Reply to Is this going to be a trend? (WSJ - Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It's Hiring High-School Grads)

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Reply to "Is this going to be a trend? (WSJ - Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It's Hiring High-School Grads)"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Palantir + Peter Theil are both gross. College can be so much fun and a great way to meet people. Why skip it unless you truly can’t afford it. [/quote]

When college becomes very expensive, it is no longer as much fun except for the few who will graduate with no loans. I think the pressure for everyone to get a degree that is expensive and it being branded as the best experience or best 4 years of your life  is equally gross. [/quote]

+1
The ROI for the majority of students is the worst investment they will make.  I hope we go back to apprenticeships, which is basically what this is.[/quote]
That all depends on if one is ok with working blue collar jobs that are harder on the body than white collar jobs.[/quote]

The error is thinking you need college for a white collar job. Up through the 1980s in Britain plenty of white collar industries recruited students right out of high school via a training scheme. Especially in finance, accounting, low level corporate roles. You would be surprised by how many rose through the ranks. So many office jobs don't need degrees if we are being honest, far more is gained from on site job learning.

As for critical thinking, I am ambivalent about the concept. It's a nice idea but college isn't the only place to get an "education." There are so many poorly educated kids coming out of colleges these days, and the degree is no guarantee they're equipped with the right critical thinking skills. [/quote]

You don't even have to look to Britain.  Up until the 1980s in the US if you lived in NYC, going to work on Wall Street was the equivalent of working for an auto company in Detroit.  I think in the 1970s and early 1980s like 40% of Wall Street CEOs had no college degree.  It was a viable pathway direct out of high school for many kids.

Now...the flip side argument is the business was far less complicated.  You didn't have all the complex financial products that exist today and their invention really taking off in the 1980s.  Much of this is due to computing power.

I remember when I started in banking in the early 1990s you might create a complex financial spreadsheet and then hit F9 and it had to run for like 6 hours overnight to incorporate your changes.  I asked some of the old guard how they did deals prior to computers and they said that someone would hand write projections using a calculator and once everyone agreed those were the projections a secretary would type them up.  Clearly, you couldn't run every random scenario you wanted, or make the models all that complex.[/quote]

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