College is a Waste - Modernize Education (Slapdash argument)

I'm writing this hoping that it's read by as many people as possible. This is not an argument against education, the "intelligentsia", or academia. My hope is that more people will realize the need to rethink our education system - a nice bonus would be if employers stopped demanding degrees for jobs that do not require years of training.

Today, college is seen as essential for many outgoing high school students. They are told they need a degree to get a job or be paid well. However, I find it hard to believe anyone who has been to college in the last decade would agree. College has become a massive waste of time and money for students and the countries they exist within. This is made even more frustrating when we consider how much information is available outside of a college class. We need to bring College and the education system as a whole into the information age.

If you looked at degrees held by employees of a single company, you'd likely find a myriad of undergraduate degrees from Anthropology to Kinesiology. However, most companies are not looking for anthropologists, political scientists, or communication majors. Most people never work in the field they receive an undergraduate degree for, so why did they spend their time and money to get that degree? The answer is: because they were expected to by parents, peers, or employers. In the past this wasn't a bad decision, you showed that you could stick with something for multiple years, people weren't going into debt, and the transition from child to adult was not so rapid.

This not the case at present. College has become an exorbitant cost for many and a time-sink. When all the information in your textbooks can be found for free online, why should you be forced to buy them every year? Why do we still require physical presence for all students when we have teleconference technology and instant communications? Now, I'm not saying you should go to an online college and I'm also not saying that higher education should disappear. My point is that many jobs, especially in the face of automation, do not require college degrees. Although for many, getting the degree is a way of getting past red-tape that society has imposed on itself. Finally, even if the student would like to work with the knowledge they received, it's likely to be a non-existent job in the next few decades as more and more jobs are automated.

There are fields/jobs that undeniably require more education and training. Medical professionals like surgeons are a great example, but why is college the only way to create a surgeon today? We should make college and vocational schools synonymous. We can have a system for training specialized individuals, but we shouldn't require degrees for entry-level jobs like an office admin or service technician. This system should also utilize technology to complete training in shorter time periods. We should honestly consider it a massive failure of our society that it takes over a decade to produce a surgeon.

I think the near future will bring a lot of stories like this:

1. Student gets degree and leaves college at 22 ready to work and pay off their loans.

2. After a few months of searching, student gets a job in related work.

3. The company appreciates her work, but has a hard time justifying her wage now that a competitor has found a way to automate the job.

4. Student is let go and senior employee takes the role of monitoring the new equipment/software that performs the majority of tasks.

This was written pretty quickly so there's no sources and it's not been edited, sorry. Not to mention there's no ending lol, but this is anonymous so whatever. Hopefully, someone gets the ideas I presented