a private college and of course that’s going to be insanely expensive. I’m not sure why you’d go to a private college and not have a plan for your psych degree if that’s the career you wanted.
Wow it's almost like we should publicly fund higher education like college and trade schools, similar to what every other developed country on the planet does.
I don't know why we just accept this current setup as a given. College was not funded by students taking out massive loans for most of our modern history. During that golden age that the "make us great again" types like to call back to, the vast majority of higher education was funded by the states and federal government.
I agree that in some cases the ROI isn’t there. It also depends on where you go and what major you pick. Going to Arizona State to get a degree in Content Creation, probably can save a few bucks there. If your school has a 90% acceptance rate followed by a 40% graduation rate, maybe some of it is watered down.
The fact that people don’t find any benefit in education should scare everyone. I attended well know universities and used a lot of what I learned early on at my actual job. A lot can be taught on the job, but we shouldn’t overlook the value of a well rounded education.
What should scare us even more is the med student using AI to pass the test. AI is accelerating the dumbing down of America 🇺🇸.
I don’t think ai made people’s education "obsolete" I think it’s just a dogshit job market right now that makes graduates feel like they have absolutely no opportunities despite the effort they put in.
The California State University is considering offering 3 year bachelors degrees. I think this is smart. A college education is really about two key things: 1) Critical Thinking Skills applied across a diverse range of subject matter, and 2) Specialized skill that is marketable for job placement.
Streamlining those things and not making every single student take 2 years of GE courses just to get a degree is a smart move. Today's students need to graduate faster, be focused on what is critical to their career, and take on less debt.
AI only made your degree obsolete if you think about literally what you did. Not the problem solving, argument making and social skills that are the real benefit to a degree.
I feel terrible for people that graduated and will graduate school without getting a holistic education. I graduated during the Great Recession, so I was severely delayed in getting a job related to my majors (I doubled). But while one major was slow going, my other major, which was a foreign language degree, awarded me the ability to keep working and honing my language skills through translation work. Albeit for shit pay. And gave me a leg up to level out of what I was doing at the time to pivot into a much more lucrative career.
I remember having honest debates and discussions in many classes before everyone was recording you on their phones. Super Socratic Method, which may by and large have fallen to the wayside. Really honing critical thinking skills and being able to interpret and evolve positions/perspectives on things without being dragged on the internet for not "getting it" from the jump. Being able to tackle humanity credit courses without feeling like they were all a tragic waste of time. And being able to take end of degree courses with professors who were active academics in their fields whose minds you could pick and have honest discussions with.
Just sad all around. But I will say, it is becoming more challenging being a nuanced thinker in the past 15 or so years. Being curious can be weaponized. Perhaps one day folks can pursue post-secondary education again and walk away with more benefits than just landing a job. Though, "landing a job" is a great reward still in and of itself.
Jobs do not care if you graduated from an Ivy League, if your degree is not exactly related to the role they cannot comprehend the idea of transferable skills or critical thinking. That alone has made degrees worthless.
Attending ivy also let's you socialize with the other ivy types, which is networking and how you get reffered in for jobs. One of the better ways to get into a company is if you already know someone.
Colleges still have a great return in investment, but you should attend with specific goals. I think people are starting to focus on college as a "life milestone" instead of a way to further your career goals. So a lot of students attend without the intention to network, build skills and knowledge, sharpen your professionalism/critical thinking, etc.
If you're going to take out massive loans, don't go for the music major unless you have concrete plans to use that degree in some way (teacher, music industry, etc.). Or don't go for that biology major unless you plan to work in healthcare or research, etc.
It's a waste of money if you make it a waste of money. But if you do it right, you can reap amazing benefits.
I honestly felt like plenty of millennials had the "college as a life milestone" mindset. Isn't that why we saw such a huge boom in those sketchy yet potentially useful bootcamps in data analysis or software/web development? A bunch of lost souls in Liberal Arts degrees?
Im Gen X and graduated high school in 1992. It was a trope back then that the major didn’t matter just get a degree. I think a lot of millennials and Gen Z got bad advice from their elders, it’s much more nuanced than that now.
I got a BS is Economics and ended up eventually in an engineering shop, went back for my Masters in cybersecurity in ‘05 and its definitely paid off. But one must be thoughtful now.
Something that I hope we start to see more of again as companies realize that they fucked over entry-level workers is being willing to build somebody from the ground up again. It pisses me off that I make six figures from my job and you could literally teach somebody to do it in a few few months. You could give them the foundations in a week. Most white-collar jobs are like this.
I'm writing this so I don't get fined.I'm writing this so I don't get fined.I'm writing this so I don't get fined.I'm writing this so I don't get fined.
Humans and capitalism create bubbles. Education is no exception. Education boards saw how much people are willing to pay for degrees and made a business line out of them.
But we can't deny that AI has taken the steam out of entry-level jobs. You don't need a team of analysts running numbers, or entry-level coders. People pushed quantitative skills for years, and now we're seeing the demand for that skillset level off.
I’d be interested in seeing a survey that broke apart traditional and for profit colleges. I wonder how much of this is actual changes in the economy and how much is the fact that we’ve normalized selling kids worthless for profit degrees? How much is the diminished value of a traditional college education and how much is the fact that we’re saddling kids with debt for degrees that were never intended to be of any value and, in fact, bordered on scams?
Isn't it a little early in the AI tech maturity tree to pronounce it has killed off the usefulness of a degree? Even if you believe the AI hype - and I don't - universities can incorporate knowledge about the state of the art to modify curriculum extremely quickly if they so choose. In other words, as AI changes a given field, those changes can and should be incorporated back into the educational program.
An education is needed to wrangle an LLM. I know that the CEO bosses at the current height of their AI induced fever dream do not understand... but one has to know about as much as the LLM to control an LLM... or else it will gaslight the user. The robot will run circles around the user. Wasting tokens time and yanking the user around.
We need to value and attain education now more than ever. But at the same time, we are destroying the incentives to attain that education. The clankers are going to win this. Ugh.
It was a waste of time, but the degree is still valuable. It shows a lot in the hiring process and is still a requirement for some jobs like clinical, science, and pharma work settings.
This is a take you can only have if you have your degree. I never finished my bachelors, and even with "equivalent experience" i know it's impacting my job prospects and upward mobility.
I keep waiting for the struggling college grads to get priced out of my neighborhood by people who didn’t “waste their money” but it keeps not happening.
I’m a software engineer with 6 years of experience (with an MS in CS). This job market is incredibly challenging and I feel for all the new graduates right now. I know some that have been looking for a year and haven’t found anything.
Well.. yeah also college and uni was always a scam, you were never guaranteed to make money from a degree but from the connections you made from being in a wealthy fraternity, sorority, or social group
Not exclusively an AI problem. Masters degrees were used to keep gatekeep my field for decades until recently. Wouldn’t want the poors doing work that benefits other poors.
I agree completely. I’m Gen Z with a college degree and a lot of my friends who also have college degrees are struggling. We all have very different majors as well, so it’s not one specific sector or something.
I absolutely regret the time and money I spent towards my Associates and Bachelors Degrees. I wish I had just put all the money in an ETF and watched it grow. I would be significantly ahead and in a much better place than what I ended up doing. In fact, I’d say going to college is my largest mistake in life so far. I’m getting mad thinking about it lol.
I'm pretty much at this point as well. My undergrad degree was in social sciences and my grad one was in chemistry. Neither of them have helped me one iota in finding any of the jobs I've had. In fact, I've recently taken to omitting one or both when I submit resumes.
Lately, the problem I've encountered again and again is that a ton of companies and local businesses are owned by inherited-wealth fail-children and managed by craven people who are complete-and-utter lickspittles to anybody who's wealthier than them. Both of these types of people are just about the most ugly 'ugly American' types imaginable and, because of the post-2010s brain-rot they're gorging on (e.g. Fox News, Joe Rogan, etc..), absolutely despise educated people and, without hesitation, will bring this culture-war nonsense into the workplace, which usually leads to dysfunction, inefficiency, profits collapsing, etc...
Turn your angst into political action -- we need your energy and leadership. Join us on the street against AI and data centers! 70% of the American people across the land do not want these data centers. we do not need them. Once the construction is done, it's basically like 5 jobs created. That's it.
Education shouldn't be so expensive. That's the lesson here. Not that the education was a waste. Terribly worded headline. Society would be much better off if everyone had post secondary education.
The value of a college degree has been fundamentallly diluted by a systemic lowering of academic standards over the last ~17 year due to the huge cuts to education that started after the great recession.
Students expect As or Bs simply for trying and a C is considered the floor just for existing.
I taught senior level molecular biology for 25 years at an R1 public university. When I started, if half my class completely flunked a major exam, it was their fault for not being prepared. A few years ago before I retired, if half my students flunked an exam, it was now "my" fault for not being a good teacher.
The only solution to keep grades up was to cut the syllabus by almost a third so we had more time to cover everything.
Was it a waste? I didn't go to college, neither did my brother. A few of our friends did, they all have much higher paying jobs while me and my brother are working manual labor. Yeah AI probably won't come for my job, but I'm making so much less.
This and, depending on what manual labor job you have, there's a chance you'll trash your body and end up unable to return to work. I worked in social services for a time and a lot of the saddest households I had to visit were ones where Dad used to make alright bank as a contractor or forklift-driver, but had to stop when he had a serious accident on the job, then turned into an abusive alcoholic/pill-popping basket-case who couldn't stop the bank from repossessing his pickup truck, and yadda-yadda-yadda.
College graduate hires other college graduates, otherwise it makes it seem like their degrees were a waste of time and money.You may know how to do the job but it's going to the person with a degree.
I was told ANY college degree would give me a better lease on life. While it's true that piece of paper got me through the door a few times, when accounting for inflation I don't make much more than my father did working an entry-level manufacturing job with no degree in the 1990s.
I don't regret getting my degree, but I'm angry that no amount of work I do will allow me to cover basic living expenses AND repay my student loan debt.
Though it's tempting to internalize that regret, I refuse to. There was no god-damned way that millennials and Zoomers could anticipate that their Boomer/Xer parents would get bowled over so thoroughly by decadent consumerist brain-rot and NPD that, by the 2010s, a crazy percentage of them would be completely primed to accept genocide on their own population rather than take any steps to pass the torch. I maintain that, if not for their historically-record-setting levels of cowardice and sloth, those age groups would have long since unleashed Rwanda-style campaigns of violence and murder onto tons of other Americans, with the worst of course happening to immigrants, women, young people, and other vulnerable populations. Because of the aforementioned cowardice/sloth, we get to experience it in slow motion with things like a collapsing job-market, widespread resistance to vaccinations/health-care, widespread resistance to affordable housing, unaddressed climate change issues, the government pushing people to eat tainted food, etc...
The people saying AI made their degrees worthless didn’t take the right lessons from college.
College isn’t just about technical skills. It can teach people how to think critically, communicate, collaborate, handle different perspectives, become independent, navigate complex organizations, build relationships, and keep learning. Those are the “human” skills that make someone valuable in almost any workplace. College isn’t the only way to develop them, but it’s one environment designed to do so
It has made absolutely zero difference in my career other than allowing me to apply for an entry level night shift supervisor position that “required a degree.” Several promotions and moves later it was the right choice but now alot of those positions don’t even require a degree because they’ve gotten hard to fill and retain.
AI only takes jobs temporarily because its been proven time and time again that it's more expensive and less effective than a human. Every company that switches over has to revert back after it collapses.
Disagree. College is about much more than getting a job. It’s about learning your strengths and weaknesses, using your intellect to its full potential, and finding a direction for your adulthood.
The importance of college has always been the learning and the gaining of new cognitive tools and becoming part of new communities and having new experiences. When college became the best real ticket to the middle class via good jobs, good jobs became the main focus, but people still got the real key stuff.
Now that college has become unaffordable, and the job market doesn't really reward college like it used to, it makes less sense to go to college, but as a result, all the real key stuff is lost.
This is all really bad for our future, and we need to fix it with universal college, universal basic income, and universal healthcare.
Nursing / Healthcare and Trade schools are getting competitive too, because “everyone” is telling young kids to go there just as we did for Computer Science in 2010s.
Having a degree is still much more valuable than not having one even if you aren't working in your field of study. It still functions as an "I'm not a moron" certificate for employers.
I'm a millennial, and I vividly remember it being rammed into my brain that you need to be getting an undergraduate degree in a field that has strong job prospects and a wide range of applications. That led me into the STEM field, where I've had a prosperous career.
My friends that went into the humanities or arts probably can't say the same. They've mostly been on the receiving end of stagnant wages, and ever decreasing job opportunities. AI has only accelerated this trend.
AI agents will replace most white collar jobs in a few years, so they’re probably right. The number of colleges and universities will likely plummet over the next few years.
Since when is a degree just a measure of what you committed to memory? Like I tell my kids, a degree is SOOOO much more. It proves you can handle responsibility, take direction, stay focused, and learn new things. I literally use 5% of my degree daily.. if that.
Also, A.I is terrible. Has been, will continue to be. Unless you're asking to be a glorified search engine, or generate some AI slop art/code.. it really can't do much. I've given it the benefit and tried it on complex issues, and it just SUCCCCCKKKKS.
All of these codebases that use AI heavily, wills start falling apart in 6-9 months, and all the real engineers that lost their jobs will be getting called back. Know your worth, ask for more money because you're worth it.
There is so much opportunity now for optimistic smart kids that like working hard. They will get extremely wealthy because so many people are just giving up. Millenials are getting rich like crazy right now.
The ex CEO of Mercedes’s not only predicted this he wrote a paper about what jobs not to do and what professions to not get into about 20 years ago. I read it then and it’s all come to pass.
AI will not be used to benefit humanity. People believe that if AI replaces the need for human labor UBI will become a reality and humanity will behold a new age of joy and prosperity.
But history tells us UBI will become irreversible chains and the death of billions.
How so many people who want AI and UBI believe (the government will have absolute control over how much UBI any person receives, btw) they will be anything more than the most effective totalitarian way to control the population is mind-blowing.
Social credit systems, drone surveillance, etc. will all determine whether or not you deserve UBI, incarceration, or death.
Whether it's factually true or not, I find this to be a sad perception. Yes AI can answer trivial questions with usually a decent level of accuracy. The thing is you need to be a subject matter expert to ask the question correctly in the first place and to recognize whether or not the answer is complete and total bullshit. Hopefully as time moves on AI will become more of a tool as it really was intended to be in the first place. The tech bro bullshit promises that it would literally replace human beings will fade into the annals of comedic one-liners and mocking the tech bros who tried to die on that hill.
Zooming out a bit, we have to think about the implications of AI for human knowledge. Up until AI human knowledge was basically carried around in our heads. Sure books supported this but ultimately we have had to get it into our heads in order to use it meaningfully. If AI gets around that and human knowledge can now essentially live in the Cloud, what will the implications be for the upcoming generations and what will happen if the Cloud or whatever follows it is no longer available to us one day in the future?
As an industrial mechanic I find AI to shorten my internet searches by a bit. And to otherwise barely be helpful as more than a sounding board I can't trust, and those are the paid for version.
To piggy back. Ai searches are trash imo. At least the Google ones. They summarize information and when you attempt to dig deeper points in opposite directions
Yeah I should probably amend that to some of my internet searches are shortened.
It's a cool and fun toy but outside of desk side make work I'm not seeing a use case yet.
Agreed. Ai is being pushed in my wife’s workplace but it makes no sense as it basically circles back to their previous work and more often than not, incorrectly
Yeah this feels overly optimistic since at this point they've sunk over 3 trillion dollars down the hole and are desperately trying to force a sunrise from this, but the returns just aren't there yet. Maybe in a few years or a decade or two but at the moment they are losing money hand over fist whilst making cents on the dollar. This ain't the first investment boom to pop and it won't be the last but it's surely the biggest we'll see in a while.
If I knew the money I could make in government without a degree, I would have never gone to college. Government lets you skip a step or two with degrees, but with time on you get those steps and promotions anyway
When I was growing up my parents were very firm on their kids needing to go to college and buy their own houses because neither of them had done that. I did that. But I was impractical about college and majored in something practically useless. So, now I make $55k as an admin. At this point I can't say that college was worth the investment. My daughter plans to get a free associate degree through our state and then a certificate and go to work. I can't say if that is a better or worse idea than going to a traditional bachelors program. I guess we'll see.
Yeah probably, no employer looks into it or thinks you have knowledge of the job because of a degree. They mostly care that you went and finished college at least for young hires. They want real world experience for older people.
