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comment by johnnyFive
johnnyFive  ·  2111 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Sex and Drugs Decline Among Teens, but Depression and Suicidal Thoughts Grow

Those are all true things, and are generally consistent with my own experience and what I've read.

Degree saturation is absolutely a problem. It kind of makes sense from the employer's standpoint, though: you can be basically outsoure verifying someone's competence, which I could see being especially nice in something somewhat more subjective (like translation). There's also a degree of standardization that comes from a formal education. You can be self-taught and good at something, but I think there are more likely to be skill gaps, and you also may not be able to communicate as effectively if you haven't been taught your field's specific vocabulary.

In the U.S., the big problem is student loans. It's far too easy to get what feels like free money, and so even as the economy and job market fell off a cliff, no one was doing the cost-benefit analysis (to the extent that you can gather enough information). Meanwhile, universities are too unwilling to fail people or to deny admission.

This is a big problem within the legal profession. Bar passage rates have been declining steadily for the last several years, and the American Bar Association (ABA), which accredits law schools in the US, has largely been asleep at the switch (when they're not being arbitrary). It may actually be good for the health of the profession in the long term, in that it'll reduce the number of lawyers to saner and more sustainable levels. But that doesn't help all the people who were granted admission to and graduated from law school but who simply lack the ability to pass the bar exam. The bar exam is hard.

My own experience is not inconsistent with this. I have a side job where I grade essays for a bar review class (this is a separate, privately-run course that prepares you for your state's bar exam). Basically every term, I have someone who is clearly a non-native English speaker, and who is simply incapable of passing. This person usually can't fully understand the question (you have to pay attention to very specific details a lot of the time), and then is unable to convey their answer with enough clarity and detail. (There are times when I don't even know what they're actually arguing.) Yet these are all people who have post-graduate degrees from ABA-approved law schools.