So we have talked about loans and about credits, but what about
the college degree itself? There is some funny business going on here as
well.
The degree scam: Let us first start with the fact that
around 12% of jobs actually require a college degree. Yes, that is right,
only 12%. Yet many people think you need a degree to be a writer, or even
an artist. Last I checked a certificate class can aid you in those without
extra expenses. The only degrees that I know for certain are needed is
those of doctors and lawyers due to complexity. But there is issues there
as well. The education a doctor gets and the education a physician
assistant or a nurse practitioner gets with respect to diagnosis is the same.
As such, doctors do not need all that extra schooling unless they are
going to specialize in another medical area as well. But they are
required to get their doctorate by the boards who run colleges and license
these professionals. They have that requirement because they know it is
cost prohibitive to try and be a doctor due to the many years of schooling and
thus it artificially limits the amount of doctors that can be practicing at any
given time. As a result, the number of doctors being limited leads to a
direct increase in the salaries of these doctors due to demand (now even at the
expense of not having enough doctors in America). Pharmacists too, have
this issue as they need to take at least 6 years of schooling (including
pre-requisite programs), but the knowledge base on drugs only requires two
years. So would not a bachelor's degree be better to include the
knowledge, and the hands on learning once the classroom work is done? It
would, but limiting supply to raise salaries comes first for those who decide
degree requirements. Then there is lawyers. They require masters
and doctorates, but if they made it so it could be studied right from the very
first year of college, there would be more lawyers which makes them cheaper to
hire. Additionally, according to studies (source is the economist and New
York Times) the final year of schooling for a lawyer appears to be redundant,
and they are now considering making it optional (but law firms still have to
retrain the students once they graduate due to complete lack of experience and
the degrees not matching up with real life job conditions). So let us
review, only 12% need to get a degree, and the degrees are established to make
it harder to get by making them more expensive to obtain. Something is
wrong here in my opinion.
Conclusion: What this all tells me is that
certificate courses, bachelor’s degrees, on the job training (OTJ) and
associates degrees with OTJ combined to equal a bachelor's seems to be the best
solution. As such, most Doctorates and Master's degrees are
outmoded unless something more specialized is needed to be studied. But
even then, a yearlong course can replace even those specialized degrees for
special skills as well. However, we are stuck with multiple people
needing degrees because jobs simply say so due to colleges being propped up as
the place to learn. Meanwhile we could have saved our money if the
degrees matched real world conditions, did not intentionally limit supply to
increase salaries, and actually stuck to the professions that require
specialized knowledge. We have been had in many respects, and it should
change.
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