Comments by "looseycanon" (@looseycanon) on "Why Are University Degrees Worth Less and Less?" video.
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If you ask me, you'd have to make universities go more specialized and maybe, just maybe, completely eliminate prep schools. I earned a Bachelors in accounting. Why do I need to study micro and macro economics (all be it truly fascinating subjects I actually like). That's two semesters worth of time, which could be spent on IFRS or specifics of some big taxes, like VAT (which can have so many of these specifics, that they alone could cover a a whole degree), or handling of customs and their effect on accounting. Or why teach marketing to statisticians? These are also questions, which the education system needs to finally ask itself. And then, there are the employers, who demand absolutely impossible skills from fresh graduates, which uni can't teach!
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Yeah, that wouldn't help much... There are two main reasons why:
1) Most of the fields, that you need to enter these days, are in their very early phase, meaning even companies them selves, don't really know, what skills they'll need in the future and thus can't communicate that need to universities, to create a study program, which would help with this.
2) A lot of societies needs are only perceived and can be outright disconnected with real needs in our economy, or be set up on poorly evaluated facts. Case and point, electromotive. You need a huge battery for an electric car, which has even greater impact on the planet, than petrol. And you have people, who claim it's not true, point to scientific studies, which don't take in to account consumer behavior and end up undercutting the need for battery size, because that supports their position and policies are built on that, which results in the picture, of what is needed in the economy for skills, being distorted, because under normal circumstances, in scenario like this one, more people would study fields surrounding internal combustion engines and would be looking for ways to make them even more efficient, and fewer people would go in to metallurgy and related fields, because there would not be such a demand for mining and refining more kinds of metals. Meaning, there would be a straight up mismatch between skills taught and skills demanded... Or in a different way, imagine industry standard being Ethernet and universities still teaching coax token ring.
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