For some, the people that they met are going to be more useful than any of the knowledge that they might have gained at college, I think that's been true for awhile, well before AI. My Bachelors itself has only ever come up a handful of times and it was just a preliminary requirement for the job, just a way for me to get my foot in the door, by itself it is somewhat useless. I'm not even sure where the physical thing is located at the moment.
However, at the design school I went to, we weren't taught any specific software packages, it was more about "design thinking" and the process by which somebody comes up with a design, having a methodical approach. I think that's helped me well in the workforce and I still appreciate it.
The kind of design work I do is pretty technical and heavily regulated, so I think I'm safe for at least a few more years, nobody is willing to risk getting their shit recalled because A.I. just decided to hallucinate some ingredients or because it didn't think to add the allergen statement or something. Maybe after more regulations are gutted and companies are pushing out literal poison I'll have to worry about it
A degree can be useless and at the same time open up a lot of doors for you that might otherwise be shut.
I use my degree for jack shit, but the school I went to impressed some faceless exec enough for me to get my foot in the door and now I have a great career.
Oh, god, yes... We should legally be allowed to file bankruptcy on the federal loans since the government hasn't done anything to protect the value of degrees.
Young people should start going to community college and transfer to state universities. I got my BSc for under $25k (4 years) and it has enabled me to build my career in business analysis and consulting.
As someone that returned to college recently to go for computer science and economics, I literally sit there and wonder how people are incapable of coming up with reasoning of articles or possible context when it comes to a way something is written. Reading and literature comprehension and terrible soft skills plague late millennial into gen z at the moment, and while AI amplifies this significantly, it is honestly not the only reason why younger generation is struggling. I am still recall talking to a bunch of younger adults, about 20-21, and two of them said something that i absolutely despised. Both of them said they couldn't imagine passing high school without AI... the thing is, they haven't been in high school for 3 years by this point. Back in 2023, AI was significantly worse than it is today, so i can't imagine how many people in school are relying on it to pass classes now as the larger models have been refined and updated in the years since. Now I watch on the commuting busses at the college, people that can't stay off their phones, not able to talk to one another, and unable to keep conversations going with almost anyone, and AI is just part of the issue, but it's by far not the only issue.
I think the friction of what college is vs what people made it become is kinda showing its head. It’s made to be a place of education and learning but people use it as job screening and job training.
It’s a poor job screener (outside of the top of each school esp top schools) and a terrible job trainer and the bottom 50-60% feel it esp during bad econs
The wealthy are not sending their kids to trade school. I grew up in a working class family. I went to college and law school and it was transformational for my life. I can't say that my experience is the same for everyone, but I still fervently believe that college is worth it. You have to be smart about it, not taking out too much debt.
For me I wouldn’t take it back. But I ended up going into a field that had nothing to do with my degree and didn’t require any degree. Again would trade that experience and knowledge gained.
I think mindset has shifted a bit too? With how expensive college is, we don’t believe it’s worth it if it doesn’t directly make you money in a career.
I do not regret going to university, mostly because I learned SO much more than I did at any other time.
Do I use organic chemistry for my job? Hell no. But it helped me understand the intensely repetitive process of the scientific method. Stats made me understand how to parse good data from bad data (and I was able to teach my friends why ivermectin’s “cancer cure” claims were absolutely bogus).
My literature gen ed made me read Cider House Rules, and it helped me understand why abortion was a medical topic moreso than a moral one.
I had to take a religion gen ed, so I took Old Testament theology. The professor was an expert on ancient Near East languages. Nothing prepared me for him opening class by reciting the Mesopotamian creation myths and tales and then reciting the opening of the Old Testament’s creation story and contrasting it with the Akkadian and Sumerian versions. He explained that the poet went to GREAT lengths to avoid using the names of deities. The word for the Sun was also the god Shemesh. The word for the moon also meant the god Nanna. So other phrases were chosen in that poem to say one thing and one thing only: no other gods are involved in this story, just one.
I grew up going to church, I had been in synagogue many times! I had never heard any of that and it blew me away.
I learned botany and sustainable forestry. I studied in Beijing for a semester. I made a lot of friends that I’m still in touch with, and have connections around the world because of it.
NONE of those are necessarily relevant to my job working in union negotiations and contracts, but they all helped take a closed minded ultra religious conservative Republican kid and make him realise “wait, there is so much more out here in the world and I have the chance to talk to actual experts about any of this stuff”
TL;DR college is not appealing because it doesn’t necessarily equate to jobs, just a LOT of debt. And society as a whole is worse off for that, because that age is when we finally can learn a ton.
>College is often advertised as the best four years of one’s life, but many Americans now have regrets.
And herein lies the main problem with higher ed today - What do you want to get out of it? Why are you here? Wanna go party? Take that tuition money and put that towards your bar tab - You'd get cirrhosis far before you drink 4 years worth of tuition at some of these colleges nowadays.
Is it learning something? well, if you go on r/teachers and read about what percentage of students just straight up cheat their way through with AI, and you'd quickly realize that for most students, learning something isn't why they're in school. Using chatGPT to do your homework is like using a forklift to lift weights at the gym - Completely missing the point.
Historically, I'd argue the value of degrees and diplomas to be signaling - This degree tells people that you are competent and qualified. But the ridiculously low caliber of students that graduate nowadays is putting that into doubt. I've seen new grads from supposedly elite universities struggle with reading comprehension.
Is it Networking? As people used to joke, the Iveys is where the smart kids get to meet the rich kids right? Well, this I still believe, but it only really benefits a certain type of person. You gotta be gregarious, you gotta be sociable, and you gotta be friendly.
It's funny, my younger brother and my girlfriend both went to top ranked universities globally, yet I don't think either of them really benefitted from the networking - He was too shy and spent all his evenings watching v-tubers, she's too easily offended and particular.
I've been saying this for ten years. Marketing majors and programmers are currently out looking for a job. Meanwhile any guy who is good at a trade can charge whatever he wants from his customers.
It's even pretty easy to start a small company for whatever your trade is. Try selling marketing schemes these days. It's you vs. the AI, vs. a million others doing the same.
The purpose of education is more than getting you a job. Not only do you need domain knowledge to guide AI but education also makes you a better human and citizen. American’s inability to see this is so depressing and that’s why our culture is total dogshit
College is the best place to find your future business partner and wife. Networking is a huge reason college is worth it. Just due to life experience. Nepotism goes a long way. I am not college educated and understand at least this aspect of it
THedman07 | 12 hours ago
>AI has already made degrees obsolete
Is this actually the only reason that the article included or is it just the one that you most want to be true?
interwebzdotnet | 11 hours ago
I've read a ton about the pure lack of reading comprehension and reading levels. Its abysmal and it's been going on since before AI.
That lacking of reading skills is being magnified by AI.
ACaffeinatedWandress | 11 hours ago
Hard agree. I returned for a “masters” after a long break from undergrad. The lack of any rigor was astonishing, and the forced handholding and nose wiping in what was supposed to be a graduate level program was insufferable. A large chunk of my cohort would not have made it through the first semester of my undergrad.
I can accept that declining standards is making many universities obsolete. I’m not about to blame computer programs for it.
Stunning_Practice9 | 10 hours ago
I did undergrad 2007-2011 and masters 2011-2013. I did some university teaching 2013-2015 and then 2024-now. The students now have alarmingly low levels of literacy and almost no emotional resilience. I'm 38 and I sound like an old man but...yikes.
Hugh-Manatee | 9 hours ago
What would be an example of a lack of emotional resiliency that you experienced?
Nemeszlekmeg | 8 hours ago
Fellow teacher at uni here. I had to supervise an undergrad that often would start shaking and almost crying when they were pressed about their method for their thesis work. It's a simple question that has a simple answer unless you neither prepared and it's neither really your work (AI). My colleague also had to deal with a genuine hysteria from another student because they were failing the same exam for the second time. It's a masters program, so you would expect that people understand what a fail means (try again, the world wont end, your grades will be fine).
A few months ago I had a student on the verge of tears begging me to let them do a course one their own (its a group-work only class), because their friend was sick.
They are not all emotional, but there is always now at least one in a group of 5 that just has absolutely no emotional resiliency and the worst part is that all of this is genuinely not a dramatic, life-deciding situations and we are never mean or harsh. In fact we keep lowering the bar to levels where I genuinely think an illiterate could do our programs at this point. It's insane how some cannot cope with any discomfort. We have to be examiners, lecturers, now also therapists and nannies to people in their 20s!
Hugh-Manatee | 6 hours ago
Seems like the accumulation of no rigor or responsibility beforehand.
EddieVanzetti | 8 hours ago
I worked at elementary schools, not university level, but they have none either. Kids in 5th grade throwing a temper tantrum like a 2 year old, breaking down in crocodile tears when you don't give them a snack or a toy because they've done zero assignments and tests all year, with such levels of learned hopelessness that they cannot even figure out how to pick up the fucking pencil and write 5 vocabulary words down, and then promptly flipping desks because they've learned there are no consequences.
The_GREAT_Gremlin | 8 hours ago
I'm close to your age and work at a technical college. I'm not sure the lack of resilience is just a 'young un' thing. Plenty of the older students or parents are just, uh, something else
mmm_burrito | 8 hours ago
I work in construction, and most of my coworkers are feeling super impressed with themselves because of all of the memes and the data center money.
Our jobsites are hives of laziness, lax standards, functional illiteracy, emotional man-babies, and pure unrefined stupidity.
It's not the schools failing us, or at least not them alone, we're just dumber as a species. Microplastics, COVID crossing the blood brain barrier, persistent lead in the water supply....all kinds of shit we've done to ourselves, I guess. At the end of the day, we're surrounded by idiots.
Gvillegator | 11 hours ago
My wife and I both graduated with master’s degrees while we worked at a pretty good R1 college. It was astounding how poor the quality of work was from some of the students, and this was in 2021.
Comfortable-Brick271 | 11 hours ago
Why would you think it wasn't just as bad when you were a student?
InvestingNerd2020 | 11 hours ago
Because SAT/ACT standards were higher. Showing far better reading comprehension and math skills.
There was a study on this. It seems kids that grew up on Tablets/iPads have made them dumber than previous generations for gen Z and Alpha. Attention span dropped, grit to do deep research declined, and irratability increased when they don't get instant answers. Brain muscle has been weakened when not put to use basically.
https://nypost.com/2026/02/07/us-news/gen-z-the-first-generation-officially-dubbed-dumber-than-the-last/
ACaffeinatedWandress | 11 hours ago
This. I refuse to go to another program that doesn’t require the GRE. I hated that test, and it was silly at the time. But now, it’s pretty much the major separator of students who got coddled through the university of AI and students who actually learn, read, and write.
AfterMeSluttyCharms | 10 hours ago
Mine waived the requirement because of the pandemic, and I was relieved but also a little bit bummed. The experience itself was as rigorous as I imagined it would've been, but then again from what I could tell AI was nowhere near as powerful and ubiquitous as it is today, and I never used it. I'm very grateful I was finished with education before AI really started to take off.
23rdCenturySouth | 11 hours ago
It's not even the screens, it's the parents.
The best definition of a generation is a little recursive, but the most useful way to understand what binds them is that they are the cohort of people raised by parents of a certain generation, or at least at a time when that generation was dominant in parenting culture.
In other words, Gen Z got their academic ability from their Gen X parents.
The good news is that it isn't a perpetual linear trend, but more of a trigonometric one.
Pretend-Marsupial258 | 11 hours ago
Their Gen X parents were raised as latchkey kids and they don't want that for their own kids. So now they've gone the opposite way and become helicopter parents or even snowplow parents. At least that's the impression I get.
OK6502 | 11 hours ago
I wouldn't say they don't want that. It's just that now, for whatever reason, it's expected. People have gotten in trouble with CPS for letting their kids walk back from school in some places in the US.
Are these isolated cases amplified by social media? Probably. But they do still occur, which is insane.
Thankfully for me I live in a country where teaching kids independence is still important so we don't have that problem. I know other societies go even further - like in Japan kids are autonomous at a fairly young age. So it's not universal.
23rdCenturySouth | 9 hours ago
> I wouldn't say they don't want that. It's just that now, for whatever reason, it's expected
It's the same thing. Gen Xers definitely over-corrected from the "hands-off" parenting style they were raised with. It was Gen X police making the arrests, Gen X prosecutors building the cases, and Gen X parents nodding in agreement. Hence why I referred to not just the generational identity of each parent raising each kid, but to the predominant generation defining the mainstream culture around parenting and children.
Millennial parents are absolutely pushing back against this trend, trying to find something of a slightly more sane balance for our own kids. When Millennials are the predominant source of parenting culture in society, it's unlikely we'd see arrests in similar cases (several states have also recently passed laws explicitly allowing children to do things like walk to school and go to the park alone).
ContextLengthMatters | 10 hours ago
Nah. It's that the ultra conservative morons are the vast majority of people having kids. Straight up Idiocracy.
We have hit a point in history where the conventional wisdom is we are leaving a dying world to the future generations. Most intelligence is abstaining.
It's a literal brain drain. It's so bad that entire populations are having a birthrate crisis.
People try to make it an affordability thing, but it's just not the right time to be reproducing without giving it all to "God".
We became too educated and then the smartest of us decided it wasn't that intelligent to continue on anymore.
Edit: As it has been unintentionally pointed out from /u/stocks-sportbikes, the share of homeschooled kids doubling in the last 5 years suggests a rise in the share of conservatism among parents. While we cannot necessarily make any good comparisons on school outcomes between public and private schooling due to selection bias, we can safely say that educated progressives aren't having babies. The fertility divide is among party lines.
UnderABig_W | 10 hours ago
It’s both. Too many parents out there that don’t value education, but even for the ones that do, the school makes things too easy for the kids.
My kids are in an IB program, and they still have teachers who let them turn things in whenever or make up bad test grades.
I couldn’t imagine teachers letting me re-take tests when I went through school for no other reason than I got a bad grade on it. I couldn’t imagine my teachers letting me turn in an assignment a week late for full credit. That shit just wouldn’t happen.
But they’re doing this with kids who are ostensibly not just the smartest in the school, but the entire district!
23rdCenturySouth | 9 hours ago
Yea that is definitely one of the things they overcorrected on, the protection vs autonomy thing. But I didn't see any indicators that they over-corrected on education. Many Gen Xers still have bitter associations due to their own experience, and many more look at it as a waste of time & resources. Some who would like to "change course" from how they were raised may want to prioritize education for their children, but don't quite know how (hence the helicopters and snowplows).
I will give them this, though: The Silent/GenX/GenZ cycle in music and art is so much better imo than the GI/Millennial cycle.
TaxLawKingGA | 9 hours ago
Don’t buy it. If anything, the mediocre product we are getting from even so called elite schools with students who have 3.8 GPAs and 1400 SATs tells us that these tests are either a waste of time, the test prep industry has made them irrelevant, or they are simply outdated.
Gvillegator | 10 hours ago
This is before the class graduating during Covid hit grad schools. By and large, the feedback from that cohort is that they really struggled with reading comprehension.
Nemeszlekmeg | 8 hours ago
The education system has completely lost the plot like decades ago and the results of that mistake is coming to full fruition now.
Comfortable-Brick271 | 8 hours ago
Nice feeling you got there
nufandan | 10 hours ago
I did not go to a prestige university or anything (mostly an arts school), but I had assignments in college in 2006-2010 that were identical to projects I had done in...grade school.
Desperate-Till-9228 | 11 hours ago
That's what happens when you turn college into a money-making enterprise. If they maintained standards and rigor, many students would not get in and therefore would not pay tuition.
TigerKittenhead | 11 hours ago
The administrators must make their money. They are after all the reason the Universities function. Of course they deserve a 50 percent cut of any grant award and a staff of 1000 paper pushers to send out emails seeking donations.
When they write the epitaph of the USA, say it was killed by the MBA.
SemichiSam | 8 hours ago
>killed by the MBA
Ask any actuary what MBAs did to insurance.
TigerKittenhead | 7 hours ago
I don't know any actuaries. Is there a subreddit for them?
Fluffy-Rope-8719 | 11 hours ago
> returned for a “masters” after a long break from undergrad. The lack of any rigor was astonishing, and the forced handholding and nose wiping in what was supposed to be a graduate level program was insufferable
To be fair, was your "masters" an MBA, because if so I would hardly consider an MBA a true graduate degree (spoken from the experience of recently obtaining one from a top 50 school). Most MBAs are just overpriced certification programs considering how easy business theory is in comparison to masters in more scientific fields like medicine or engineering.
> I can accept that declining standards is making many universities obsolete. I’m not about to blame computer programs for it.
Couldn't agree more. The poor ROI of many college programs is more an indication of our broken societal incentives around education rather than an indictment of a truly robust educational process itself.
