The unemployment cycle

Aside from hard science and engineering degrees where the technical knowledge is a foundation for what you'll learn in industry, a college degree is simply a piece of paper that says "I received a balanced education and have my life together enough to focus, manage time, and complete tasks reliably for 4 years straight." Rarely do you ever use most of the knowledge you gained in college besides the aforementioned life management skills.
- Then why even bother going to a university? Seems like community college would be a much better use of your money to accomplish that
  
  University is meant to be higher level and teach you soft skills. Academics also aren't supposed to be the only thing you do, but participating in clubs and sports is supposed to give students experience in leadership to make them better leaders when they graduate.
  It is supposed to be a civilian version of officer candidate school.
  
  2 vs 4 year degree. I do recommend going to community college first though and transferring if pursuing a degree.
  
  It is
- Right, and without it the only thing you're qualified to do is work shit blue collar jobs and live out of your car. That is, if you were lucky enough to buy one before they became unaffordable.
- Working in the AEC firm, I can absolutely confirm that engineering degrees teach you almost nothing you'll do on the job. The disconnect between college and work in engineering not only exists, but is far, far larger than anyone may think.
  
  It depends. I absolutely use my degrees in my job, including my Masters. However, I'm heavy into the kinds of design where it is valuable.
  Also, a lot of the job is plan preparation and no one really teaches that in college.
- Eh. There's more to it than like you need a degree to become a doctor, lawyer, psychologist etc. It's just that you need to have a well layer out plan and a good understanding of what your strengths and weakness are. Unfortunately, in the US there's a massive emphasis on getting into college right after high school where people barely know what they want nor have any real world experience. In Ireland there's a scheme there's a thing called a mature student where its basically encouraging people 23 or older to go into college. Like courses will have spots reserved for them and the like.
  
  What do the kids do in the meantime? I understand it's a lot to throw a "kid" into university, but it's often done so they can get a career and start contributing to retirement and building wealth.
  I mean it's also impractical to have a family without some career so that gets put on hold too. Or worse they have kids and have to go to school at the same time.
  I'm not saying everyone should go to college, but just defending the reasoning for those that do why they go as young as they do.

To be fair I feel like college is way less about teaching you anything specific and way more about teaching you critical thinking and abstract conceptualization.
Like I didn't learn jack shit from my "American economical development in the 14th century" class but I did genuinely get good at telling good sources from bad ones while writing essays, and that IS a skill that has uses in life
- It's showing that you can complete a multi-staged project that required years of effort and investment without any immediate return on investment.
  Even if you don't learn anything in college, the sheer process of going through the motions and getting the degree demonstrates skills that are useful in an employee.
  
  Skills that can be shown from working at an entry level job. Or through several other methods.
  That's not a good reason to require someone to pay tens of thousands of dollars for the opportunity to even apply for a job.
  
  Skills that capitalist scum loves in exploitable workers
  FTFY
- To be fair I feel like college is way less about teaching you anything specific and way more about teaching you critical thinking and abstract conceptualization.
  That's because conservatives want to replace universities with vocational schools. Nothing wrong with those schools, but its just another face of their culture war politics making their way to everyday discussions.
  
  Yeah I really don't know what your reasoning here is. Can you explain?

Normalize lying to employers.
They lie to you all the time so fuck it.
- How many employers even check to see if you went to college unless you got a higher level degree? Maybe a few will ask for transcripts, but it's rare.
  
  If they do background checks and you list it on your resume / hiring paperwork, they all do.
  I used to work as a team lead on a call center help desk that had literally no requirements to get the job outside of a 10 question "technical interview" that features questions such as "can you name three programs that are a part of the Microsoft office suite" and periodically we would have new hires get fired once their background check returned that they lied about having a degree that they don't actually have.
  I don't know why they lied - degrees aren't even requested or required for getting the job, but they did and lying on anything that came up on the background check was an immediate termination
  
  I work for a background checking company... it's not even close to rare. I know clients that check your education records even if you don't have any.
- Me: "I'm the best neurosurgeon in the entire southern hemisphere"
  Interviewer: "Wow! You're hired! Welcome aboard. Can you start tomorrow?"
  The next day: "Haha bonesaw goes brrrrrrr"

Don't you know? Jobs work like prestige classes. You have to max your level and then you need to reset everything to be qualified. Age too, that's where we get all the 20 year olds with 30 years of experience.
- Time to do a 3rd prestige reset.
- BTW forget all that stuff in college while you are at it.

people always act like you're going to directly use stuff you learned in class "in the field" (think about how antiquated that term is, my god) and you're really not; every place has different standards and expectations. and the day-to-day is usually more trivial and doable than the raw theory in school -- i feel like most people could do most jobs if trained well by someone competent at them
- I am living testament to this.. i have blagged my way into several jobs (had some knowledge but not the qualifications required) and have done pretty well for myself learning as I go. I always say "Just treat me as if i know nothing, I won't be offended, i want to learn the way you do things here" and employers/managers seem to love that..
  However i must stress the fundamental knowledge was essential. along with an interest and desire to learn.
- Agree entirely.
  I am in my 40s, have two bachelor's degrees, got my second SPECIFICALLY in my field, have changed job directions half a dozen times within my field (because money talks), and have used nothing from college that I couldn't get in a month long certification program.
  I've gotten way more out of getting the respected industry specific certs than I did in more than half a decade of school.
  I've gotten a thousand times more skills from learning on the job from colleagues and working managers than college and certifications together.
- bring back apprenticeships

Besides, you are 30 already, yet have only 10 years experience. We are looking for at least 25 years for someone your age
- We need someone with a millennium of experience with a framework that just came out a month ago.
  
  My favorite is the ones where programmers are like "they wanted someone with 5 years experience with ? Guess I'm unqualified, I wrote it 3 years ago"
- Basically ageism in the workforce.
  
  Yeah they want you to have 30 years of experience, but you also aren't allowed to be old either. You have to be some weird enigma of someone who is 30 but also had 30 years of experience.

The difference is regardless of whether you directly use what you learned in college or not, you have gained experience and tools that will help you in your future endeavors.
I read this sort of thing as: Forget what you were taught because we’re going to reshape you to help you succeed in this position, but DON’T forget how you learned, what tools and concepts you used along the way, connections built, etc.
You have to understand the core building blocks you became familiar with still apply one way or another. All of that hardship helped you build experience and understanding which enabled you to enter the industry of your choice and get a job where they start to mold you in a way that benefits the work you were hired to do.
If you don’t go to college you didn’t have all of those building blocks from approved curriculums and standardized testing, in person labs, team projects, etc.
You can achieve without college no question but that usually means the job will need to do potentially even more molding to get a person to a similar spot. Not always but much of the time.
- Great explanation! I always knew this but never had the chance to mold the thoughts into one clear explanation which you just did.

"Forget everything..."
Way ahead of you buddy. I literally got like amnesia, a day after the qualifying exam for college.

Life is a game unfortunately. Play the game by the rules, win the game.
- If being saddled with debt AND a shitty low paying job is your condition of winning, then yeah
  
  Sadly I think winning in capitalism for the 99% is not starving on the street.

i just lie about my degree, works everytime
- Same. They've never checked.

it's not what you learnt but how you learnt it.. or so they say, anyway