The original point of education was to teach people skills. And it worked for centuries.
People became craftsmen, scientists, artists, statesmen—whatever path they chose, they learned a set of skills along the way to help them succeed.
Education transitioned eventually into theory, which was a boon for science the beginning of the end for liberal arts. After the theories had been taught, new ones were hastily developed, always seeking to outshine the past.
And then education eventually became opinion-based. Not teaching someone how to come up with their own opinion, mind you, but simply providing students with one opinion and teaching them solely that opinion.
College students are finding a lack of jobs because the job market in these leaner times is all about skills. Five years ago, you had a job. Five years later, a computer does your job. So how will you survive?
At that point your wage is going to be determined primarily by your customer service skills. Are you pleasant to deal with? When people think to themselves that they’d rather interact with a human being, they typically don’t have a grumpy and dyspeptic human being in mind—they’re thinking of a nice, cheerful, helpful human being. And obviously this is a real skill.
Until robots become sentient and can be as empathetic to us as real humans, humans will always have jobs.
According to Matt Yglesias of Slate:
But I’m not sure this is a skill that’s well-acquired by getting a high SAT score and then hanging out with other people who had high SAT scores for four years while listening to lectures from very distinguished academic researchers. Obviously it’s already the case that a lot of what’s taught in college has very little direct application to people’s jobs.
Eventually, smart college students grow up inside their own bubble—of classmates, professors, opinions, and “skills”. Everybody can do the same thing, everybody thinks the same way, and nobody can survive in the real world. That’s why you see people with Ivy League degrees bussing tables—it’s a job for hardworking young people who are saving up for college, not those who got a fancy degree and now can’t find a job in their field.
Once education became unhitched from learning skills, it became consistently less valuable—and more expensive. As we restructure this new economy, we can’t forget the education our young people are paying hand over fist for—that is now useless.