Zontar_shall_prevail | 11 hours ago
I see a direct correlation between the commodification and finacialization of college and lowered academic standards. The student is both a consumer and the product. Look at bloated academic beauacracies backed with guaranteed loans. The schools are incentivized to keep the customer (student) in school. Ask any professor and they'll tell you. The scary thing is what's happening in certain California medical schools currently.
ACaffeinatedWandress | 11 hours ago
My “masters” was an MSN. Yes, it is true that nursing education in general is kind of a joke, but it was an appalling experience.
I also agree—first any idiot with a pulse automatically graduated from high school. Then, colleges and universities started accepting and graduating any idiot with a pulse. As always—it is the academically inclined who take the bulk of the pain.
eleven010 | 10 hours ago
Is there a more scientific Masters than an MBA that still intersects with money/finance?
I'm in an MBA program (not top 50, but Cal State), and I too, am not finding it as much of a challenege as I thought it would be.
I fear the lack of challenge equates to it being less deairable in the future.
Maybe a Masters in Economics will be more distinguished in the near future, opening better job opportunities?
coolnameright | 9 hours ago
You're probably better off getting a CFA if you want to show your finance skills and that you can complete something challenging that holds weight
eleven010 | 6 hours ago
Certified Financial Advisor?
coolnameright | 3 hours ago
No that doesn't exist, it's a Chartered Financial Analyst. It requires passing 3 increasingly complex exams that are graded on a curve to keep the integrity, a couple years of on the jobs experience, and a couple professional references.
I think like only 10-20% of people that have started it ended up finishing
eleven010 | 3 hours ago
Thanks!
skysophrenic | 8 hours ago
Undergrad, dual honors in Economics and Finance, Masters in Supply chain and logistics is the route I took. More technical that an MBA but adjacent to a degree. Really the more tangible things it gave me was the business side/POV of macro economic events, and the inverse, while also having the technical foundation in math and statistics and data analytics to do what I do for work.
carbonclasssix | 11 hours ago
If you don't mind, what was the field or degree of masters? I'm thinking of going back and feeling out options
ACaffeinatedWandress | 11 hours ago
It was an MSN. To be fair, nursing school is a bad joke.
CapnFlatPen | 9 hours ago
So at the risk of being annoying because this is the second time I'm responding to you, I've known several nurses, family's full of'em. The older ones (grandparents, great aunts and uncles, etc.) look at the financial assistance available for the newer ones, as well as the sheer amount of work they're expected to do, the breadth of system's they're expected to learn, and largely agree that the expectations are obscene.
My wife who's on the ICU was explaining the program to my grandmother, including the fact that she had work, clinicals, and school all in different cities, and the old lady had her mouth agape. I know this is an anecdote, and plenty of veteran nurses might disagree, but i feel like anyone calling nursing school a joke is just being reductive.
ACaffeinatedWandress | 9 hours ago
It’s a joke. First, the learning hardly prepares you for nursing. Second, academic rigor was…just lacking.
Substantial_Coat_229 | 10 hours ago
To be fair, where did you go for your masters compared to undergrad? In my experience, community colleges are a joke. It was a “hack” to do math courses and whatnot at your local community college to skip having to do the real thing at the university.
ACaffeinatedWandress | 10 hours ago
The community college where I did my nursing prerequisites was phenomenal. I got my MSN at Marquette—what a sloppy fucking joke that was.
ILIKESTUFF8989 | 9 hours ago
I forget what it’s called but in the corporate world where organizations stagnate or decline because nobody wants to seem mean So in the process of trying to be nice people don’t get real criticism. I wish I knew what that was called.
Anxious_Guava8756 | 8 hours ago
My associate's at a community college (which was in Boston, but still just a community college) was more fulfilling and challenging than my master's degree from last year. Figured I'd knock it out before I got too old.
I studied poli sci and we had a level 5 course that covered material I had learned in fucking high school back in 2009. And yeah, the kids were complaining that it was boring.
I should've dropped out. Waste of money.
AloneExperience7520 | 10 hours ago
You can't pay for Ritz level accommodations and a new rec center if you've flunked all your cash cows-- ahem, students.
CapnFlatPen | 9 hours ago
So while a decline in standards is definitely there, there's a prevailing school of thought that it's a consequence and not necessarily a root cause. The breadth of things expected of someone in college and particularly grad school has changed, and keeps changing, usually getting wider. As tools have become more efficient, expectations of how much you can do in a certain time have generally increased. More assignments means more to do means less time to do it.
Further, the cost of getting a college degree just keeps skyrocketting while the increase in income has significantly decreased.
Teachers are paid less so their incentive is lower, college is prohibitively expensive and increasingly stressful so student incentive is lower, and this is all in the 2000s and 2010s, long before AI.
Add into that, shit sucks right now. Just in general. We are mired in a multigenerational funk and have been for a while. Everyone's depressed, everyone's mad, everyone's struggling, no on feels safe, it'a a fuckin mess. And, if we're being brutally honest, college degrees aren't exactly a load-bearing pillar on Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Don't know how long your break from school was, but the world's a different (and for a LOT of people, worse) place.
And to be clear, AI is making it worse. It is, undeniably, adding yet another thing onto the neverending cavalcade of bullshit.
armlessturtleneck | 9 hours ago
Maybe I need to go back to grad school I feel like I could crush it if this is how its become.
TommyPickles2222222 | 9 hours ago
Yea there’s a lot of dumbass people with masters degrees these days.
SilkLife | 8 hours ago
Do you mind if I ask what the masters was in?
ACaffeinatedWandress | 8 hours ago
MSN
SilkLife | 8 hours ago
Oh that’s one I would hope would tend to have more competent candidates 😅 cause of the life and death responsibilities but thank you for sharing your experience
MildlySaltedTaterTot | 7 hours ago
yeah my undergrad was in two ‘easy’ majors and while rigor wasn’t expected, what I got was even more dumbfounding. The bar was in the floor and some people were competing with moles in a game of limbo.
gdirrty216 | 11 hours ago
This is certainly happening at the aggregate level, but my 10 year old son and 13 year old daughter both read like crazy. Like to the point where I get annoyed we have to go to the library so often to refill their stock. And they have friends that love to read as well, but I am cognizant that this is not likely happening at scale.
My point is that there is a widening gap between highly literate and semiliterate peoples, and while AI may exacerbate it, it’s not the cause. It’s about intentionality and effort; if your kids dont see you reading they won’t read either.
Monkey see monkey do.
interwebzdotnet | 11 hours ago
>my 10 year old son and 13 year old daughter both read like crazy.
I'll donate some gas money for you, hopefully this is the new trend. :)
>AI may exacerbate it, it’s not the cause. to be clear that is not what I was saying, I basically said AI highlights the lack of reading abilities.
officiallyBA | 11 hours ago
What made these degrees less valuable was when they became narrowly focused on specific careers instead of helping to broaden the person's knowledge base and improve critical thinking skills.
College became a credentialing for jobs instead of a quality of person's thinking skills.
interwebzdotnet | 11 hours ago
Yes, that is a parallel issue.
The reading comprehension one is a stand alone in comparison.
Eo292 | 9 hours ago
It becomes a race to the bottom too. Once upon a time and English, Philosophy, Math, Political Science, whatever else non-career degree was not a detriment, plenty of massively successful professionals held these degrees. Today though it’s hard to compete in the job market without a specialized degree, because other applicants likely have those degrees.
If you’re an investment fund looking for an entry-level analyst, that English major really needs to show they’re quite brilliant to beat out Data Science + Business double majors who have spent 4 years training for that job.
Inside-Selection-625 | 9 hours ago
Its funny you say that because I am currently mentoring an intern at work. We legit had this conversation about university, my biggest complaint about it was that we just throw random facts at people and expect them to get it. Rather then giving them the concepts behind what is trying to be taught.
This was a policy grad. I then taught them how to reason through abstract problems and think about it systematically.
MildlySaltedTaterTot | 7 hours ago
A lot of students see this as what college is as well, though. The pigeonholing I see of young minds on a future, with no regard to supplementary learning or activity and how wholistic these experiences are meant to be
Virtual_Childhood626 | 11 hours ago
I’m listening to the podcast Sold a Story and it’s heartbreaking. We failed an entire generation of kids. This was decades before AI but these are the Gen Z and Gen A kids. So now that they’re college aged, they had AI allowing for them to cheat at learning and try taking shortcuts.
interwebzdotnet | 11 hours ago
Its even before the current college students. You have people who have been in the workforce for several years now in the same boat.
ProletarianLilith | 10 hours ago
Gen A kids are like 7 max
Shadowkiller00 | 8 hours ago
Named generations are not exact 20 year delineations. A quick search says gen Z is 1997-2012. That puts the oldest of Gen alpha at ~14.
Your point that they are not yet college age stands, but your specified maximum age is off by about half.
Gen beta may be starting soon if it hasn't already.
Virtual_Childhood626 | 8 hours ago
From my understanding, the oldest Gen A’s were born in 2010.
Hugh-Manatee | 9 hours ago
I also see bad academic performance for young kids being blamed on COVID but I think that’s starting to be an easy excuse. I strongly remember that things were declining before COVID when it comes to academic performance and reading
interwebzdotnet | 9 hours ago
You are so dead on right, I didn't even think about it. But absolutely. COVID was well after this trend started, COVID didn't help at all, but it certainly wasnt the cause and you are right its looking like the easy excuse.
Hugh-Manatee | 9 hours ago
Yeah I have a relative and she has had different jobs in the school system but nowadays she’s quite influential and gets called in to coach teachers to get standards up. And I think even she is on cruise control buying the COVID narrative and a lot of folks are coasting without accountability because of the it.
That play will eventually expire but it hasnt yet and probably will carry on as conducting clickbait-able research on how the COVID kids got screwed will continue to flourish because it feeds biases of the lockdown revengers.
interwebzdotnet | 8 hours ago
So sad how truth and facts are so easily washed away.
YoBo151 | 8 hours ago
Covid isn't THE cause, but it sure as heck did have an impact. Almost like it accelerated things
RobotEnthusiast | 9 hours ago
I graduated with an MBA in 2018, along with my wife who attended a different university for her MBA. The difference in coursework between the schools was CRAZY. Going through a grueling training with a heavy workload sucked at the time, but I came out prepared for the workforce. The easier courses at her college did not prepare her enough and this is a scarily common trend.
Economy_Zombie_3026 | 10 hours ago
The issue is that the AI brain of gen z seems to me like the obvious conclusion from the "teach to the test" pedagogy. If tests are just systems for answers. And answers are understood to be this binary thing. Then why not just let AI give you the short cut from A => C.
What does learning have to do with tests?
Sanity0004 | 9 hours ago
That's the saddest thing I see in something like /r/ExplainTheJoke or /r/explainitpeter so many times it feels like such a lack of comprehension or basic level of thinking and making it to the front page.
interwebzdotnet | 9 hours ago
Yeah, I've had "debates" on here on various topics (Flock cameras, Finance, Palantir, Investing) where its so painfully clear that people are literally responding to things I never said, but quoting me and completely not responding to what I actually said. I used to pass some of it off as bots, but you can start to tell the difference at a certain point.
People just dont know how to read and understand what they just read.
Cynadiir | 8 hours ago
I just assumed half of those were rage baiting or sharing a joke they thought was funny, and modifying it to fit the sub.
MagicTheGlizzying | 9 hours ago
the dumber you make people, the easier it is to keep them trapped as low-wage employees, even despite their education.
keithstonee | 8 hours ago
using AI also destroys your critical thinking.
interwebzdotnet | 8 hours ago
Thats a broad brush statement. I use AI all the time for research and some legal things I'm working on. It summarizes well, provides references I can cross reference, and helps develop strategies that I have to re-read, analyze, and make adjustments to.
Depending on your mindset, AI can either make you dumber, or act as a force multiplier and increase brainstorming cycles drastically.
Past_Top3704 | 8 hours ago
Well per another post, people who like to read, don't know how to pick up after themselves and just leave tents, coolers, and other festival items laying everywhere.
See Reading Festival posts /s
br_k_nt_eth | 11 hours ago
Seriously. I wonder who all this “don’t go to college and better your economic future” language really benefits.
HourOfTheWitching | 11 hours ago
The silicon valley technocrats aren't discouraging their own children from attending higher education, and minimise screen use when raising their young.
I wonder why.
Typical-Meringue-890 | 11 hours ago
You know what’s kind of strange about that? A large proportion of those children of these types of people go to college and pursue liberal arts degrees rather than the “practical” education that other people are told they should pursue.
HourOfTheWitching | 11 hours ago
Oh this is a whole thing. If you check out the c-suite of Fortune 500 companies, humanités and social science graduates are vastly overrepresented.
They want monopolize critical thinking.
Not_FinancialAdvice | 9 hours ago
> If you check out the c-suite of Fortune 500 companies, humanités and social science graduates are vastly overrepresented.
My cynical take would be that it's easier to maintain a high GPA in most of the the humanities/social sciences than in many of the hard sciences and engineering. For example; having to take organic chemistry, the bane of every pre-med student, where the class test average is like 24%. Now, some people are great at OChem, or PChem, or Diff E - but I'd argue a lot more people are going to be able to do well in like modern political economy (they aren't necessarily easy courses, but more tractable for a lot more people). So if you're just trying to hit the hurdle of an "elite" degree, you go the path of least resistance.
LurkerBurkeria | 9 hours ago
Why do STEM guys always do this? Its not cynical you sound like every other person who is totally dismissive of the liberal arts because youre resentful of the homework or whatever
The elites pick these because they cultivate critical thinking, emphasis on culture, society, and the arts. All of these are important when one is networking, and doubly so when interacting with an increasingly impossibly complex world once you get above the IC level.
Yall have got to stop assuming lib arts degree holders are lazy or dumb. It is dead wrong and unbecoming. obsessed with the coasters at the left end of the bell curve while ignoring the high performers on the right end are your boss lol
Not_FinancialAdvice | 9 hours ago
Assuming you're not an engagement bot, I really would recommend you re-read what I wrote. I'm not dismissing the value of liberal arts degrees; many of my friends who went to law school (elite ones at that) went that path. My philosophy major friends/acquaintances are remarkably good at picking apart arguments and situations, and I'd argue they have one of the strongest grasps on logic of anyone.
That said, please, take a step back. Model the higher education experience not as a chance to improve yourself (yes, incredibly cynical), but as a game to be played and rules you can exploit to hit career hurdles like "ivy league degree". If all you care about is a degree from a name-brand institution and a high GPA that opens high-paying career paths for you, then you're going to 80/20 that super hard. I don't think it's how higher ed should be, but I've met enough people in my time in academia to know that it's certainly a thing (that is unfortunate).
LurkerBurkeria | 9 hours ago
Bud I wanna know what engagement bots you read that have my syntax. I re-read what you said, and the shoe fits. You dismissed lib arts and lifted up STEM, not very hard to read between the lines.
Fluffy-Rope-8719 | 11 hours ago
Yeah it's almost as if higher education is supposed to be about expanding your mind and ability to think critically, rather than just a glorified jobs training program that you the future employee pays for.
sevseg_decoder | 10 hours ago
The conflation of education with training is depressing. So many people don’t want to understand how the world works but at the same time want to be handheld through all sorts of things they could learn in an evening or a weekend of reading.
Comfortable-Bread249 | 10 hours ago
But engineering! STEM! Computers! It has to be a simple binary outcome or we’ll malfunction!
Castelante | 9 hours ago
College isn't even a vocational training program. It's effectively printer that spits out pieces of paper that tells future employers, "I'm not dumb, and I can stick with something."
dogs_gt_cats | 10 hours ago
I think a big part of it is because people don't know what liberal arts education actually means. The most marketable reason for liberal arts education is orthogonal thinking - when you are trying to solve problems (technical, emotional, political) having a widely arrayed variety of knowledge to draw from helps you approach problems in different ways. If you're an engineer in a company with 100,000 other engineers, being a good engineer doesn't make you stand out. Having a background in psychology that helps you persuade and influence people on the other hand, does (speaking from experience as a former engineer in a fortune 50).
But you use the word "liberal" and republicans immediately recoil because their propaganda networks have instilled that behavior.
Due_Comment_3333 | 11 hours ago
the arts are reserved for the aristocrats. the poors have no business learning music!
choicemeats | 8 hours ago
they also have the luxury to pursue that because they don't have the immediate possibility of being broke. they can likely just bank on their parents.
a family member went to college and got a nice internship/job in a law firm doing something they wanted to do. decided on the side to pursue art/talent. Spent earned money on the talent. Then after one self-publishing decided to quit said career and focus on the art which to date is not supporting any kind of lifestyle, but can went home to their parents because they make great money and can continue to support her. And that's like.....a non-rich case.
all the truly wealthy don't have to do anything and can "start up their own business" on mom/dad's money after getting an art history degree.
warren_stupidity | 10 hours ago
Actually the first part is true, the second part is dubious.
