How to keep people from calling in sick

[MUFDVR]

How much more money would you be making with an undergrad degree?  Or a Masters?  How much money did you miss out on?  Quite a lot.  To say you've missed nothing is ignorant at best.

You're bitter as fuck about college.  You always have been.  Your lack of a degree has hampered your career, you've whined about that many a time.   Most people like you realize the importance of the degree and further their education because they aren't afraid and realize it's the smart thing to do that is clearly in their own best interests.  Your own biases cloud your judgement and show little you know.

So, without college, how do you propose we prepare people to be doctors, lawyers, scientists, nurses, engineers and other professions that are highly important to our society?  Since you are so smart, you must have the answer, right? 

[Ogre]

I'm currently making as much or more than people who have a degree in my field. Any complaints I had prior were merely frustration from some organizations using degrees as gatekeepers when the job market was tight. In hindsight, I'm fortunate to have not worked for those companies. Once I got the right certifications my career took off like a shot.

I can paint a scenario with a broad brush:

A decentralized knowledge sharing model utilizing the myriad communication channels that have existed for decades now to distribute knowledge. In fact, many people in the world educate themselves this way already because all of the knowledge in the world is at our fingertips now.

Apprenticeship or distributed and focused training centers or seminars for hands-on skills.

Paid testing and certification clearinghouses that provide proof of knowledge through standardized testing and verification of credentials. In fact, this part is used widely in the IT field, and certifications are more valuable than degrees. A non-degree CCSP averages $135k per year, add some cloud and engineering certifications and one can exceed $200k without ever stepping foot in a college. All of the training is available in books, or online. I know a guy making $180k with just a few Cisco certifications. The best software devs I've known didn't have a degree, but they were certified. A good Dev with the right skills and certs can clear $200k. If you can show current and relevant knowledge, you don't need a degree at all. Very few companies require a degree for any IT position even through engineering and management positions, where project management certs rule the day. There's no reason at all other fields can't do this.

In fact, using the certification paradigm would be arguably better. A doctor can ride on a PHD for his entire life and be completely unqualified at the end of his career, yet still licensed to practice. An engineer can operate off of the same stale knowledge for decades as material sciences and techniques pass them by, and still have engineering credentials. (incidentally I'm a credentialed engineer without a degree, how about that?)

Certifications would expire and need renewal. Using this paradigm you can be assured that someone has up to date knowledge of their given profession.

Wouldn't it be nice to shop for a doctor who you can be sure has the most current knowledge in the field in which you require care? How about a lawyer who you can be sure has current knowledge in an area of law that you need assistance with? How about an engineer who has demonstrable knowledge of the latest in material sciences?


This is also cheaper than University, doesn't require the ridiculous infrastructure, and operates much more efficiently. No more ivy covered buildings housing stale knowledge and lazy entitled tenured professors. No more paying for an irrelevant sportsball team's stadium in your tuition. No more gatekeeping assholes who rest on their haunches with decades old knowledge ruining innovation.

[MUFDVR]

Your response shows how little you know about the professions you cite.  Everything you suggested has been incorporated pretty much since the profession was created.

1) Each one of those professions require a license and some type of formal testing and education (mostly of which is done in the university).  Bar exam, med boards, CPA exam, PE, Arch Exam, Nursing exam, teaching license and exams, etc.  It's already done.  BTW, there aren't many "hands on skills" in those professions, most of those professions rely upon brain power, not mechanics.  We already have "paid testing and certification clearinghouses."

2)  Each one of the professions require CE (continuing education) in order to remain licensed. If you don't keep up, you lose the license.  This applies to doctors, nurses, teachers, engineers, CPAs,  architects, etc..  The idea that they can stop learning and still practice isn't true at all, the system doesn't allow this.

3)  Each of those professions has an learning and apprenticeship component built in to it.  Those professions require a combination of content learning and applied learning.  The content learning is done at the university.  Testing is done for every class to ensure that the content is learned.  If the student doesn't learn the content, they fail out.   The mastery of the content is so important to the profession that students must be tested to ensure they know it, this is where college comes in. Each college is accredited in the fields that it teaches.  The teachers and the process are tested in order to remain accredited on a regular basis.

The apprenticeship component begins after the degree is earned and required to be licensed.  Residencies for doctors, two years of experience for CPAs, clinicals for nurses, internships, etc.

Ogre, you really need to do some research about the professions and the university system of learning.  How you think it operates isn't how it operates.

The knowledge may be at our fingertips, but you have to have a method to ensure that knowledge is learned.  The university system does that better than any other system.  If that wasn't the case, there wouldn't be universities.

And Doctors get MDs not PhDs.

[Ogre]

The CE systems you described seem to be doing the job without the University system... Why not just start there?  With regards to hands-on training, it sure seems like surgeons need that sort of thing to learn proper technique... so fuck off.

The idea that an ingrained institution will just disappear because it's not needed is ridiculous. That's not how the world works. That's free-market idiocy, and the basis for all kinds of things that clearly don't work like trickle-down economics, and free market regulation of environmental concerns. 

You're fool and a dinosaur, and you're defending an outdated and stupid system that costs everyone involved too much money to keep supporting stubborn and foolish old dinosaurs just like you.

You can be replaced by automation, just like most other people, and the world will be better for it. I'll be happy to continue facilitating that.

[MUFDVR]

Dude, CE doesn't need the university system because the amount of content isn't enough to warrant fulltime classes.  But to get the job that requires CE does require college to learn the content.  And many colleges and universities do offer CE. 

Hands technique for surgeons is an outlier, the exception not the norm.  Plus, it's far more important to know what to cut and what not to cut.

You don''t even know what I do, so how can you say I am going to be replaced by automation? 

Ogre, you are just a bitter uneducated fool.  And you've given zero suggestions for how to improve the system.  In fact, your suggestions for what to do are already implemented.  Which you would know if you had ever been to college or done any research on the subject.

The only person to blame for not having an education is you.  Duh.

Bottom line, would a college degree have made your life better or worse? 

[Ogre]

You don''t even know what I do, so how can you say I am going to be replaced by automation? 

I don't need to know what you do. I know you'll be replaced. It's part of my job to replace people with automation. Nobody thinks that they can be replaced, but that's wishful thinking. There's no escaping it. It's coming. I'll eventually be replaced too.

A University education would have done nothing for me in my current career. Perhaps I could have taken a different track, but it doesn't really matter. I'm in an awesome place.

You assume that I'm uneducated because I didn't complete a degree. You're wrong. I'm very well educated, and well credentialed. I just didn't use a University to do it.

[SpaceMonkey]

I'm broke. I owe more than I make.