Watch Napoleon Dynamite give a rowdy kid some comeuppance:

https://twitter.com/atlasssc/status/1135385103323095040

Sorry to not post yesterday. This conference (the Northeast Evolutionary Psychology conference and today, the Applied Evolutionary Psych conf) has been all-consuming.

Job descriptions and required skills are changing rapidly these days. Colleges are finding it difficult to keep up with the ever-changing demands. A degree increasingly reflects yesterday's job requirements.

In the future, will we learn skills instead of getting degrees?

"A lot of what is being taught in college has no bearing or relevance on the day-to-day functions of a real job. Yet, there is still this perception that degrees are some kind of holy constitution of mastery over your topic of study. For doctors or other highly advanced degrees, that may still be true for now. But more often than not, your professional competency has nothing to do with what you learned in school."

Which begs the question: Does a college degree's value lie solely in the job it can get you? Is there a non-job value to a liberal arts education? If so, need that education be attained as part of a four-year degree?

Facebook: if we don't like your opinions, we might share your data with the MFM.

https://twitter.com/RVAwonk/status/1135053672071749632

Look at philosophy degrees to answer your question Conan. What financial value does one provide? Pretty obviously the answer is none. What impact does a philosophy degree have on future employment? People who get such degrees often go on to high paid jobs. But when you look closer it is obvious that degree or no degree they were still going to get that job.

Yet with all of that people still get philosophy degrees. So a transition to a skills based system seems unlikely. Especially since the skills colleges want to teach and the skills businesses desire aren't really related.

I also have to add that the article you link to is horribly out of date. The gig economy is dying. People are finding full time jobs now that the economy is growing faster so finding workers for the low paid part time gig economy is pretty hard. The graph they present showing a fall off in college enrollment has nothing to do with business needs. Almost all of the fall was in for profit schools, and that was driven by Obama era attacks on that sector. Funny how they complain about schools being lost in the past while doing the same thing themselves.

Col. Schlichter outlines why socialism is attractive to people. Emphasis mine.

The thing about leftists is that their ideas about the need for command and control over every aspect of human life always presume they will be the ones personally commanding and controlling. You will never meet a young socialist who looks forward to a proletarian career picking up garbage or cleaning toilets.

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2019/06/03/time-for-conservatives-to-get-ruthless-fighting-for-free-speech-n2547255

The questions the article asks and inspires are still relevant, Ben. And as for being out of date, the article is from June 2019 and the data include the Spring 2019 semester.

That a number of major companies are no longer requiring degrees for certain jobs is interesting and relevant. That acquiring skills may succeed getting a college degree as a rational plan for the future is certainly relevant, especially in an age of crushing student loan debt.

As for the philosophy degree you denigrate, it does teach logic, argument, and ethics, all useful knowledge to have in today's world; perhaps not in measurable skills, but certainly useful.

As for the gig economy dying, yes, people prefer full-time jobs with benefits. They like knowing that they'll have a steady job next week. Gig jobs mean selling yourself and networking like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest, always hopping. It also means keeping up with an industry on your own dime - subscriptions, education, seminars, licenses, etc. - and not through a corporate account. For Uber drivers, wear-and-tear on their cars, extra insurance for increased driving, gasoline, etc. must all come out of their pockets. Even so, a fair number of formerly-stable occupations remain heavily freelance and probably will be for a long time to come.

Yes, the largest drop in enrollment was in the for-profit college sector. That had to do with both the Obama administration's war on for-profit colleges and the fact that most of those colleges were not delivering on their promise of a college education on-the-cheap. Too many were little more than mail-order diploma mills. Too many employers looked askew at candidates with degrees from online or for-profit colleges with low-to-nonexistent admission standards.

Regarding the college-degree thing: The elephant in the room that everyone wants to ignore is Griggs v. Duke Power. That laid down a marker for restricting an employer's ability to evaluate a prospective employee, and subsequent laws and court decisions have taken that ball and run with it, to the point that now just about the only thing an employer is allowed to use to make a decision about an applicant is the degree and its social status. You need a degree to get almost any job now. But, now that college degrees have become a glut on the market, you need to have a "good" degree to get a good job, meaning a degree from a prestige institution. And, if you aspire to become one of the ruling class, you need a degree from one of the institutions that they control. By this method, they have set themselves up as the gatekeepers; everything else is just collateral damage.

Maybe we should be dealing directly with the cartels, since they seem to be the ones in charge?

Mexican government admits 80% of its populated territory is run by cartels, including key border areas

https://www.conservativereview.com/news/mexican-government-admits-80-populated-territory-run-cartels-including-key-border-areas/

Teaching transgenderism-is-normal to 10 year olds elicits parental complaints, but that's only because the people who disagree are motivated by "fear" and "hate".

Apparently it's the SJW's only counter-argument.

A possible running indicator as to how close we are to being sooooo screwed.

Yes the data is recent Conan. But the questions they ask of it are years out of date.

"One of the fastest growing areas of work is within the freelancing community or "gig economy.""

This isn't true anymore. They are years out of date.

"That a number of major companies are no longer requiring degrees for certain jobs is interesting and relevant." ~Conan

You misunderstand what is being reported here. This isn't a new trend in any way shape or form.

"93 percent of freelancers with four year degrees said that skills training was more useful than their degree. A majority of 70 percent of freelancers participated in new skills training within the past six months, compared to only 49 percent of full-time non-freelancers that didn't do any skills training in that same time frame."

This is nothing new. They then go off to talk about programmers as their main source of freelancers and how programmers don't need a degree. I agree with them. Programmers absolutely don't need a degree. They need a portfolio. Just like artist and many other career paths. For these jobs skill certification is pretty much worthless. You need a body of work you can provide to prove you can do what the customer wants. A skills certification system any different than the one currently implemented has no value.

"That had to do with both the Obama administration's war on for-profit colleges and the fact that most of those colleges were not delivering on their promise of a college education on-the-cheap." ~Conan

No. The drop was almost solely due to the Obama administration's war on for-profit schools. I agree most were not delivering on their promises. But that didn't matter. Both for and not for profit schools are mainly paid for with federal loans. Losing access to those loans is what is shutting for profit schools down.

For the record lots of not for profit schools aren't delivering on their promises of a quality education or future employment opportunities. They aren't seeing much change.

As for the philosophy degree, yes it often teaches logic, argument, and ethics. So do lots of other things. That isn't enough to set it apart. Look up actual statistics on students post degree. It is pretty clear getting the degree has zero economic impact. It neither hurts nor helps. Even so there are plenty of people getting such degrees.

"The elephant in the room that everyone wants to ignore is Griggs v. Duke Power." ~CD

Agreed Cousin Dave. And as you say as the supply increased without a matching increase in demand the relative value of those degrees has dropped.

The deputy at the Parkland School shooting has been arrested and is facing 11 charges related to that day. Personally I don't see how most of that is going to stick. After all he did what he was trained to do.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/deputy-at-parkland-school-shooting-is-arrested-11559681755?mod=cx_picks&cx_navSource=cx_picks&cx_tag=poptarget&cx_artPos=2#cxrecs_s

He was trained to hide?

As I recall from the reports at the time yes. Since he was a single officer he was supposed to hunker down and call for backup. Now, that isn't what I think he should be doing for which I blame Sheriff Scott Israel, his boss. Israel is the one who decided what actions should be taken in different situations. He is the one who chose how his officers would be trained. And Scot Peterson acted on that training. If he had done otherwise he could be fired. So Peterson is in a damned if you do and damned if you don't situation right now.