Hire Education

I paid off my modest student loans, incurred decades ago, relatively quickly and easily. I had no support from parents for any of my post-high school education; I had to pay for it all through scholarships, work and loans. But tuition costs have since skyrocketed well past any measure of inflation and most certainly well-past affordability for the majority of Americans. We do not mind cutting taxes for the mega-rich, but we seem to have no problem making young adults start out life with a burden that is beyond crushing, especially if that higher education embraces professional schooling (MBA, JD, MD, DDS, DVM, etc.), where scholarships are rare or inconsequential.

For young adults carrying effectively the cost of a mortgage without getting a house, saddled for decades with student loans in a job-market where artificial intelligence is replacing workers at warp speed with resulting wage/salary suppression for all but the top of the economic ladder, this reality is bitterly unfair. The average age for those who marry these days is 27, up from 20 in the 1950s. Delaying having children, if they have kids as all (the U.S. birthrates are below replacement levels), is standard as is buying that first home… if ever. Urban young adults are buying fewer cars, explaining the rapid rise of Uber and Lyft and the rebirth of renting homes near city-center jobs. For unaffordable cities like San Francisco (and the nearby Silicon Valley), NYC, Washington DC and Los Angeles, tiny apartments and communal living are becoming a survival technique.

The world is changing and adapting. Prestigious, top-of-the-academic-hierarchy degrees still carry enormous weight, especially in the legal, financial and medical fields. But the tech world is littered with famous college dropouts – from Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg (both left Harvard before graduating) – and self-taught college tech whizzes who never got past high school. So the really hard question for many is whether the cost of college has spiraled so high, with crushing debt for most graduates (and even dropouts), that perhaps it is not necessary, particularly if career aspirations involve software development.

The March 30^th FastCompany.com explains: “‘Getting a job at today’s IBM does not always require a college degree,’ the company’s CEO, Ginni Rometty, has asserted. ‘What matters most is relevant skills.’ Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn, has been pushing the same message at his company. And David Blake, cofounder of the learning platform Degreed, has put it like this: ‘It shouldn’t matter how you picked up your skills, just that you did.’

“But others are decidedly cautious, noting that longstanding cultural norms and institutional inertia stand as powerful roadblocks to this new way of thinking. Some experts are particularly skeptical that a skills-oriented approach to learning and hiring can transcend the tech industry.

“‘We’re in the early innings of this transition,’ says Mike Adams, cofounder and chief product officer of MissionU, which offers an educational alternative to a traditional degree by focusing on skill building and job placement. Indeed, he anticipates that it will take ‘decades to shift’ to an environment in which capability trumps academic pedigree on a wide scale.

“The situation is evolving—but ‘not fast enough,’ adds Karan Chopra, executive vice president of Opportunity@Work, a social enterprise whose signature program, TechHire, has enabled thousands of Americans from underserved communities to access training and jobs..

“‘It’s important to realize that this is a problem of collective action,’ Chopra says. ‘Individual employers changing their hiring practices one at a time won’t work—or won’t work quickly enough. A critical mass of employers needs to shift behavior, signaling to the rest and influencing a change in the way the market operates today.’

“To be clear, no one who is advocating for a skills-centered system is suggesting that learning isn’t essential. In fact, the idea is that ever more of us must engage in lifelong learning as automation and other technological advances render our skills obsolete. Having only a high school diploma is not sufficient to land and hold a job anymore.

“The goal, then, is to make all kinds of courses readily available in physical classrooms and virtual settings alike, allowing folks to acquire know-how that’s useful in the real world and then demonstrate their prowess to employers.” Those with the relevant skills can prove their expertise with normal job-testing, an objective measurement that is enough for an increasing number of employers, from IBM to Google. There’s even a question whether traditional educational institutions are even capable of keeping up with the tsunami of change foisted on society by accelerating artificial intelligence. Are such software-driven, college-learned skills obsolete even as they are taught?

Technology and hyper-accelerating social change/income inequality are completely redefining the work landscape, shaking our political systems to the core. That has an equal threat-value to our educational systems. Thoughts of mega-socialist counter-measures, like a guaranteed universal basic income, have not come to terms with the innate human desire for competitive betterment. What exactly will people do as artificial intelligence penetrates virtually every job skill, from assembly line worker all the way up to doctors and lawyer?

If we replace people with machines, do the owners of those machines make all the money as workers are cut out? If enough workers are pushed out, who exactly will be able to buy those machine-generated services and goods? Oddly, there isn’t a single political system in the world that has ready answers to these questions. Populism has been a common response, seeking to place blame on more easily identified targets (immigrants and a currently irrelevant understanding of globalism, a “last decade” issue), but none of their goals and policies have saved jobs or stopped the onslaught of artificial intelligence. No one has addressed one harsh fact: the world no longer wants or is willing to pay for old world obsolete workers.

I’m Peter Dekom, and governments everywhere need to address these growing economic realities before their constituents tear them apart.