Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who has since moved on to greener and perhaps more dangerous pastures, told an audience of Stanford students recently that “Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning.” Evidently this hot take was not for wider consumption, as Stanford — which posted the video this week on YouTube — today made the video of the event private.
Except the system is so fucked that even terrible low paying jobs routinely ignore applicants without degrees.
State universities, community colleges, boot camps and inexpensive online universities exist. Not to mention trade schools and entrepreneurship. No one was forced to take on an insane amount of debt. They chose it.
FWIW, the system is fucked for people that have degrees right now too. The job market is super competitive and a lot of educated people are struggling to find work.
We should plan for the future rather than pay the bills you don’t feel like paying.
State colleges are still extremely expensive.
Community colleges are more manageable, but most of those jobs don’t value them much more than no degree. Same with online.
Boot camps are obscenely expensive, and so many are so absurdly bad that having a boot camp on your resume might lower your chances of getting a job.
Everyone who took on that debt was told, by effectively every authority figure they ever interacted with, plus the objective reality of the real world, that success was borderline impossible without a college degree. The system is bad for people with degrees for literally the same reason. Because the system is fucked and told everyone, regardless of ability of inclination, that a college degree was mandatory to even theoretically have a chance of success.