I sincerely hope that we start sending a more considered and nuanced message to young people now about "college."
In my father's (Boomer) generation, you could incredibly easily see the net effect that college vs. no college had on career potential and thus earnings, and as a result I was coached to aim exclusively for college.
If I'm being honest I gained two main things from those four years:
1. I personally enjoyed a few fascinating or culturally uplifting classes, most of which were outside my major
2. By luck, I happened to meet someone in a class (which was an overall graduation requirement for the College of Business), who connected me to my first tech-related job.
Thankfully my school was cheap and I only graduated with about $40k in debt. But if I'd spent those 4 years living at home and teaching myself to code, I'd have been far ahead in my skills. To the extent anyone refused to hire a "non-college educated" software engineer, it would have been their loss, because it contributed nothing to my skills.
I will not be suggesting to my kids that they target "college," unless they have a very specific career goal and are confident on the job prospects and the median earnings being sufficient to pay back the loans and still be a net positive. There are just too many of the 'requires college' careers now that used to be somewhat viable and now are a dead-end joke, such as teaching, journalism, etc. Including software development, probably, for Gen Alpha, since nobody wants to hire juniors anymore, for rational reasons.
>> Including software development, probably, for Gen Alpha, since nobody wants to hire juniors anymore, for rational reasons.
This point is the best so far -- from my standpoint in technology, the market for entry-level has almost completely disappeared. When speaking with my kids, I dont know how I could propose over-leveraging for college any longer in any field where there isnt forced scarcity or licenses or some other protection mechanism for entry-level workers looking to go up the ladder.
As someone who now spends my time conducting over a dozen interviews a week for senior software engineers, it absolutely breaks my heart that I can't tell a smart, tech-loving 18-year-old to either learn to code or get a CS degree and go into software.
I don't know which outcome I'd hate more:
• It turns out that AI has hit a ceiling and in 20 years when I retire there will be no one left to do the complex work that senior engineers do today because we shut out a whole generation of engineers, or
• AI continues to advance and no humans are even involved in software in 20 years
In my father's (Boomer) generation, you could incredibly easily see the net effect that college vs. no college had on career potential and thus earnings, and as a result I was coached to aim exclusively for college.
If I'm being honest I gained two main things from those four years:
1. I personally enjoyed a few fascinating or culturally uplifting classes, most of which were outside my major
2. By luck, I happened to meet someone in a class (which was an overall graduation requirement for the College of Business), who connected me to my first tech-related job.
Thankfully my school was cheap and I only graduated with about $40k in debt. But if I'd spent those 4 years living at home and teaching myself to code, I'd have been far ahead in my skills. To the extent anyone refused to hire a "non-college educated" software engineer, it would have been their loss, because it contributed nothing to my skills.
I will not be suggesting to my kids that they target "college," unless they have a very specific career goal and are confident on the job prospects and the median earnings being sufficient to pay back the loans and still be a net positive. There are just too many of the 'requires college' careers now that used to be somewhat viable and now are a dead-end joke, such as teaching, journalism, etc. Including software development, probably, for Gen Alpha, since nobody wants to hire juniors anymore, for rational reasons.