Outrageous-Break3585 | 9 hours ago
The same reason wealthy children don’t join the army.
Ranccor | 11 hours ago
Right wing politicians. The more educated a voter is the more likely they are to vote left wing.
jackofslayers | 10 hours ago
Or, for example, a more educated person might be able to read one of the many many lifelong studies that have been done that show we have a very good measurement of how much more college grads make.
DetroitLionsSBChamps | 9 hours ago
Reddit seems to understand this until it comes to college vs trade school and then all of a sudden everyone thinks college is a scam and learning to be a nation of hvac repair techs is what will save us
Or maybe it’s just botted to hell, hard to say
PirateSanta_1 | 10 hours ago
It benefit the wealthy who are still overwhelmingly sending their kids to college. Making everyone else believe college is a waste of money is a great way to create a labor pool for their college educated children to exploit.
throwaway098764567 | 9 hours ago
if college were free go for it, taking on a ton of debt to set you up for jobs no one can find is not the smart move right now. unfortunately there is no smart move right now which sucks.
FacetiousTomato | 9 hours ago
A good chunk of people who go to college/uni, shouldn't. They are not interested in the subjects they're studying, and those subjects don't lead to careers.
If you want to learn art/history/English, etc absolutely university is a great place to do it. If you're just doing it because mom wants you to, maybe don't.
AttonJRand | 11 hours ago
Ah yes my friends who are stuck without jobs, and with debt from their computer science programs, are actually just bought by big tech, to convince me to not send my kids, that I don't have, to college.
Not everything is a conspiracy.
Fluffy-Rope-8719 | 11 hours ago
Or maybe the impact of an emergent technology on specific employment sectors should be chalked up to just that - technology driven disruption of a subset of the labor force.
Imagine how dumb it would be if people who majored in "printing" decades ago convinced us all that education was pointless because their profession was made obsolete.
br_k_nt_eth | 10 hours ago
Bro, if you can’t see how depressing highly paid labor and forcing you and your friends out of the domestic market to justify offshoring benefits the billionaires, you may want to look at the bigger picture.
Also, I second everything the other person said to you. It absolutely sucks that y’all got solid the “coding/STEM is the only viable career option” shit and that it landed you here. That’s also a systemic thing and not indicative of higher education overall. In fact, I’d say it’s even more evidence of the need for accessible retraining and economic diversification overall.
PlutoNZL | 11 hours ago
OP just copy and pasted the title of the article.
roller3d | 4 hours ago
This is reddit, no one will read the actual article.
ACaffeinatedWandress | 11 hours ago
I have a feeling if AI made your degree meaningless, you relied on AI to get that degree.
Less-Cartographer-64 | 11 hours ago
Actually, I got a degree in Being Inaccurate. AI has made my degree and field completely obsolete.
warren_stupidity | 10 hours ago
The first time I went to college I majored in Hallucinations. Unfortunately I was 50 years ahead of time.
_burndtdan | 8 hours ago
My BA in BS is worthless now!
fear_of_birds | 11 hours ago
If someone tells me that AI is a better writer or researcher than they are, I'm inclined to believe them. I just don't see what their skill issue has to do with me.
Dekipi | 11 hours ago
It’s in the article title but that doesn’t make it true
DumpsterHunk | 9 hours ago
Is that really so hard to believe or does it go against your stock interests?
bloodontherisers | 11 hours ago
The other is that the ROI is seen as diminishing (obviously won't be able to verify this for years to come) especially because new grads are struggling to find work in their field and entry level wages are very low compared to the price of college.
pkennedy | 11 hours ago
It probably hasn't made degrees obsolete, but it has made it possible for teams to wrap up their output within their current teams, meaning they need fewer junior positions.
lemonylol | 10 hours ago
Seems to be a conclusion the author added. Fortune is sort of a shit publication with clickbait like this that front page reddit is rabid for though so it's not surprising.
The real conclusion here isn't that degrees are worthless or made obsolete by AI, there are tons of occupations that necessitate study. What the real takeaway is that the social contract of "get a degree and you'll be hired and make a living wage" no longer exists, and it is in no way exclusively because of AI, the current effects we are experiencing are actually the results of the last 10 years, not what's currently happening.
CaterpillarJungleGym | 10 hours ago
Yes, my college years could never be replaced by AI. Maybe simple knowledge but not the synthesis and using it for other things. And I wouldn't be the person I am without those experiences. It gave me time to figure out what I value in life.
whyneedaname77 | 9 hours ago
This is anecdotal. I was at the gym a few months ago and over heard two young people who just finished college. They were saying they can't find a job because it seems like AI is doing the entry level positions. I don't where they went to school or majored in. But I have heard this before from a few others.
tierciel | 9 hours ago
It's not just AI My generation (millennial) have been saying this for many years now. I got my degree in computer networking, when I was looking for IT work , I never got asked about my education at all they just wanted you to have the degree for I assume legal and liability reasons. What they did care about was work experience, they wanted people graduating college with at least 2-5 years of work experience.
I now work in a kitchen, if I could go back in time and never go to college I would in a heart beat. I would lose nothing but gain several years of time and thousand of dollars back.
BareNakedSole | 9 hours ago
A basic degree in business is still helpful as it will help you understand how the world pays for itself. Just don’t spend $300,000 on it.
SupportIntrepid7834 | 9 hours ago
Honestly haven’t read the article, but I just dat down last night with two of my cousins who are 30 year lawyers and they were ecstatic at the progress of their AI clients to help with writing, proofreading, and citing case law and it terrified me that they were excited at the prospect of these techno fascists being in charge of everything. They explicitly were okay with the future where Elon and Peter Thiel are at the top of everything and AI is doing all the work… it was bizarre and unsettling
AntonioH02 | 9 hours ago
I think in my case (BA in Econ) is that I didn’t do any networking, which of course I regret. I work as a cook since that’s all I could find
Mt8045 | 11 hours ago
An online survey amongst people who are trying to find jobs is a terrible way of evaluating the worth of a college degree. Actual data consistently shows big advantages both in salary and employability for college graduates. Are all majors affected evenly? No. But using this to push a doomer agenda is really disingenuous.
TempBurnerAccount089 | 11 hours ago
Agreed.
Adventurous-Roof488 | 10 hours ago
Most articles from Fortune are garbage clickbait anymore.
lemonylol | 10 hours ago
Yeah this is validation bias I think?
SonofHondoBelmondo | 10 hours ago
I don't think it's about a doomer agenda. It's just that a lot of higher earning positions require college, so naturally, humans funnel into them. But, unfortunately, we are currently left with a "remainder", a statistically significant amount of people that didn't get that higher earning position, but are still left with this massive debt.
No problem! We'll just get a mid level job to balance things out while I...oh know, that didn't work either.
So now we're stuck as a society with all of these consumers who can't produce. I know that as a person who works hard and has "made it" it's almost impossible to understand or accept that what I'm talking about is real. But I think it is.
And before you think I'm just complaining, I didn't go to college. And I make plenty of money, it probably wouldn't be enough for most normal people who aspire to a middle class sort of life, but I make it work and I'm frugal af.
I think middle class guys with decent office jobs, CPAs, etc have a pretty big blind spot to this issue. I say this as someone who has waaaaaay less farther to fall before hitting the bottom. What happens when this problem becomes exacerbated further? All the finance guys and other corporate job guys just get to stay on the gravy train? I'm not so sure, I hope so for their sake, but it strikes me as hubris when I see so many brushing this off as "avocado toast".
CincoHombres | 9 hours ago
Your gonna make bro uncomfortable shh.
SonofHondoBelmondo | 9 hours ago
I mean, I'm trying to be respectful about this. It's just a trend I'm noticing, to hand wave away this growing class of non-producing consumers. Or we write off their lack of production as laziness when they earned a degree. Obviously this isn't a laziness issue.
Mt8045 | 8 hours ago
Sure, college is not for everyone and it doesn't work for everyone. But it has opened doors and brightened the futures of so many more. And it certainly doesn't get refuted based on an online survey like this.
SonofHondoBelmondo | 7 hours ago
I agree with all of that.
ComradeJohnS | 8 hours ago
yeah on average they’re better, but is the value of the $100k price tag for public universities making up that difference? would that money be better invested and grow money in other ways?
ai isn’t the problem, student loans and predatory lending to 17-18 year olds is the main problem with college, and colleges are going to blame the new buzzword instead of decades of bad policiez
PLaTinuM_HaZe | 8 hours ago
Bingo!
Tha_Sly_Fox | 8 hours ago
Also degree specific.
I actually have an expensive degree in a bullshit major but it helped me get good jobs that I wouldn’t have had without it.
I’m luckily at the point where experience matters more than the degree but I wouldn’t have gotten the jobs that gave me the experience without the initial degree.
Or to say a degree is for everyone, I’ve seen plenty of people in trades or who just had a high school degree and made it work, but it was devotees a net positive for me.
cryptotrader87 | 12 hours ago
Idk I’m a software engineer. I just replaced someone’s AI generated PR that was 55+ files and 25k lines of code with a single file and 400 lines of code. AI without a brain behind it is useless still.
t-g-l-h- | 11 hours ago
Also a software engineer here. The problem is that if senior leadership is not technical, they don't give a shit if it's a single file and 400 lines of code, they are okay with 55 files with 25k lines, as long as it works and it was done fast.
Technical debt? These people don't care. It's all about getting it done now.
Sea_Ninja_6863 | 11 hours ago
Exactly. Only engineers care about clean code
bloodontherisers | 11 hours ago
For now, eventually bad code leads to actual business problems, but that's the next CEO's problem
A_Novelty-Account | 11 hours ago
Yeah, but as long as it’s not a now problem, AI will continue to be used. Even the solution will eventually be dealt with by AI.
petit_cochon | 8 hours ago
Assuming AI can solve it.
SnugglyCoderGuy | 11 hours ago
Even then a lot don't. They just throw some ramshackle of a Rube Goldberg machine together that 'works' and get mad at you when you plaster their glorious work with more comments than there were lines of code because its just that bad.
One guy on my team actively yells at me, even called me disrespectful once, because I dared to clean up some code that wasn't directly related to the issue I was working. "IT WORKS! WHY ARE YOU TOUCHING IT?!", I dunno, because it's incomprehensible and I made it shorter, more streamlined, and about 100x more comprehensible to readers?
Dramatic_Ice_861 | 10 hours ago
Tbf cleaning up their code instead of telling them how they can clean it up is pretty rude.
SnugglyCoderGuy | 10 hours ago
I can see why it would be, and a lot of it depends on details that I'm just not going to take the time fill in here because too much, but its not like I'm coming up behind all the changes and rewriting them the way I think they should be.
I give loads of feedback during code review. I will give the version of how I would write something and explain why I would write it that way and why I think it should be preferred over what they wrote. If they really don't want to heed the suggestions and others also don't see a problem, I move on with my life.
But then some of this code is years old that none of wrote, or it is code that was copy-pasta from another teams, and I go in and modify it, I get the same response.
Rolandersec | 10 hours ago
Looks good, works, and works at scale are all different things and a lot of tech leaders lack the proper amount of knowledge and skepticism.
SnugglyCoderGuy | 10 hours ago
This was another engineer on my team lol
Rolandersec | 10 hours ago
Tell them their work was inelegant.
SnugglyCoderGuy | 10 hours ago
"That's just your personal preference! Many people have different prefernces! Unless there is some technical wrong, don't bother!"
angrytroll123 | 8 hours ago
I used to be that way but that guy...he's probably right. If it works and doesn't need optimizations, you should probably leave it alone since you most likely have other fish to fry. If you have free time though and testing is in place, go for it.
Jamesglancy | 11 hours ago
Well. Higher ups care once everything breaks and no one can fix it
corporaterebel | 7 hours ago
And then you get the budget "to do it right" if it is worth it.
If not, it gets trashed and wasn't worth it.
Fuddle | 11 hours ago
Do you want another Y2K? That's how you get a new Y2K!
corporaterebel | 7 hours ago
Y2K wasn't kludge...it was saving precious memory when it cost a fortune.
When memory got cheaper: then things were fixed.
I had a code base that I wrote and it died on Y2K. Yeah, it was unfortunate, but management didn't think it was worth to repair and off to the trash heap it went.
pkennedy | 11 hours ago
Beautiful code that doesn't work, or drains the budget before it's complete is useless. It was a main takeaway from a business class I had in engineer and it was how coding was marked, with heavy emphasis on it MUST work first and foremost, 60% of the grade and then anything beyond that was for how it was implemented. Clients really doesn't give a shit how elegant it was going to be, if it doesn't work or blew through their budget.
radiosimian | 9 hours ago
It doesn't need to be elegant, it needs to be maintainable.
Comfortable-Brick271 | 9 hours ago
And then you ship and then in 2 years every new feature that "works" takes double the time to implement and test because it was implemented on top of a heap of kludge
SnugglyCoderGuy | 10 hours ago
> Beautiful code
Beautiful code to me is code that I don't have to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out WTF is going on so that I can use it or change it. The harder it is to read the code, the harder it is to understand the code, the harder it is to use or change the code and the more likely it is to introduce defects.
It being able to 'do the thing', is the bare minimum. After than it needs to be able to be understood as easily as possible.
invisible_shrek | 10 hours ago
We don’t care about “clean” code, whatever you think it means. We care about code that is reliable, stable and doesn’t make erroneous assumptions. You are far more likely to introduce bugs and erroneous assumptions in 25k lines than in 400.
“Cleanliness”, beaty or elegance is sometimes a side effect of that and is subjective anyway.
dukeofgonzo | 9 hours ago
Engineers who know they might have to work on that code later care about clean code. I've had to restart work from scratch because my co-worker's quickly LLM-generated bloated code was not easy to work with when changes had to be made.
corporaterebel | 7 hours ago
This will be the norm in the future, if not now: disposable code.
cupofchupachups | 11 hours ago
> Technical debt? These people don't care. It's all about getting it done now.
To be fair this has always been the case. The pendulum swings from maximal "getting it done now" to "quality actually matters" every decade or so. Right now, it's getting it done, but after a decade of 25k line PRs like the one OP mentioned, and after a few major failures, they'll have to come back to quality.
funkdified | 6 hours ago
I think many assume future superior models will wipe the technical debt by cleaning up earlier generation slop code. Based on how things are advancing, that's a real possibility.
gonzo_gat0r | 11 hours ago
It’s not just software engineering. Leadership doesn’t have a technical understanding of many parts of the business. So it’s slop all the way down.
Level21DungeonMaster | 11 hours ago
Yep. I HAD a nickel for every line of spaghetti code I wrangled with and it paid for my house.
cryptotrader87 | 11 hours ago
In the open source community you can’t just drop massive garbage PR’s so senior leadership can hear why the community rejected the PR
warren_stupidity | 10 hours ago
There is a future career as a software slop engineer. People who still know how to read and write code will be in high demand.
sedersayspoop | 10 hours ago
I mean they care if one of the KPIs on your team is lines of code… guy creating 25k lines of code is clearly 60x more productive
vintergroena | 11 hours ago
This is going to cause so many problems long term and the management responsible will be left clueless scratching their heads what went wrong with no semblance of proper reflection whatsoever.
Maguffins | 11 hours ago
Technical debt is a feature not a bug!
gochai | 11 hours ago
That argument would completely fall apart in almost any other domain, imagine if you get an AI built building that looks the same as the ones built by experts, but internal structure is full of issues.
-Brodysseus | 10 hours ago
Shit, they might even get applause for having 55 files and 25k lines instead of 400
WellHung67 | 9 hours ago
That works until it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t the companies get ass fucked. So go ahead I say, let em crash and burn. More job for me
jmdybf | 11 hours ago
You just described the problem in most senior managers!
Mysteriouspaul | 11 hours ago
Dude, just get an AI to make another program in 1/100th the time it would take a team of people, and the AI will inevitably be better in 2 years than it is now and may even be superior
The AIs fucking blow most of the time right now and they're still seem as a viable alternative. I'd be learning another career if I did anything even remotely at risk this is only the beginning
MagicWishMonkey | 11 hours ago
The key is to become more of a technology generalist so that you can be the person responsible for implementing these systems once actual dev jobs start drying up (if that happens).
It's never a good idea to pigeonhole yourself, anyway. A lot of people who have spent their careers specializing in one specific thing are going to have a rough time if this stuff continues to get better and better.
