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Its not about learning, its about paying your dues to the church of capitalism
For the US, id certainly agree with you. College is free here and some employers require it (less and less though). A coworker once told me a degree shows you can be serious for one thing and see it through. It shows you are capable of achieving a goal.
I believe your coworker is right to some extent. Getting a degree is a lot of work. It demonstrates your ability to do work and get things done.... Among other things.
Having any degree/post secondary diploma, generally says you have the ability to work on something without being forced into it. IMO, HS is generally expected and more or less forced on everyone, so it doesn't really count.
While I believe that's the motivation behind needing a degree to get a job, I also, personally, don't agree with it. There's plenty of hardworking people who never even considered college/uni after HS. Some of them are much more motivated and hardworking than the people I knew from my time in college.
I work in IT, and see degree requirements on all sorts of job postings. It's bullshit, since there's haven't been IT centric degrees until very recently, outside of CS/development. Most of these jobs don't require any programming whatsoever. They'll be for helpdesk, system administration, networking, etc. Programming knowhow might help but it's definitely not required. I don't need Java, or C++, or Python, or any other language to know how to click buttons on dialogs in Windows.
that's still such an ableist take. (as someone in the usa)
Employers are inherently ableist. They discriminate against people who are unable to do the job. They also discriminate for reasons unrelated to job performance, but then measuring job performance is very difficult even when someone has been working at a company for years.
Note that in professional sports and in Hollywood it’s quite easy to measure performance. Accordingly, you see athletes and actors compensated in a way that’s much more in line with their job performance than other industries.
Can you expand on this? I'm curious what you find ableist about it.
some people are just unable to go to college due to finances, physical/mental health, or other things like being a single parent. i was never able to go to college because i couldn't mentally handle the stress due to serious trauma of various kinds that i was just coming out of. i couldn't find a job to adequately support me and i had health issues and undiagnosed learning disabilities preventing me from having the energy or time to focus even on part time studies. i had no family, so no safety net. i tried taking college thru a work program but the college ended up being unaccredited.
and keep in mind some people have several/all of these things to deal with.
so to say that seeing someone went thru college shows they can stick to something, it's negating all the hidden struggles that the rest of us work every day to get thru. I'm on year 7 of my current job, so i can clearly commit. but saying that college is the measuring stick is kinda disrespectful for those who had a different path.