People being able to follow through a long set of tasks is actually a good indicator that they might be “useful” if the tasks are well-designed and relevant and the payoff is reasonable.

What if the tasks are poorly designed, nonsensical, and irrelevant, and a typical payoff for “following through” is a huge pile of non-dischargeable debt, a mediocre dead-end job, and a lifetime of rent payments to Vanguard’s investment firm’s property management firm’s tenement housing department?

And now the AI is coming for your mediocre dead-end job?

What’s a PMC. PigManCow, as opposed to PigManBear.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGoEP-IqoDg

Seven Laughing Skulls says, “Sam, I suspect you’re a little bit out of touch. These days, if a large organization requires a degree, you don’t want to work there.”

I get all this. I’m perfectly cognizant of how technology is changing things. Some of my assumptions are based on some people surviving the released plagues that are going on.

The Chinese will of course survive, as they have when they stopped the recently released hemorrhagic fever.

I think you people are missing my point. Not everyone wants to be “master of the universe”.

You know people used to remove themselves from society and live in caves or on top of poles or in monasteries.

And many people just want mid-level jobs and for that a college degree might be useful as a stepping stone. That the utility will and has gone down is not relevant because in the “all or nothing” you speak of that someone has done some sort of work or at least enough to get a degree will always show that they know something. Maybe the wrong things or not much but it does show they are capable of following through and that’s not nothing.

People being able to follow through a long set of task is actually a good indicator that they might be useful no matter how much you people make fun of a college degree.

You can argue with the last paragraph, but I think you will look increasingly silly. So by all means go right ahead and do so as it will bring me great amusement.

White men are wising up.

DOOOOMED!

We’re not talking about the same thing. I was relating the utility of a degree for the average Joe to get his foot in the door of larger organizations.

If you want to reach the heights then a degree is useless. Large amounts of the economy are staffed through nepotism or modern mafia type ties bonded by family or blackmail.

In facts reaching the heights is becoming ever more difficult without these ties.

And even if your highest aim in life is to serve those who own equity, no degree will ever get you into the executive suite. The only way to become an executive is to “know” (have weak ties to) executives (good) or major investors (better) or owners (best). If you don’t already have ties, you have an open-ended problem requiring “outside of the box” thinking and no amount of having-degrees will help. And the organizational class arteries have hardened. The value of knowing middle management or HR or PR or sales is bupkis. Executives, major investors, or owners.

Today when you look at execs at major companies you still see people with degrees. That’s because they’re old and their degrees are from the seventies, eighties, and nineties. You’ll start noticing the fracturing when it comes to execs who would have graduated in the naughts and a total breakage by the tens and beyond.

Again, the past efficacy of degrees is an historical accident. It wasn’t exclusively or even primarily the consequence of phenomenal competence, although that was its greatest legitimator. The yuge legibility of competence and status briefly conferred-signified by a degree was the anomaly. We’re now beginning to revert to historical norms.

And when the tanks of normalization begin to roll, they roll all the way to the capital.

It’s not who you know, but who knows you.

You’ll lose your shirt. Boomers value degrees so highly thanks to historical accident: degreed Boomers were reliably 1-2 std. deviations more competent than their non-degreed counterparts.

That’s more than the difference between blacks and whites. “Degrees must have caused this,” the administrators thought. “Let’s send everyone to college to make them smart and us rich.” And so they did.

But as the Boomers finally die off they’ll be replaced by people who just don’t care as much because they’re trying to find reasonably competent underlings to hire but since everyone has a degree not only is it no longer a reliable signal of competence it’s also not a reliable signal of conformity.

That’s the apex. The fun part is the downslope, when people start realizing (first at the margins, soon trickling down) that suddenly a suspicious proportion of the Painfully Talented Young People of all walks of life are running around without degrees. “So you went to college, huh,” they’ll ask, “my condolences.”

That’s when most people stop advertising that they “went to college” and start trying to cover up. (They’ll fail.)

No later than 2027.