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Slaw's avatar

Colleges should be the destination for those interested in Sartre and Camus, Planck and de Broglie. Attempting to transform universities into some kind of glorified vocational system that confers the final stamp before a white collar career is wreaking havoc on society. It is especially harmful to disadvantaged/working class populations who a) take on horrific amounts of debt in an attempt at a better life and b) are often unsuited to "creative" professions due to a mismatch in aptitude or temperament.

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Always Adblock's avatar

The "get the job done" part is interesting. For all that we live in a fairly ruthless capitalist economy, there are lots of places for the incompetent* to hide, and paradoxically this becomes easier the more white collar the environment. I've done pizza delivery, where an inability to find a house or show up on time gets you unceremoniously fired. I've done data entry, where slacking off to read a sports website gets your pay docked. I've done blue collar work, where incompetence makes you the pariah of the shop and guarantees temporary misery and eventual unemployment. And finally I've done - and am at this second doing - middle management in corporate America, where busily doing eight hours of unproductive nothing a day gets you a matched 401k and health insurance.

In this sense, funneling people into roles that are contrary to their abilities actually makes a lot of sense. Few things have less impact on day-to-day life than the composition of a Google doodle or shuffling the menu options on the Uber app. If on the other hand that person can't check a brake system properly, or can't hang drywall correctly, the consequences are much direr.

Eventually the music will stop. But for the time being, arraying society to get as many people into home office sinecures as possible, ability be damned, is very, very rational, because what use is ability anyway when resources are so abundant and roles so meaningless?

*Many of these people being incompetent through little to no fault of their own; rather they are acting very rationally by taking opportunities afforded them by a society that thinks diplomas are magic scrolls that award not just a middle class life but actually denote someone's abilities.

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