alt Hacker News> The percentage of American adults over age 25 who have a college degree was only 20% as recently as 1990. When America was truly at the top of the world in the 1950s and 1960s, it was under 10%.
Due to automation and the great advance of technology, the floor for most jobs has risen such that the skills/knowledge that a 1950s school dropout had would be insufficient for anything but the most menial jobs today.
Outside of a few sectors like agricultural or physical service labor, our economy just doesn't need less educated people anymore.
That doesn't mean everyone needs a 4 year degree, but to make a sustainable living at least a degree from a trade or service school focused on some advanced technician skill is required, and that must be followed by apprenticeship and licensing. In the end, it requires as much time as University, but might cost less if the education is at a public community college.
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Hard disagree. Most useful skill and knowledge is still learned on the job. The "education" is just a selection process. And not only it is a pretty bad one, it is extremely costly.
Our immigration policies pretty strongly indicate we still need those less educated people doing work, we just don’t want to pay anything resembling reasonable wages for such.
Community colleges are the best existing institution we have to fill the gap. They are too wedded to the university model though. Credit hours, semesters, discrete courses, administrative overhead, the whole works, minus much of the campus life dressing.
Hell I applaud even boot camps for trying to fill it, for all their faults. At least they tried something slightly different.
People can operate heavy equipment and even fly planes without a fancy sounding degree, so I don't think some stupid office job is so complex that a HS grad can't handle it.
That is absolutely untrue - a large part of the jobs were either outsourced and/or automated to be trivial, but a large part is essentially barely made easier by technology - food service, all the jobs necessary for running and building infrastructure, homes etc. is only changing very slowly due to technology - this is due to the nature of the fields, even if there were rapid advancement in plumbing (there weren't) in the past few decades, most of the buildings are standing and rebuilding them makes little sense - same with water treatment facilities, power plants etc.
In fact I would argue in some ways society is even less capable today - the percentage of people skilled in the trades is much lower, so it would be much harder to rebuild from scratch.