End-of-year challenge: Day Eleven, Two Facts

Day Eleven: Two facts you find disturbing

1. A single mom has less of a chance of getting a decent job even still today because of the probability of time being taken off for sick kids (this is a quote), even though they tend to be more well-rounded and able to handle a wider variety of tasks than single people – even those (or especially those) with degrees.

2. The conventional wisdom is that you have to have a college degree to get a good job.  And most of the jobs that are advertised reference college degrees.  But attaining college degrees used to mean that you were above average intelligence because you probably had to get in on scholarships or else your parents were wealthy (which kinda also implied you were smart, since you’re their kid, and they were smart enough to also be born rich).  Then there were college loans that were supposed to make sure that you could afford to go even without the rich parents if you were in that case where you were smart enough but just didn’t make the cut.  Except that then people realized that the practice of usury made giving out loans profitable, so they wanted to encourage more people to get into college… but college is hard and lots of people couldn’t get in, so they made NEW colleges for EVERYONE to get a college education… except that college educations imply that you’re clever enough to learn the advanced stuff (let’s face it, some people have an upper-limit on what they can grasp), and lots of people who didn’t otherwise qualify really wanted that degree so that they could get the jobs that didn’t involve burgers and data entry.  So they lowered the expectations and standards for the students as a whole, diminishing the actual quality of education that’s received for the average Bachelor’s degree (compared to what you’d expect from an advancing civilization), so in the end, the market is dominated by people who had to read three extra literary references and pretend to learn about an Oxford comma, re-learned the stuff that really should have been covered in high school, and they’re none the wiser because they can’t legitimately compare against the educational standards of even two or three decades ago.  So, right now, our entire jobs economy is based on hiring people with glorified high school educations and massive, crushing debt.  And the smart people who avoided the scam are the ones that can’t find jobs.

(That may not technically be a fact, but it’s a strong implication, and it’s very deeply disturbing.)