WellHung67 | 9 hours ago
If ai becomes better than humans in general at writing code (like it can actually make long term maintainable code that runs at scale with no oversight) we’re all fucked anyway doesn’t matter what you do
kelpyb1 | 10 hours ago
As yet another software engineer, I appreciate every day that at least 4 layers of management above me all came up from technical roles. It simply makes life easier for everyone involved.
nochinzilch | 10 hours ago
And that’s why it takes forever to launch any app. “It’s slow? What if we add more lines of code optimization?”
ablx | 10 hours ago
I think the real problem is that AI is getting better at coding and resolving buggy code at an exponential rate. Humans correcting AI mistakes is a thing today, but will be much less of a thing in the future.
PercheMiPiaci | 10 hours ago
Leadership will see large numbers and be impressed by the metrics ... And then expect even larger monstrosities to track how great AI was. It will be someone else's problem that things are not efficient, buggy, impossible to debug and maintain ...
filmfan2 | 9 hours ago
bingo!
Not_FinancialAdvice | 9 hours ago
> Technical debt? These people don't care. It's all about getting it done now.
Incentive structure problem; clean, manageable codebases don't clearly lead to increased revenue, improved goal rates, or higher margins.
Upper-Raspberry4153 | 8 hours ago
They will care when they try to make any changes to the code base or add a new feature to the app and it breaks something else and AI can’t figure out where the problem is.
st_malachy | 8 hours ago
Or wait for the next model to come out to clean up the codebase.
kauthonk | 8 hours ago
ha, true that
papa-hare | 8 hours ago
Sigh, my leadership is pretty technical but they're still talking about not caring about tech debt...
thunder_blue | 8 hours ago
Leadership will care when 25k lines of code costs them more.
AttonJRand | 11 hours ago
That requires leadership to see things the way you do, when many of them are falling to psychosis.
pong-and-ping | 10 hours ago
Exactly. I'm well capable of proving I know how to use AI as a tool to for coding responsibly - god knows I've been doing it freelance for years now - but for a more traditional hiring process, a HR person will see "graduated 202X" on my CV and automatically reject it assuming I just used AI for my degree etc. Or worse, assuming AI can manage a full scale project better then myself.
It's the age old problem of HR hiring for things they don't run, but made 1000x times worse
TailorSubstantial863 | 11 hours ago
Anyone pushing a PR with 55 files with 25k lines of code is always going to be putting out bad code. Fire that person now. It's an ID-TEN-T error, not an AI error. This just allows that person to pump out tons more bad code.
bautofdi | 11 hours ago
Problem is, it’ll get better in leaps and bounds. I have a friend that works at Amazon, and some international launches takes a full team 6 months to complete from start to finish. He got put on a Skelton crew AI team as a test case and they did the same work in 5 weeks.
Speed over quality is what they expect from AI for now.
It’s also shitty because he now knows his job is somewhat safe as he’s on the spearhead team, but everyone else that were left behind on the legacy teams are now at risk.
BetaPositiveSCI | 11 hours ago
Why would it get better? We are at the point in the cycle where tech promises get scaled back and what exists now gets enshittified.
bautofdi | 11 hours ago
If you haven’t noticed any difference in quality and/or use cases from 4 years ago or just 1 year ago, I don’t know what to tell you.
deusasclepian | 10 hours ago
I'm not saying you're wrong. I've got no clue. But there's no guarantee it will continue improving at the same rate, or even keep improving at all.
There's a semi-famous story from the 90s where some researchers looked at the improvement in women's running times over the prior 20 years or so. Women didn't get to start competing in long-distance running events until the 60's or 70's, so for a while their record times were showing massive improvements year over year, as training and sports science improved. The researchers predicted that women would be outperforming men in the marathon by 1998. This didn't happen. It turned out that all the easy gains had already been made, so the improvements pretty much stalled out (at least relative to men).
I'm not saying that's necessarily what's going to happen with AI (or, at least, not going to happen immediately). But saying "AI has improved over the past 4 years so obviously it's going to get way better" is a bit like saying "my baby has doubled in height over the past 4 years so obviously he'll be nearly 7 feet tall by age 8"
BetaPositiveSCI | 11 hours ago
You could tell me how exactly they have inproved over things a computer was able to do before that
hobo_stew | 11 hours ago
LLMs have proven open mathematical conjectures. A year ago it still struggled with relatively simple computations.
BetaPositiveSCI | 9 hours ago
So they are almost caught up to where machine learning was years ago
bautofdi | 11 hours ago
Just go browse thirst traps on IG. 2 years ago it was not possible to run an imaginary OF pimp farm. Now you have millions of horny dudes believing these women are actually real and shelling out hundreds every week for AI generated porn while nerds in India rake in millions.
Go ahead and try that on a basic computer.
Olangotang | 11 hours ago
I have a 5070ti that can run ALL of the latest image models and Minimax H3 for videos, as well as Qwen for coding.
The unfortunate reality for all of you hidden accounts hyping a technology they don't understand, is that there is no moat and this won't be a billion dollar industry. Because there is no money to be made when your costs to stay ahead of open source increase exponentially.
bautofdi | 11 hours ago
What do you think the models you are running are?…
Olangotang | 11 hours ago
Is it possible for any of you to make a statement that doesn't leave a massive amount of ambiguity? Are what? The fuck does that mean?
deusasclepian | 10 hours ago
I think his point is that the model he's running on his local machine is free. He's not paying openAI or anthropic for the tokens. If his free model can do that on local hardware, how do these companies recoup their billions / trillions of dollars in investments?
No moat.
TadhgOBriain | 11 hours ago
The corporations have financial incentive to increase its ability so they can replace human workers
BetaPositiveSCI | 11 hours ago
Sure, but they are the customers. The ai companies are past that point and looking to pass on the bag to the customers
LastNightOsiris | 11 hours ago
It's clear that it will get better at some things - like it seems to be pretty good at enhancing productivity at programming and software development tasks. Will it ever be good enough to fully take humans out of the loop? That remains to be seen. But very likely that we will be able to do more with smaller teams in this area.
Will it get good enough for large-scale replacement of human labor across the board, or at least at a broad array of different jobs? That's unclear at this point. I think it can be helpful for office work outside of the software/IT space, but so far not in a game changing way. Like it could make me 10% more productive after accounting for the amount of time I have to spend training and refining. Maybe with some improvements it gets to 25% or even 50%. That's enough to make a real difference in productivity, but not nearly enough to start cutting a lot of headcount.
And that doesn't even begin to consider the cost. I don't think we have a good sense yet of where AI costs will eventually stabilize relative to the cost of paying people to do the same work.
ContextLengthMatters | 10 hours ago
We are in a very weird time right now where it's ok to make huge mistakes because everyone is, but that's not always going to be the case.
Fail fast has its limits and we are continuously pushing at it because we are in a runaway economy where nothing actually matters.
It's not just the legacy team at risk, we are all at risk from the fallout and the switch when we stabilize into the new paradigm, whatever that may be. We haven't figured that out yet.
Since we are no longer recommending kids become software engineers, I feel pretty good myself. I'll probably make some good money retired as a contractor when the time comes.
Pretend_Safety | 12 hours ago
Shhhhh, no one wants to hear the truth! /s
In reality: this needs to be said more often
RoliePolieOlie__ | 12 hours ago
Yup. AI is a tool. Corporations know this
missinlnk | 12 hours ago
Well the rank and file do. The more removed from doing the day to day work an executive is, the less they seem to understand this. At least for now.
Egad86 | 11 hours ago
You only learn that in Principles of Management courses though!
Blackboard_Monitor | 11 hours ago
Spell check is also one.
RoliePolieOlie__ | 11 hours ago
Appreciate it
Samanthacino | 11 hours ago
All of the layoffs beg to differ
Vilnius_Nastavnik | 11 hours ago
They know what they’re doing and they know AI’s limitations. It’s bad faith. They’re always looking for a reason to do layoffs and AI handed them the biggest, sexiest excuse they’ve ever had
IHaveNeverEatenACat | 11 hours ago
I’m going to call bs on those numbers.
MimiVault | 10 hours ago
99.999999% of reddit ai denial SWEs are either larper bots or theyre actually clueless to whats happening
Marrk | 11 hours ago
Extremely curious about the feature or fix that this was about.
movzx | 10 hours ago
It's very easy for the tools to go down a path because of certain instructions being interpreted different ways.
Just as a general example, "Add caching to the called API" vs "Add caching to the new API call". One of those may trigger a change to the entire codebase (and beyond if your AI tools have access to Confluence or other systems) while the other may be limited to a specific function.
It's also been my experience that these tools like to over test, make "do nothing" tests (where they are testing fully mocked systems), and struggle with optimizing tests. ex: 15 test that do the same thing, but with different data vs 1 test that has a data provider.
If you don't know (or don't care) what you are doing, you won't know something is wrong.
AgileDrag1469 | 11 hours ago
AI without context is also limiting if not error prone if not dangerous. Had someone from work just ask me to use AI for something AI won’t have all the context for and will lead developers down a rabbit hole of nonsense on the daily.
Anomelly93 | 10 hours ago
Y'know what huge problem I keep having? 😭
The LLM will be like ... We're using this library and we're going to pull data from this url blah blah blah blah
But then if the URL is broken then we go in and correct the issue, and the AI will sit there and hard code synthetic data instead of pulling the actual data when it can't 😭 and then lie to me and say that it's the real data stream lmao
😔 Eugh hahahah
MyFeetLookLikeHands | 11 hours ago
also software engineer: just because one junior did something silly with AI doesn’t mean our jobs aren’t significantly at risk
RivalSlays | 11 hours ago
The only jobs at risk are the ones of engineers whose only value is outputting code.
MyFeetLookLikeHands | 11 hours ago
okay???…
evangelism2 | 10 hours ago
they hated him because he told the truth, if your only value is you are really good at typing in an IDE, you are cooked
Gloomy_Setting5936 | 12 hours ago
Thank you for being a rational person.
ares7 | 11 hours ago
Yea but what about the brain that uses it to eliminate the jobs for others?
Rolandersec | 10 hours ago
Academics has always been hit or miss with software engineering. Some of the best sw engineers I’ve known were welders or truck drivers before. I’ve been disappointed in PHD holders more often than not. That’s because all they know is school and in the real world there is actual reality, not a project for a class.
Not_FinancialAdvice | 9 hours ago
> I’ve been disappointed in PHD holders more often than not. That’s because all they know is school and in the real world there is actual reality, not a project for a class.
I'd argue that a good portion of the time, it's due to a role mismatch. Sometimes, you need someone to figure out how to flesh out a wholly-new thing for a business need; find out what the right questions to even ask are, and build out something that addresses at least some of them. That's a job that someone with a research background is likely going to be good at. Other times, you just need to implement a feature that marketing or sales demands; your competiors' product has it, you need it too. The needs are well-defined, it just needs done. You need a "line cook" developer to bang out a good, solid codebase. Research people can do this, but they aren't necessarily going to be great at it.
Miller4103 | 10 hours ago
Its because they get paid in tokens.
Way more for 55+ files and 25k lines than for 400 lines.
I mess around with ai local models and its mostly python. Iv notice alot of code that doesnt need to exist at all. For a hobby, I have fun.
Anomelly93 | 10 hours ago
fr, absolutely useless without a hand to guide it
I'll tell you what though 🥺 I was someone who studied emergent complexity and systems and all that, never been a good programmer at all
But since the robot understands the systems allegories and metaphors, it has made me into a decent engineer 🥹
The people who don't know how to plan for contingencies a through z, don't understand multi order causation and technical debt etc... they'll always produce bugs with vibe coding
f93nf02ndoqjf392bfiw | 10 hours ago
yeah but you could just put that code in an AI and say, make this no more than x lines of code, and it'll do that and it'll do it so much faster than any human ever could.
Minimum_Principle_63 | 9 hours ago
Yup, after looking at the solution it presented I suggested just changing one line at startup. The AI was like, oh you are right that would be less changes and still follow the architectural standards.
That being said I switched to Opus and it told me I wouldn't have to do anything if the rest of the code followed the standards to begin with 😅... I had to save that plan as tech debt 😭
MazzleMaze | 9 hours ago
I mean clearly not useless... They created something that worked, albeit inefficiently. Thats good enough to launch an MVP and test a product though.
That allows you to see if a product is actually worth launching and buying a dev to fix up the work.
bizzygreenthumb | 9 hours ago
How is this possible? I’m a software engineer too. What was the scope of the task? And how did they manage to go off on such a quest without anyone checking in on their progress?
cryptotrader87 | 8 hours ago
Easy. The person didn’t know whether or not the LLM was hallucinating or not. I knew the code base from years and years of reading it. They went and used a hallucinated design/assumption.
Ruminant | 11 hours ago
Attention-grabbing headline... but is it true? Was it actually a waste for so many of them, or are they just exaggerating the upside of the counter-factual?
About two-thirds of millennial college graduates took out student loans. The average loan amount among those borrowers was around $30,000; the median was around $27,000.
And these are just for the millennial graduates who borrowed at all. They don't include the one-third of graduates who did not borrow. If you include those who borrowed $0, average debt at graduation was approximately $20,000 and the median probably somewhere around $15,000 to $18,000.
So the debt-at-graduation numbers for millennials are likely something like below
|Group|Median|Average| |:-|:-|:-| |Millennials graduating with bachelor's degrees|$15,000 to $18,000|$20,000| |Borrower millennials graduating with bachelor's degrees|$27,000|$30,000|
And what earnings outcomes did the typical millennial graduate get with their bachelor's degree?
For full-time workers aged 25 to 34, annual earnings in 2024 were
|Highest educational attainment|Median|Average|% earning $100k or more| |:-|:-|:-|:-| |High school diploma or GED|$46,380|$55,000|7%| |Bachelor's degree|$74,480|$92,740|30%|
and for full-time workers aged 35 to 44
|Highest educational attainment|Median|Average|% earning $100k or more| |:-|:-|:-|:-| |High school diploma or GED|$50,310|$61,910|13%| |Bachelor's degree|$85,290|$114,000|40%|
Source: PINC-03. Educational Attainment-People 18 Years Old and Over, by Total Money Earnings, Work Experience, Age, Race, Hispanic Origin, and Sex
These are all estimates for employed adults, so it's also meaningful that workers with college degrees tend to have materially lower unemployment rates than those with just a high school diploma.
asskicker1762 | 9 hours ago
Actually, I believe degree holders recently reported greater unemployment than non degree holders for the first time.
Ruminant | 8 hours ago
They do not. I believe you are thinking about this data from the New York Fed, which shows that the unemployment rate among recent college graduates is now higher than the unemployment rate across all workers.
The emphasis on "recent college graduates" and "all workers" is important. Two facts about unemployment are
The New York Fed defines "recent college graduates" as
>recent college graduates are those aged 22 to 27 with a bachelor's degree or higher
This group is both younger and more educated than the average worker. Historically, the employment "boost" from their education has been larger than the "penalty" from their age, which is why their unemployment rate has been lower. However, the demographics of the "average worker" has been changing in two important ways
In other words, the educational gap between "recent college graduates" and "all workers" has been decreasing while the age gap has been increasing. At some level, it almost seems inevitable that the two unemployment rates should cross.
But crucially, you cannot choose your age. You can choose your level of education. And among people of similar ages, those with college degrees have lower unemployment rates than those without. Just take a look at the charts below that show the unemployment rates of high school graduates versus bachelor's degree holders for
asskicker1762 | 7 hours ago
Very nice! Thank you sir! Point still generally stands.
Trollslayer0104 | 8 hours ago
Source?
OkMarketing6612 | 8 hours ago
Close. You may have seen unemployment for recent grads that is higher than non-degree holders overall (all ages) or the overall labor market, but if you control the age group, it's lower for those with a degree than without.
CoastieKid | 12 hours ago
The purpose of higher education is to develop critical thinking skills and understanding of complex subjects. Degrees becoming vocational was the wrong move IMO
NotaValgrinder | 11 hours ago
Issue is higher education coming with an insane price tag. When you sink people into debt then they're going to start gauging how fast they can pay it off and what degree can do it.
Swoly_Deadlift | 10 hours ago
The insane price tag is because we made it so the loans federally backed. Banks see student loans as guaranteed money so they approve anything, and schools see that banks will approve anything so they charge insane amounts of money.
Integrated_Magazine | 7 hours ago
You are totally right, but the thought was that we have to federally back loans to make sure people can get the degrees needed for us to function as a society. We need engineers, accountants, historians, statisticians, teachers, nurses, etc. If we didn't have federally backed student loans, only those already with money would be able to get those degrees, which would likely lead to a shortage in the workforce.
The real problem is that there are no more free and low-cost options for higher education like what was available before the 70s. (Thanks again, Reagan.)
