Makes me think of the "The purpose of a system is what it does" axiom. Universities were always about credentials whether professional or just to indicate social class. They can at the same time be places of learning, and many still are in some disciplines.

The problem is that value of the credential is now worth more (to most people) than the value of the learning/knowledge. So universities adapted to the that model. Its more profitable and university presidents can now earn millions of dollars, further intrenching the problem as it now attracts exactly the kind of people into those positions who only care about money (and themselves).

The true blame for this situation, (IMHO), are the employers across the economy who require applicants have 'university degrees' for jobs that in no way need those skillsets. Bullshit requirements then led to the demand for bullshit degrees which the universities changed to supply.

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Lu2025 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> employers across the economy who require applicants have 'university degrees'

Somebody from HR admitted to me that they often do it to simply trim the applicant pool to a more manageable size.

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Eddy_Viscosity2 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is true across literally millions of HR people across the whole country. Every one trying to make their job a little bit easier and thus creating an externality with the monstrous negative effect on the entire education system and years of people lives pursuing pointless degrees at great cost and debt that may take some lifetimes to pay off. Absolute madness.

	▲	skeeter2020 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>> pursuing pointless degrees at great cost and debt Maybe if you require a liberal arts degree and immediately cut someone who's just "well read" but this is not my experience in technical and engineering focused roles.

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skeeter2020 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is definitely part of it, but after working - and hiring - in the software industry for several decades I can say that a university grad has probably at least heard of relational algebra or taken a course that covered costing algorithms. Do they use this every day or ever? Definitely not, but when I interview non-uni grads the odds they can write (let alone explain) a modest SQL query are lower. There's very little causation between uni grad and good developer, but IME the best uni grads are better than the best non-uni grads. There's some signal in there.

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mofosyne 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Wonder if this problem would be reduced by some mechanism of incurring cost on job positions that advertise for more requirements. (A heavy handed approach would be to charge an additional fee/tax if you require university educated persons for a position not requiring one)

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fzwang 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I agree with your general assessment, but not sure if the blame could be placed on employers mostly/entirely. They're also limited by bounded rationality and cannot (or should not) dictate what the purpose of an education should be. There's such diffusal of accountability that no one is really designing the system, just reacting to it. To your point, the system just do what it does. The ultimate unaccountability machine, per Dan Davies [1].

I think we're witnessing the collapse of the university value proposition. In the decades post WW2, the attendance/competition within universities was quite modest compared to today. Relatively fewer people went, and it was essentially a social class sorter, with a liberal education sprinkled throughout. This actually creates a better learning environment, as once you're "in", you can focus on the experience. Nowadays, the university is just another hamster wheel in the grind, in a never-ending arms race against the sea of other students/degrees/credentials. Failure to deliver results means you didn't consume enough, and must consume more. Eventually this dilutes the value of the degree, both from a signaling and a financial perspective. It seems like we're in the peak enshitification stage of higher ed.

For employers, requiring a degree doesn't cost them anything. So they're happy to keep piling on the requirements. I guess the question is what type of employers would actually be the first to decouple their recruiting/hiring from credentialism and rely on other metrics of competency?

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unaccountability_Machine

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Eddy_Viscosity2 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You are correct, but the fact that employers are being rational doesn't make them blameless. To answer your question is that I don't see any employers decoupling from credentialism because why would they? So I think any solution to that would require there has to be a cost associated with university requirements for job positions. A fee maybe? Unless the job legally requires the credential (e.g. engineer, lawyer, nurse, etc.), then any other position you have to pay a fee to include that requirement? I know, not great, but what else could be done?

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fzwang 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's an interesting conundrum, where everyone knows the system is bs but no one wants to take the first step. Hypothetically, some possible scenarios:

1) An external event, like a war, that stress test the credentials and to force selection based on outcomes. 2) Some sort of monetary benefit for employers, like extended internships for high schoolers. Assuming it's cheaper/more effective for an employer to train their workforce from scratch than pay the full salary of a recent grad. 3) A new field, where credentials haven't been established yet.

There are obv caveats to all of these. And they don't address the question of what a formal education is supposed to accomplish. At some point, it was supposed to be to train "better citizens". And that shouldn't be dictated by employers, imo. But nowadays it seems like the purpose is to get a job and survive.

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bilbo0s 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

But this is just a tacit admission that a lot of jobs need the credential.

And it's a slippery slope. Should, for instance, a chemist have the credential? It's easy to say, "No". Until you get another Bhopal.

Basically you would start getting more and more fields demanding credentials for liability purposes over time. Some would be entirely justified, like chemist and biologist. Some would be tenuous in the extreme, like c# or javascript monkey.

	▲	Eddy_Viscosity2 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There are absolutely jobs that require credentials and for good reasons that I fully support. I'm not talking about these jobs. It's the ones that require a credential, but the job duties do not involve the skillsets associated with that credential. An easy way to spot these is if the requirement is something like a 'bachelors degree'. Doesn't matter what field, you just have to have gone to university. This is BS requirement.

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7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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jstanley 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> "The purpose of a system is what it does"

Conversely, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...

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fl0id 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

To blame are employers but also politicians and Uni admin staff enabling the narrative that a degree should always be about employable skills. First employers often eintreten know what they need and in general this focus on practice is exactly what promotes roteness imo