Bogdanovist_Rebel | 11 hours ago
It becomes the ultimate opportunity cost. I never went. Saved the $100k, made more than my peers for over a decade. Then because I worked a practical job with lots of overlapping skills, got moved into management right as they were coming out of their junior roles.
We make roughly the same now, but I’m debt free and ahead on retirement savings and very secure in my employment. I started collecting certificates a few years back from local colleges and it keeps me moving forwards.
greysnowcone | 10 hours ago
Congrats, but your anecdote doesn’t change the fact that college graduates earn more than a million dollars more than non college graduates over the course of their careers.
It sounds like you would have been successful regardless. But many people struggle to justify their worth without a degree.
followyourvalues | 10 hours ago
I struggle to justify with the degrees. 🫠
Zaximeows | 9 hours ago
How much of that is because of the paper they print your diploma on? Yeah, presumably it's because networking in university for 4+ years is how to turbo start a career.
RYNNYMAYNE | 9 hours ago
I think this is going to change as people like op and myself move up into management who try out degrees and degree holders have roughly similar salaries later on. I’m 25 and dropped out of engineering school to work, after getting my natural gas license 3+ years ago I have never been unemployed not have I made less than my peers who graduated (a lot of the guys who went the software path have been unemployed for 2+ years).
It’s hard to argue this when most of the dropouts I know are preparing to buy property around my age whilst my educated compatriots are still looking for entry level employment. I agree with you they might make more in the future but the opportunity cost of a degree is astronomically high and isn’t conducive to success imo
Bogdanovist_Rebel | 10 hours ago
What’s that million worth though? The best part of my job is a guaranteed 40 hour week. Lots of the grads I know are doing 60 per week. I could easily do OT and make even more, but I don’t really give a fuck about money. It doesn’t bring happiness past a certain point.
Also how many opportunities are lost because of student loan debt? I have remarkable levels of freedom. If I want to move and take a lower salary for better living conditions I can.
The obsession on earnings is a huge part of the problem. People who are obsessed with accruing wealth can’t comprehend that there are people who just don’t care.
sevseg_decoder | 10 hours ago
“Your peers” all earn the same salary, paid the same tuition etc. and are sharing these numbers with you? You sure that isn’t some sort of confirmation bias?
MoonBatsRule | 10 hours ago
How much do you think a college education should cost?
Keep in mind that a public high school education (managed and paid for by local taxpayers) is around $20k, and a private high school education (no public subsidies) is around $25-50k.
Also keep in mind that independent living expenses (food & lodging) for a young adult are around $16k/year.
NotaValgrinder | 9 hours ago
I am not sure, but I can say that the financial model for high schools isn't the same as colleges. For example, charging international and OOS students more tuition, which is totally fair to do, having a much larger professor-to-student ratio which are good in terms of money. However, universities have more things that can sink their money, like graduate students. The US is general has had many places with nice competitive PhD stipends which countries like Canada can't really match, which is something we can lose out on if we decrease the costs.
Regardless, if an education costs someone, it's only natural that there's some "vocational" part of it, which is my main point. You can't expect "college" and "career" to be separated when it costs money to attend college.
MoonBatsRule | 7 hours ago
I'm just trying to make the point that people say that college is expensive (which it is) with an implication that it is needlessly expensive.
If high school instruction, from public to private, is in the $20-$50k range, and the cost of living/eating somewhere independently is $16k, then it is nonsense to think that college priced at only a few thousand dollars per year is achievable without some kind of subsidy. I would say that non-commuter college probably costs $35k/year to provide.
Sticker price is ridiculously expensive, but that is what allows individualized pricing - charging wealthier and international parents more money so that they can charge others less money. Most people shouldn't be complaining about that because they most likely are being subsidized, and are not subsidizing others.
BizarreReverend76 | 11 hours ago
Yeah it will be interesting to see what happens when colleges are only worth their education itself again. Education standards may actually improve if there are only people there that want to learn for its own sake, nor will colleges be able to able to charge their current rates without being able to pretend it is "worth it" monetarily.
Capraos | 9 hours ago
If I were going to college purely for the joy of learning, I wouldn't mind the fluff classes they tack on to the degree program. But because it is a financial barrier to myself and better employment, I find it really hard to buy their justification for making me take Mythology, Philosophy, Anthropology, etcetera when my degree has nothing to do with those things. I'm past all the fluff classes now but a third of my overall college requirements are made up of of bullshit fluff to drive the price of a degree up.
Edit: I'm a STEM major so I did consider actual returns on my education. I'm in my junior year now.
AZMadmax | 11 hours ago
Yes 100%. A lot of my college professors said exactly this. A liberal education means an open education, where you expand your mind on various topics. Student loan program has ruined/severely tainted the experience and purpose of college
[OP] laxnut90 | 11 hours ago
When students are required to take on home mortgage levels of debt for the degree, they need to consider return on investment in addition to everything else.
It is irresponsible not to treat college like an investment when you are spending so much time and money to pursue it.
BangBangMeatMachine | 11 hours ago
None of that means that AI has made a degree obsolete. I have literally never worked in the field of my degree, but it absolutely informed how I solve problems and think about complex issues. It gave me a set of tools for thinking about the world that apply to many areas well outside my degree.
AI's utility is heavily informed by the person using it, and their ability to see where its flaws are, to know when its treading into shaky ground, to understand which pieces of what it tells you need to be fact-checked. Without the ballast of methodical reasoning, AI will take you wherever you let it, even if that's way off course.
Saying AI has made degrees obsolete tells me that all your time in college ever got you was accumulating facts without learning how to solve problems, in which case I'd say your degree was always rather useless.
br_k_nt_eth | 11 hours ago
Ultimately, it’s still the best way to increase your overall lifetime earnings, and those particular skills are vital not just in jobs but also in everyday life. People need to sign contracts, read legal/government docs, manage their finances, etc.
I side-eye anyone who wants to dissuade people from improving themselves and their prospects. It’s funny how much this anti-higher ed shit benefits a very small handful of very rich people looking to undermine critical thinking skills. You ever paused to question that critically or nah?
[OP] laxnut90 | 8 hours ago
Agreed.
But an investment depends on the cost as much as the earnings.
If the degree gives you an extra $10k of earnings per year, but you are paying $1k a month in interest on the loans it was probably not a good investment.
You also need to consider the 4+ years of opportunity costs to get the degree when you could've otherwise entered the workforce earlier.
cballowe | 11 hours ago
They're not unless their parents are wealthy or at least pretty well off or are chasing a degree for the piece of paper and not caring about the institution. All of the best schools have pretty solid need based aid that brings the costs way down. The challenge on those isn't paying for it, it's getting in.
The only thing going up on many schools is the sticker price, not what people actually pay.
Ruminant | 11 hours ago
The average total amount borrowed by 2023-24 bachelor’s degree recipients who took out loans to pay for college was $29,560. And that average does not even include the roughly 1/3 of graduates who borrowed $0.
https://research.collegeboard.org/trends/student-aid/highlights
What kind of homes are you seeing that only cost $30,000?
Lie-Straight | 11 hours ago
The problem is the cost, not the revenue associated. Digital books and YouTube lectures cost nothing, yet college costs $50k/year ?
Wellontheotherhand1 | 11 hours ago
Most people can't learn to think critically, let alone learn in-depth knowledge about a wide variety of topics, simply by watching youtube lectures and reading books they get for free. There's a lot more to education than that yaknow
Lie-Straight | 11 hours ago
I don’t disagree, but if the rest of the world can do it for <$5000 per year, if we in the US used to do it for the equivalent of <$5000 per year, there’s no reason it should be costing 10x that
hippydipster | 10 hours ago
It's irresponsible for society to force that calculation on its individual people wrt to education.
If society treated it as an investment, we wouldn't be having this problem.
[OP] laxnut90 | 8 hours ago
Irresponsible or not, society has already forced that calculation onto the individual.
If you are not making that calculation, you could end up with a lifetime's worth of non-dischargable debt.
hippydipster | 7 hours ago
Yes, but we do have the option of changing our conversation toward better topics, not just be reactive. Society has made decisions, and will continue making decisions, and we have some ability ro influence its direction.
CoolLordL21 | 8 hours ago
You do not need college for this.
nowhereman86 | 11 hours ago
Nah man it was never about helping people think. Universities turned higher education into a commodity and put an entire generation into crippling debt. That was the wrong move.
t_t_today_jr | 11 hours ago
Critical thinking has left the country (US)
Wedgiebro | 11 hours ago
That sinply isnt worth the price tag associated with it
Any_Sale2030 | 11 hours ago
Says someone who probably came from a rich family who paid his way. My parents were poor. So I HAD to get a degree that paid well. See the difference?
CoastieKid | 11 hours ago
Nope. My mother didn't finish high school and my father worked in automotive manufacturing after completing a few years in the Air Force.
I ended up having several full rides to civilian colleges. Went to one of the service academies and studied electrical engineering & computer science. Finished my time out there and later got an MBA part time with my GI Bill.
I knew my father wouldn't pay for me to gain a university education so worked in high school to earn scholarships.
It's what I see nowadays in my field of technology. People aren't actively interested in it, only for the money.
Occupation is important and so is vocation. I've met very skilled IT professionals who never went to college yet are knowledgable in their craft.
I love higher education and constant learning for the record. People who utilize generative AI for educational pursuits are shortchanging themselves.
TheNatural14063 | 8 hours ago
Unfortunately society pushes people into fields they don't like, leading to multitudes of issues, including apathetic workers that impact quality, because society fails to provide a strong enough social safety net. Allow people alternative means to make a living instead of selling themselves out to jobs they hate and we dont have these issues.
CoastieKid | 5 hours ago
The goal should always be to align occupations to our aptitudes. Johnson O’Connor was a research psychologist who worked at General Electric and noticed some employees had greater facility for tasks than others
His foundation tests aptitudes. If I ever had children I would send them there when they are freshman in high school. I did testing when I was active duty and it was quite informative
in4life | 11 hours ago
How far back do you have to look when higher education was teaching people HOW to think and not WHAT to think?
This, to me, is the entire breakdown in academics and also shines light on why STEM degrees are still so valuable. The sciences are mostly objective, so teaching someone WHAT to think is still useful. Teaching WHAT to think on subjective matters has mixed results, but ultimately best grooms someone to also become a professor or other academic vs. tackling the professional world.
LofiJunky | 12 hours ago
No it wasn't? The degrees aren't the problem. "AI" and the jakal like mentality of moderm business is. Degrees becoming vocational was absolutely the right move as it incentivises people to become more educated which is highly valueable to business.
Society is better off because it means more (educated) people working. Educated workers make better business and desicions and typically are able to invest in the market.
CoastieKid | 11 hours ago
Education and vocation are two separate things
hippydipster | 10 hours ago
> which is highly valueable to business.
Making sure business gets what it wants & needs vs making sure human beings get what they want and need.
I don't like your priorities.
LofiJunky | 10 hours ago
I'm not saying its right or what I prefer, but it's the world we live in
hippydipster | 10 hours ago
I sort of don't think that's true for kids currently trying to decide what to do about their future. I think if you choose your education path based on the idea of predicting what will get you a job in the future, you'll probably be wrong, and then that path will end up having no value, either to you or to any business.
LofiJunky | 9 hours ago
Got it so people who want to be doctors, engineers or lawyers shouldn't persue college.
hippydipster | 9 hours ago
Certainly not software engineering. Probably not most kinds either, and being a lawyer is probably at a good deal of risk too. Doctor is much more difficult to predict, but that's basically my point. If you choose to do those things, do so because it is truly what you want to learn, vs because you think it'll pay back over a career.
LofiJunky | 9 hours ago
Right so my original point sticks. AI and greed is the problem, not education.
hippydipster | 7 hours ago
You objected to education that valued critical thinking and understanding complex topics, and you prefer vocational because it gets jiobs. I'm saying, that time in our history is likely to end, and vocational training might leave you with no job, and no education that enriched you as a human being.
And your reply is to say its this change in history that's the problem. Maybe so, but you may as well complain that the sun rises too early.
Double-Mine981 | 10 hours ago
Getting drunk and getting turned down by many women at shitty college bars turned me into the salesman I am today. Without those rejections, I would not have the ability to bounce off the mat for another sales call
shwaynebrady | 10 hours ago
Generally speaking, I agree with your first take, that universities should be giving you and focusing on the tools and critical thinking mindset to be a lifelong learner and intellectual. Something akin to how Oxford operates.
However, I strongly disagree with the need for vocational degrees. There absolutely needs to be a certain level of “foundational” knowledge and skills for a lot of professions.
The system needs to find an appropriate balance between the two, which frankly speaking, the majority or big name universities already do. The disconnect largely comes from students who have absolutely no desire or incentive to engage in these aspects and universities that are more focused on the the financials than anything else.
But
Sen_ElizabethWarren | 12 hours ago
I’m sure completely crushing the hopes of the majority of young people won’t have negative economic or social implications at all. Doesn’t Gen Z understand their investment portfolios are increasing in value? Doesn’t Gen Z understand our economy is driven by greed, short term thinking, and accounting tricks? Why do they care so much about jobs? God it’s so annoying. All they do is complain!
toastbot | 12 hours ago
Have they even tried walking into a data center, asking for the hiring manager and giving them a copy of their resumé?
J_NonServiam | 11 hours ago
You forgot the firm handshake! Can't forget that part!
EnamelKant | 11 hours ago
Doubt it. Most of them are too lazy to ask their parents for a loan of a couple of million bucks.
CodeX57 | 10 hours ago
If they just got off their asses, walked down to the nearest estate agent, bought a house with cash, they could save a fortune on rent and have an appreciating asset. But no, they just want to stay at home, be on their phones, and complain.
kittenTakeover | 11 hours ago
There has been conservative anti-intellectual astroturfing and propaganda for a while now. Authoritarian conservative oligarchs want you to think that education, academia, and expertise are not just pointless but your enemy.
Economy_Zombie_3026 | 10 hours ago
This is interesting. My step-father the actual epitome of the conservative bootstraps rhetoric. He was an addict who turned his life around and made an incredible life for himself and the family by being the top of his field in his particular trade. ANYWAY, he has started using those talking points recently: "We need tradesmen not IT. IT is dead. The only real jobs now are trade jobs." Now, free from the fact that I'm a software dev, I don't understand why it matters to him if IT dies? I always read the subtext as "fuck the industries that look down on blue collar work."
But from what you say I can see the propaganda as being more socially destructive than just giving blue collar workers their comeuppance. It's the structures and institutions that provided the ability for IT and its ilk to exist that are the real enemies.
kittenTakeover | 10 hours ago
Yeah, it serves a dual role for the conservative authoritarian oligarchs driving this type of politics. The first is that it drives a wedge through the middle of society. It makes educated people a scapegoat for less educated people and pits them against one another. This allows these oligarchs to carve off a large section of society for votes. It's classic divide and conquer tactics. The second thing it does is disconnect many people from education and experts. This makes them more vulnerable to disinformation and propaganda, which are a very valuable tool for the conservative authoritarian oligarchs.
Optimalfucksgiven | 12 hours ago
Thank you Senator
AntonioH02 | 9 hours ago
How am I going to invest if I literally owe money… (I work full time )
Naeveo | 11 hours ago
This is all downstream of 2008.
The intellectual value of a degree was decimated the moment it cost tens of thousands to attend school, only to be met with a hyper-literal job market that underpays and refuses to understand the concept of transferable skills. The monetary value simply outweighs the educational value.
choicemeats | 8 hours ago
i never got to experience a world where an entry-level job didn't require 3-4 years of experience lol
hearing about mid-career people doing entry level work for the paycheck was brutal
MazzleMaze | 9 hours ago
Kind of, you can still go to community college for like 2k a semester.
The_Fiddle_Steward | 11 hours ago
My math degree opened a lot of doors when I graduated in 2011 (millennial). I spent 2 years at Community College and went in-state while staying with my parents. I know I'm very privileged to be able to do that.
Now that I'm a senior engineer, I don't know what it would be like looking for an entry level job in this economy. Wish our government would give a shit about the working class because businesses aren't going to take care of their employees unless they're forced to.
CrissBliss | 10 hours ago
Entry level doesn’t exist anymore
hearmeout29 | 12 hours ago
This just means focusing on strengthening soft skills is all the more important now. Gen Z in my workplace struggle heavily with this. We had a colleague in a meeting sit and stare while our manager asked a direct question. It's like he was loading or something. He isn't the only one either.
interwebzdotnet | 11 hours ago
I made another comment in this thread... basically the reading comprehension and ability to critically think have been in serious decline for at least a decade,well before AI as we know it today.
The results are showing up now in the workplace and AI is magnifying it.
hearmeout29 | 11 hours ago
What makes matters worse is that we work in sales. Half of the new hires can't even look clients in the face when discussing the deal or make eye contact with them. I honestly don't understand how they were hired.
interwebzdotnet | 11 hours ago
Yep. Not a surprise, I know a lot about sales,and boy no eye contact is terrible.
dreamcicle11 | 11 hours ago
Unfortunately COVID really did a number on the social skills and just general professional readiness on a segment of Gen Z. I have noticed this in scholarship interviews. It has since gotten better. But those that graduated high school between say 2022-2024 or so really seemed to struggle.
Sketch0z | 11 hours ago
And the autistics who are exceptional at their speciality but will never have the right "soft skills" can just go fuck themselves I suppose?
hearmeout29 | 11 hours ago
You play with the hand you were dealt. My brother has autism so he avoided jobs where he has to socialize. He is great with his hands so he fixes cars as a mobile mechanic.
NicodemusV | 11 hours ago
AI just exposed the people who actually pay attention in class versus those who just coast by in college. All it really did was show the difference between students who actually chose their degree with some intention and students who just attend college hoping it’ll luck them out into a job. That’s never what college was for or how the system was intended to be used. Having applicable skills and practical knowledge is what got people jobs, not a paper credential saying this is what you “learned.”
nefrina | 10 hours ago
many/most were pressured to attend out of fear of being destitute or being forced into manual labor jobs (the horror of working with your hands!). the degree marketing itself as some cheat-code for a comfortable upper middleclass life has been a lie for some decades now. the reality is many/most do-nothing professional labor jobs require on the job training anyway. the degree is just artificial gatekeeping some employers still use because it proves you played the game for 4 years and can follow basic instruction.
house343 | 9 hours ago
100% this. I did my engineering degree from 2007-2011 and a concerning amount of my classmates did shit work and just wanted to do well enough to graduate for the piece of paper so they could get a well paying job. I can count on one hand, and still name names, the people in my degree/program whose work I actually respected. One kid was even thrown out for blatantly cheating/copying another classmate's assignments; he's still been working in engineering roles since 2011.
00OOO0OO000OO00OO000 | 9 hours ago
Remember kids: the people that are pushing "education is pointless" all have higher education, as do their kids.
They want to go back to only the rich being educated.
Be a rebel! Read a book. Learn some history. Get a skill.
GrumpyTom | 11 hours ago
Elder millennial here. My undergrad experience lead me directly to the career I am in now, and more than paid for itself. Having said that, I did a masters degree some years later and that has not made any difference whatsoever. I did it for my own satisfaction, but looking back, I could have gone without.
My own two cents: an associates or bachelors degree from a community college or state school is enough for many professional careers. Unless your chosen field requires it, however, graduate degrees are not nearly as valuable as they once were.
I’m also not convinced expensive degrees from “flagship” state schools and Ivy League institutions are worth it.
Edit: good comments below offering different perspectives!
Responsible-Meringue | 10 hours ago
Unfortunately my career requires graduate and post-doc training to get an entry level position. Doesn't really pay, cause earning ceiling is about the same as that ditzy cheerleader who used charisma to climb the ladder to a figurehead HR position. Except she got a 10 year headstart
squish042 | 11 hours ago
I wouldn’t have my current job without my masters and making the amount of money I make today. I’m sure it depends on the degree, the person, and the industry.
Dayngerman | 11 hours ago
100% anything leadership at my hospital requires a Masters degree.
15 years front line experience and 3 years in community health management?
Not even an interview.
When 200+ candidates apply for a single role, the credentials are the first thing they filter by, which is how you end up with people who’ve gone high school->undergrad->masters in positions of leadership with zero fucking clue on how to actually engage with people and understand why programs work and why other programs don’t.
duckbonez | 9 hours ago
The flagship and ivy/private school degrees are only worth it if you network with the highly affluent people in those programs. On linkedin you don’t have to go far to see a 20-something in a prestigious role that went to a no-name private college that charges $60k+ yearly tuition. They usually go for the connections.
greysnowcone | 10 hours ago
I got a professional doctorate and graduated making 6 figures straight out of college. They only hire people with doctorate degrees for my role.
Zygoatee | 12 hours ago
I graduated in 2007 from a top 50 liberal arts college, and their tuition was like 45k a year back then. I got a degree in Psych, and my first job was making 30k at an electrical distributor, then I was a personal trainer (prob made 10k, worst economic time of my life), and then worked in retail (32k). Then I got fired for some BS, and my step dad happened upon a one year business masters from a well regarded school down south. Maybe 40k for the year (and they gave me a 15k scholarship) and my job out of it was 65k, and soon I was making 6 figs
All that to say that yes, undergrad is too damn expensive, has almost no bearing on what you do after, and they prob should charge you less for majors that don't have a clear job path, or where you need to go to grad school to make any money
Oh, and they hound you for more money the rest of your life. It would be like buying a Porshe 911,, not being able to afford the gas, and then the dealership sending you emails monthly for the rest of your life asking if you want to donate to Porshe
Any_Sale2030 | 11 hours ago
A bachelor degree in psych? Psychologists need a doctor degree to practice. Sort of common knowledge I thought. So yes your degree was worthless. But lots of bachelor degrees make good money. Engineering. Finance. Nursing. Etc. It was your choice and maybe really bad advice from someone that caused your issues.
welshwelsh | 11 hours ago
A psych bachelors isn't worthless, it just can't be used to practice psychology.
Properly marketed, it can be applied to a variety of business roles. Many middle managers and HR specialists have psych degrees.
twenty_three_three | 11 hours ago
Psych is great for marketing, HR, Sales...
squish042 | 11 hours ago
If you went to a top 50 LA college, then you went to a private college and of course that’s going to be insanely expensive. I’m not sure why you’d go to a private college and not have a plan for your psych degree if that’s the career you wanted.
house343 | 9 hours ago
45k a year in 2007? For a liberal arts school? There are 1000 better choices.
failedaspotcheck | 11 hours ago
Wow it's almost like we should publicly fund higher education like college and trade schools, similar to what every other developed country on the planet does.
I don't know why we just accept this current setup as a given. College was not funded by students taking out massive loans for most of our modern history. During that golden age that the "make us great again" types like to call back to, the vast majority of higher education was funded by the states and federal government.
Lost-B4-Translation | 11 hours ago
I agree that in some cases the ROI isn’t there. It also depends on where you go and what major you pick. Going to Arizona State to get a degree in Content Creation, probably can save a few bucks there. If your school has a 90% acceptance rate followed by a 40% graduation rate, maybe some of it is watered down.
The fact that people don’t find any benefit in education should scare everyone. I attended well know universities and used a lot of what I learned early on at my actual job. A lot can be taught on the job, but we shouldn’t overlook the value of a well rounded education.
What should scare us even more is the med student using AI to pass the test. AI is accelerating the dumbing down of America 🇺🇸.
NxOKAG03 | 9 hours ago
I don’t think ai made people’s education "obsolete" I think it’s just a dogshit job market right now that makes graduates feel like they have absolutely no opportunities despite the effort they put in.
BlitheSpritely | 9 hours ago
This is it ☝️
Ambitious_Egg9713 | 11 hours ago
The California State University is considering offering 3 year bachelors degrees. I think this is smart. A college education is really about two key things: 1) Critical Thinking Skills applied across a diverse range of subject matter, and 2) Specialized skill that is marketable for job placement.
Streamlining those things and not making every single student take 2 years of GE courses just to get a degree is a smart move. Today's students need to graduate faster, be focused on what is critical to their career, and take on less debt.
someonehasmygamertag | 12 hours ago
AI only made your degree obsolete if you think about literally what you did. Not the problem solving, argument making and social skills that are the real benefit to a degree.
elektrik_noise | 11 hours ago
I feel terrible for people that graduated and will graduate school without getting a holistic education. I graduated during the Great Recession, so I was severely delayed in getting a job related to my majors (I doubled). But while one major was slow going, my other major, which was a foreign language degree, awarded me the ability to keep working and honing my language skills through translation work. Albeit for shit pay. And gave me a leg up to level out of what I was doing at the time to pivot into a much more lucrative career.
I remember having honest debates and discussions in many classes before everyone was recording you on their phones. Super Socratic Method, which may by and large have fallen to the wayside. Really honing critical thinking skills and being able to interpret and evolve positions/perspectives on things without being dragged on the internet for not "getting it" from the jump. Being able to tackle humanity credit courses without feeling like they were all a tragic waste of time. And being able to take end of degree courses with professors who were active academics in their fields whose minds you could pick and have honest discussions with.
Just sad all around. But I will say, it is becoming more challenging being a nuanced thinker in the past 15 or so years. Being curious can be weaponized. Perhaps one day folks can pursue post-secondary education again and walk away with more benefits than just landing a job. Though, "landing a job" is a great reward still in and of itself.
Naeveo | 11 hours ago
Jobs do not care if you graduated from an Ivy League, if your degree is not exactly related to the role they cannot comprehend the idea of transferable skills or critical thinking. That alone has made degrees worthless.
Freaky_Barbers | 11 hours ago
They sure do care in high paying fields like medicine, finance, law, oil & gas, etc.
Worthyness | 10 hours ago
Attending ivy also let's you socialize with the other ivy types, which is networking and how you get reffered in for jobs. One of the better ways to get into a company is if you already know someone.
two_hyun | 11 hours ago
Colleges still have a great return in investment, but you should attend with specific goals. I think people are starting to focus on college as a "life milestone" instead of a way to further your career goals. So a lot of students attend without the intention to network, build skills and knowledge, sharpen your professionalism/critical thinking, etc.
If you're going to take out massive loans, don't go for the music major unless you have concrete plans to use that degree in some way (teacher, music industry, etc.). Or don't go for that biology major unless you plan to work in healthcare or research, etc.
It's a waste of money if you make it a waste of money. But if you do it right, you can reap amazing benefits.
TempBurnerAccount089 | 11 hours ago
I honestly felt like plenty of millennials had the "college as a life milestone" mindset. Isn't that why we saw such a huge boom in those sketchy yet potentially useful bootcamps in data analysis or software/web development? A bunch of lost souls in Liberal Arts degrees?
warlizardfanboy | 8 hours ago
Im Gen X and graduated high school in 1992. It was a trope back then that the major didn’t matter just get a degree. I think a lot of millennials and Gen Z got bad advice from their elders, it’s much more nuanced than that now.
I got a BS is Economics and ended up eventually in an engineering shop, went back for my Masters in cybersecurity in ‘05 and its definitely paid off. But one must be thoughtful now.
imhereforthemeta | 11 hours ago
Something that I hope we start to see more of again as companies realize that they fucked over entry-level workers is being willing to build somebody from the ground up again. It pisses me off that I make six figures from my job and you could literally teach somebody to do it in a few few months. You could give them the foundations in a week. Most white-collar jobs are like this.
DeadInternetVoid | 11 hours ago
And the oligarchs ain't gonna pay or support UBI.
Folks ain't paying attention and it shows....
I'm writing this so I don't get fined.I'm writing this so I don't get fined.I'm writing this so I don't get fined.I'm writing this so I don't get fined.
topclassladandbanter | 11 hours ago
Humans and capitalism create bubbles. Education is no exception. Education boards saw how much people are willing to pay for degrees and made a business line out of them.
But we can't deny that AI has taken the steam out of entry-level jobs. You don't need a team of analysts running numbers, or entry-level coders. People pushed quantitative skills for years, and now we're seeing the demand for that skillset level off.
ChaosAndFish | 11 hours ago
I’d be interested in seeing a survey that broke apart traditional and for profit colleges. I wonder how much of this is actual changes in the economy and how much is the fact that we’ve normalized selling kids worthless for profit degrees? How much is the diminished value of a traditional college education and how much is the fact that we’re saddling kids with debt for degrees that were never intended to be of any value and, in fact, bordered on scams?
Cdub7791 | 10 hours ago
Isn't it a little early in the AI tech maturity tree to pronounce it has killed off the usefulness of a degree? Even if you believe the AI hype - and I don't - universities can incorporate knowledge about the state of the art to modify curriculum extremely quickly if they so choose. In other words, as AI changes a given field, those changes can and should be incorporated back into the educational program.
Ateist | 10 hours ago
The problem is that AI has eliminated beginner tasks that were historically delegated to fresh graduates.
What's left are high complexity tasks that require years of practical experience and can't easily be taught.
PianoPatient8168 | 11 hours ago
I guess developing critical thinking skills and learning about the world around you is a waste now?
Hyper specific degrees may be a problem, but liberal arts and sciences will always have value.
modilion | 12 hours ago
This is bad. Maybe very bad.
An education is needed to wrangle an LLM. I know that the CEO bosses at the current height of their AI induced fever dream do not understand... but one has to know about as much as the LLM to control an LLM... or else it will gaslight the user. The robot will run circles around the user. Wasting tokens time and yanking the user around.
We need to value and attain education now more than ever. But at the same time, we are destroying the incentives to attain that education. The clankers are going to win this. Ugh.
Fit_Eye_3564 | 11 hours ago
It was a waste of time, but the degree is still valuable. It shows a lot in the hiring process and is still a requirement for some jobs like clinical, science, and pharma work settings.
Practical-Injury-622 | 11 hours ago
This is a take you can only have if you have your degree. I never finished my bachelors, and even with "equivalent experience" i know it's impacting my job prospects and upward mobility.
Bright-Ad2594 | 11 hours ago
I keep waiting for the struggling college grads to get priced out of my neighborhood by people who didn’t “waste their money” but it keeps not happening.
iroh-42 | 11 hours ago
I’m a software engineer with 6 years of experience (with an MS in CS). This job market is incredibly challenging and I feel for all the new graduates right now. I know some that have been looking for a year and haven’t found anything.
kingseraph0 | 10 hours ago
Well.. yeah also college and uni was always a scam, you were never guaranteed to make money from a degree but from the connections you made from being in a wealthy fraternity, sorority, or social group
MaleficentOstrich693 | 10 hours ago
Not exclusively an AI problem. Masters degrees were used to keep gatekeep my field for decades until recently. Wouldn’t want the poors doing work that benefits other poors.
User299651 | 10 hours ago
I agree completely. I’m Gen Z with a college degree and a lot of my friends who also have college degrees are struggling. We all have very different majors as well, so it’s not one specific sector or something.
I absolutely regret the time and money I spent towards my Associates and Bachelors Degrees. I wish I had just put all the money in an ETF and watched it grow. I would be significantly ahead and in a much better place than what I ended up doing. In fact, I’d say going to college is my largest mistake in life so far. I’m getting mad thinking about it lol.
A_Monster_Named_John | 2 hours ago
I'm pretty much at this point as well. My undergrad degree was in social sciences and my grad one was in chemistry. Neither of them have helped me one iota in finding any of the jobs I've had. In fact, I've recently taken to omitting one or both when I submit resumes.
Lately, the problem I've encountered again and again is that a ton of companies and local businesses are owned by inherited-wealth fail-children and managed by craven people who are complete-and-utter lickspittles to anybody who's wealthier than them. Both of these types of people are just about the most ugly 'ugly American' types imaginable and, because of the post-2010s brain-rot they're gorging on (e.g. Fox News, Joe Rogan, etc..), absolutely despise educated people and, without hesitation, will bring this culture-war nonsense into the workplace, which usually leads to dysfunction, inefficiency, profits collapsing, etc...
FractalFunny66 | 9 hours ago
Turn your angst into political action -- we need your energy and leadership. Join us on the street against AI and data centers! 70% of the American people across the land do not want these data centers. we do not need them. Once the construction is done, it's basically like 5 jobs created. That's it.
OrneryError1 | 9 hours ago
Education shouldn't be so expensive. That's the lesson here. Not that the education was a waste. Terribly worded headline. Society would be much better off if everyone had post secondary education.
xtt-space | 9 hours ago
The value of a college degree has been fundamentallly diluted by a systemic lowering of academic standards over the last ~17 year due to the huge cuts to education that started after the great recession.
Students expect As or Bs simply for trying and a C is considered the floor just for existing.
I taught senior level molecular biology for 25 years at an R1 public university. When I started, if half my class completely flunked a major exam, it was their fault for not being prepared. A few years ago before I retired, if half my students flunked an exam, it was now "my" fault for not being a good teacher.
The only solution to keep grades up was to cut the syllabus by almost a third so we had more time to cover everything.
Boss_Atlas | 8 hours ago
Was it a waste? I didn't go to college, neither did my brother. A few of our friends did, they all have much higher paying jobs while me and my brother are working manual labor. Yeah AI probably won't come for my job, but I'm making so much less.
A_Monster_Named_John | 2 hours ago
This and, depending on what manual labor job you have, there's a chance you'll trash your body and end up unable to return to work. I worked in social services for a time and a lot of the saddest households I had to visit were ones where Dad used to make alright bank as a contractor or forklift-driver, but had to stop when he had a serious accident on the job, then turned into an abusive alcoholic/pill-popping basket-case who couldn't stop the bank from repossessing his pickup truck, and yadda-yadda-yadda.
smellslikebigfootdic | 8 hours ago
College graduate hires other college graduates, otherwise it makes it seem like their degrees were a waste of time and money.You may know how to do the job but it's going to the person with a degree.
VHS_Ronin | 8 hours ago
I was told ANY college degree would give me a better lease on life. While it's true that piece of paper got me through the door a few times, when accounting for inflation I don't make much more than my father did working an entry-level manufacturing job with no degree in the 1990s.
I don't regret getting my degree, but I'm angry that no amount of work I do will allow me to cover basic living expenses AND repay my student loan debt.
A_Monster_Named_John | an hour ago
Though it's tempting to internalize that regret, I refuse to. There was no god-damned way that millennials and Zoomers could anticipate that their Boomer/Xer parents would get bowled over so thoroughly by decadent consumerist brain-rot and NPD that, by the 2010s, a crazy percentage of them would be completely primed to accept genocide on their own population rather than take any steps to pass the torch. I maintain that, if not for their historically-record-setting levels of cowardice and sloth, those age groups would have long since unleashed Rwanda-style campaigns of violence and murder onto tons of other Americans, with the worst of course happening to immigrants, women, young people, and other vulnerable populations. Because of the aforementioned cowardice/sloth, we get to experience it in slow motion with things like a collapsing job-market, widespread resistance to vaccinations/health-care, widespread resistance to affordable housing, unaddressed climate change issues, the government pushing people to eat tainted food, etc...
gdirrty216 | 11 hours ago
The people saying AI made their degrees worthless didn’t take the right lessons from college.
College isn’t just about technical skills. It can teach people how to think critically, communicate, collaborate, handle different perspectives, become independent, navigate complex organizations, build relationships, and keep learning. Those are the “human” skills that make someone valuable in almost any workplace. College isn’t the only way to develop them, but it’s one environment designed to do so
jmdybf | 11 hours ago
It has made absolutely zero difference in my career other than allowing me to apply for an entry level night shift supervisor position that “required a degree.” Several promotions and moves later it was the right choice but now alot of those positions don’t even require a degree because they’ve gotten hard to fill and retain.
CorellianDawn | 9 hours ago
Who wrote this? Elon Musks AI girlfriend?
AI only takes jobs temporarily because its been proven time and time again that it's more expensive and less effective than a human. Every company that switches over has to revert back after it collapses.
Calm_Chemist_4952 | 11 hours ago
Disagree. College is about much more than getting a job. It’s about learning your strengths and weaknesses, using your intellect to its full potential, and finding a direction for your adulthood.
reddit_user13 | 11 hours ago
IMO “finding a direction” and “getting a job” are 90% synonymous, unless you have a trust fund.
2noame | 11 hours ago
The importance of college has always been the learning and the gaining of new cognitive tools and becoming part of new communities and having new experiences. When college became the best real ticket to the middle class via good jobs, good jobs became the main focus, but people still got the real key stuff.
Now that college has become unaffordable, and the job market doesn't really reward college like it used to, it makes less sense to go to college, but as a result, all the real key stuff is lost.
This is all really bad for our future, and we need to fix it with universal college, universal basic income, and universal healthcare.
reddit_user13 | 11 hours ago
Yeah just look at the “man in the street” YouTube content. They’re all fucking idiots with no cognitive/reasoning skills.
Fallenweeble100 | 11 hours ago
Healthcare!!!
Nursing
Physician Assistant
Anesthesiologist Assistant
Physical Therapist
Radiology
Medical technology
Surgical assistant
Audiology
Speech Therapy
rubey419 | 11 hours ago
Nursing / Healthcare and Trade schools are getting competitive too, because “everyone” is telling young kids to go there just as we did for Computer Science in 2010s.
Wonderful-Teach8210 | 11 hours ago
Having a degree is still much more valuable than not having one even if you aren't working in your field of study. It still functions as an "I'm not a moron" certificate for employers.
titsmuhgeee | 9 hours ago
I'm a millennial, and I vividly remember it being rammed into my brain that you need to be getting an undergraduate degree in a field that has strong job prospects and a wide range of applications. That led me into the STEM field, where I've had a prosperous career.
My friends that went into the humanities or arts probably can't say the same. They've mostly been on the receiving end of stagnant wages, and ever decreasing job opportunities. AI has only accelerated this trend.
getmeoutoftax | 11 hours ago
AI agents will replace most white collar jobs in a few years, so they’re probably right. The number of colleges and universities will likely plummet over the next few years.
while_e | 11 hours ago
Since when is a degree just a measure of what you committed to memory? Like I tell my kids, a degree is SOOOO much more. It proves you can handle responsibility, take direction, stay focused, and learn new things. I literally use 5% of my degree daily.. if that.
Also, A.I is terrible. Has been, will continue to be. Unless you're asking to be a glorified search engine, or generate some AI slop art/code.. it really can't do much. I've given it the benefit and tried it on complex issues, and it just SUCCCCCKKKKS.
All of these codebases that use AI heavily, wills start falling apart in 6-9 months, and all the real engineers that lost their jobs will be getting called back. Know your worth, ask for more money because you're worth it.
miagi_do | 12 hours ago
There is so much opportunity now for optimistic smart kids that like working hard. They will get extremely wealthy because so many people are just giving up. Millenials are getting rich like crazy right now.
chrisinvic | 10 hours ago
The ex CEO of Mercedes’s not only predicted this he wrote a paper about what jobs not to do and what professions to not get into about 20 years ago. I read it then and it’s all come to pass.
onyxkunai | 10 hours ago
AI will not be used to benefit humanity. People believe that if AI replaces the need for human labor UBI will become a reality and humanity will behold a new age of joy and prosperity.
But history tells us UBI will become irreversible chains and the death of billions.
How so many people who want AI and UBI believe (the government will have absolute control over how much UBI any person receives, btw) they will be anything more than the most effective totalitarian way to control the population is mind-blowing.
Social credit systems, drone surveillance, etc. will all determine whether or not you deserve UBI, incarceration, or death.
davesaunders | 10 hours ago
Whether it's factually true or not, I find this to be a sad perception. Yes AI can answer trivial questions with usually a decent level of accuracy. The thing is you need to be a subject matter expert to ask the question correctly in the first place and to recognize whether or not the answer is complete and total bullshit. Hopefully as time moves on AI will become more of a tool as it really was intended to be in the first place. The tech bro bullshit promises that it would literally replace human beings will fade into the annals of comedic one-liners and mocking the tech bros who tried to die on that hill.
schtickshift | 10 hours ago
Zooming out a bit, we have to think about the implications of AI for human knowledge. Up until AI human knowledge was basically carried around in our heads. Sure books supported this but ultimately we have had to get it into our heads in order to use it meaningfully. If AI gets around that and human knowledge can now essentially live in the Cloud, what will the implications be for the upcoming generations and what will happen if the Cloud or whatever follows it is no longer available to us one day in the future?
othor2 | 10 hours ago
As an industrial mechanic I find AI to shorten my internet searches by a bit. And to otherwise barely be helpful as more than a sounding board I can't trust, and those are the paid for version.
rabbitsmell | 10 hours ago
To piggy back. Ai searches are trash imo. At least the Google ones. They summarize information and when you attempt to dig deeper points in opposite directions
othor2 | 10 hours ago
Yeah I should probably amend that to some of my internet searches are shortened. It's a cool and fun toy but outside of desk side make work I'm not seeing a use case yet.
rabbitsmell | 10 hours ago
Agreed. Ai is being pushed in my wife’s workplace but it makes no sense as it basically circles back to their previous work and more often than not, incorrectly
othor2 | 8 hours ago
Yeah this feels overly optimistic since at this point they've sunk over 3 trillion dollars down the hole and are desperately trying to force a sunrise from this, but the returns just aren't there yet. Maybe in a few years or a decade or two but at the moment they are losing money hand over fist whilst making cents on the dollar. This ain't the first investment boom to pop and it won't be the last but it's surely the biggest we'll see in a while.
rabbitsmell | 10 hours ago
If I knew the money I could make in government without a degree, I would have never gone to college. Government lets you skip a step or two with degrees, but with time on you get those steps and promotions anyway
Long_College_8342 | 10 hours ago
When I was growing up my parents were very firm on their kids needing to go to college and buy their own houses because neither of them had done that. I did that. But I was impractical about college and majored in something practically useless. So, now I make $55k as an admin. At this point I can't say that college was worth the investment. My daughter plans to get a free associate degree through our state and then a certificate and go to work. I can't say if that is a better or worse idea than going to a traditional bachelors program. I guess we'll see.
dumbname0192837465 | 10 hours ago
Yeah probably, no employer looks into it or thinks you have knowledge of the job because of a degree. They mostly care that you went and finished college at least for young hires. They want real world experience for older people.
SafeForTwerking | 9 hours ago
For some, the people that they met are going to be more useful than any of the knowledge that they might have gained at college, I think that's been true for awhile, well before AI. My Bachelors itself has only ever come up a handful of times and it was just a preliminary requirement for the job, just a way for me to get my foot in the door, by itself it is somewhat useless. I'm not even sure where the physical thing is located at the moment.
However, at the design school I went to, we weren't taught any specific software packages, it was more about "design thinking" and the process by which somebody comes up with a design, having a methodical approach. I think that's helped me well in the workforce and I still appreciate it.
The kind of design work I do is pretty technical and heavily regulated, so I think I'm safe for at least a few more years, nobody is willing to risk getting their shit recalled because A.I. just decided to hallucinate some ingredients or because it didn't think to add the allergen statement or something. Maybe after more regulations are gutted and companies are pushing out literal poison I'll have to worry about it
Dear-Credit-3812 | 9 hours ago
A degree can be useless and at the same time open up a lot of doors for you that might otherwise be shut.
I use my degree for jack shit, but the school I went to impressed some faceless exec enough for me to get my foot in the door and now I have a great career.
MG788 | 9 hours ago
Oh, god, yes... We should legally be allowed to file bankruptcy on the federal loans since the government hasn't done anything to protect the value of degrees.
Possible-Tangelo9344 | 9 hours ago
Just based on this headline it feels like the article is gonna be full of shit.
Half of degrees are useless cuz of AI as it currently exists? How useless were these degrees two years ago then?
InclinationCompass | 9 hours ago
Young people should start going to community college and transfer to state universities. I got my BSc for under $25k (4 years) and it has enabled me to build my career in business analysis and consulting.
jastop94 | 8 hours ago
As someone that returned to college recently to go for computer science and economics, I literally sit there and wonder how people are incapable of coming up with reasoning of articles or possible context when it comes to a way something is written. Reading and literature comprehension and terrible soft skills plague late millennial into gen z at the moment, and while AI amplifies this significantly, it is honestly not the only reason why younger generation is struggling. I am still recall talking to a bunch of younger adults, about 20-21, and two of them said something that i absolutely despised. Both of them said they couldn't imagine passing high school without AI... the thing is, they haven't been in high school for 3 years by this point. Back in 2023, AI was significantly worse than it is today, so i can't imagine how many people in school are relying on it to pass classes now as the larger models have been refined and updated in the years since. Now I watch on the commuting busses at the college, people that can't stay off their phones, not able to talk to one another, and unable to keep conversations going with almost anyone, and AI is just part of the issue, but it's by far not the only issue.
Eclipse434343 | 8 hours ago
I think the friction of what college is vs what people made it become is kinda showing its head. It’s made to be a place of education and learning but people use it as job screening and job training.
It’s a poor job screener (outside of the top of each school esp top schools) and a terrible job trainer and the bottom 50-60% feel it esp during bad econs
TeacherOfFew | 8 hours ago
It's also used for amusement and networking.
I am all for being in good shape, but universities building incredibly expensive gyms for students in order to recruit them feels a bit off.
Eclipse434343 | 8 hours ago
Well from the pov of the student people go to school for job opps. Nobody pays 30k+ in tuition to go to school for amusement. That’s what I mean.
TeacherOfFew | 5 hours ago
They should go for career ops, but very many go just because.
Source: I teach HS seniors.
Kcirrot | 8 hours ago
The wealthy are not sending their kids to trade school. I grew up in a working class family. I went to college and law school and it was transformational for my life. I can't say that my experience is the same for everyone, but I still fervently believe that college is worth it. You have to be smart about it, not taking out too much debt.
yellowcardofficial | 8 hours ago
For me I wouldn’t take it back. But I ended up going into a field that had nothing to do with my degree and didn’t require any degree. Again would trade that experience and knowledge gained.
Its_Pine | 8 hours ago
I think mindset has shifted a bit too? With how expensive college is, we don’t believe it’s worth it if it doesn’t directly make you money in a career.
I do not regret going to university, mostly because I learned SO much more than I did at any other time.
Do I use organic chemistry for my job? Hell no. But it helped me understand the intensely repetitive process of the scientific method. Stats made me understand how to parse good data from bad data (and I was able to teach my friends why ivermectin’s “cancer cure” claims were absolutely bogus).
My literature gen ed made me read Cider House Rules, and it helped me understand why abortion was a medical topic moreso than a moral one.
I had to take a religion gen ed, so I took Old Testament theology. The professor was an expert on ancient Near East languages. Nothing prepared me for him opening class by reciting the Mesopotamian creation myths and tales and then reciting the opening of the Old Testament’s creation story and contrasting it with the Akkadian and Sumerian versions. He explained that the poet went to GREAT lengths to avoid using the names of deities. The word for the Sun was also the god Shemesh. The word for the moon also meant the god Nanna. So other phrases were chosen in that poem to say one thing and one thing only: no other gods are involved in this story, just one.
I grew up going to church, I had been in synagogue many times! I had never heard any of that and it blew me away.
I learned botany and sustainable forestry. I studied in Beijing for a semester. I made a lot of friends that I’m still in touch with, and have connections around the world because of it.
NONE of those are necessarily relevant to my job working in union negotiations and contracts, but they all helped take a closed minded ultra religious conservative Republican kid and make him realise “wait, there is so much more out here in the world and I have the chance to talk to actual experts about any of this stuff”
TL;DR college is not appealing because it doesn’t necessarily equate to jobs, just a LOT of debt. And society as a whole is worse off for that, because that age is when we finally can learn a ton.
Uptons_BJs | 12 hours ago
>College is often advertised as the best four years of one’s life, but many Americans now have regrets.
And herein lies the main problem with higher ed today - What do you want to get out of it? Why are you here? Wanna go party? Take that tuition money and put that towards your bar tab - You'd get cirrhosis far before you drink 4 years worth of tuition at some of these colleges nowadays.
Is it learning something? well, if you go on r/teachers and read about what percentage of students just straight up cheat their way through with AI, and you'd quickly realize that for most students, learning something isn't why they're in school. Using chatGPT to do your homework is like using a forklift to lift weights at the gym - Completely missing the point.
Historically, I'd argue the value of degrees and diplomas to be signaling - This degree tells people that you are competent and qualified. But the ridiculously low caliber of students that graduate nowadays is putting that into doubt. I've seen new grads from supposedly elite universities struggle with reading comprehension.
Is it Networking? As people used to joke, the Iveys is where the smart kids get to meet the rich kids right? Well, this I still believe, but it only really benefits a certain type of person. You gotta be gregarious, you gotta be sociable, and you gotta be friendly.
It's funny, my younger brother and my girlfriend both went to top ranked universities globally, yet I don't think either of them really benefitted from the networking - He was too shy and spent all his evenings watching v-tubers, she's too easily offended and particular.
Geigengiger | 11 hours ago
I've been saying this for ten years. Marketing majors and programmers are currently out looking for a job. Meanwhile any guy who is good at a trade can charge whatever he wants from his customers.
It's even pretty easy to start a small company for whatever your trade is. Try selling marketing schemes these days. It's you vs. the AI, vs. a million others doing the same.
shellbackpacific | 11 hours ago
The purpose of education is more than getting you a job. Not only do you need domain knowledge to guide AI but education also makes you a better human and citizen. American’s inability to see this is so depressing and that’s why our culture is total dogshit
Educational_Bag_6406 | 11 hours ago
College is the best place to find your future business partner and wife. Networking is a huge reason college is worth it. Just due to life experience. Nepotism goes a long way. I am not college educated and understand at least this aspect of it