College loans succeeded in burdening many students, especially liberal arts majors, with debts they couldn’t repay. Thanks in large part to the rapid rise of AI, the promise of entry level jobs paying six figures for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) majors appears to be waning. Last week’s Wall St. Week, on defunded PBS, had an unsettling report on the weak job market for recent tech grads, along with some other segments of interest.
For years, the most brilliant computer programmers and scientists of the world have been progressively rendering their less brilliant, yet highly competent, colleagues obsolete. Their code is now generating its own code. Is it too late to cash in being an influencer?
We are at a tipping point in education, where major technology firms are only accepting job applicants from MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Cal Tech, and a select few other institutions of higher learning. If you are graduating from a less competitive college or university, forget it. There’s software that can do the work you would have been hired to do ten years ago, for a salary of $125,000 or more.
One notable exception I can think of is the leading healthcare software firm Epic Systems, which treats the University of Wisconsin/Madison as if it were a farm system team for recruiting new talent. Epic’s campus is even on a former farm.
It would be good to see at least a partial return to the idea of embracing education for its own sake. The value of HEAP — History, English Literature, Art, Philosophy — shouldn’t be undervalued. But how to make that affordable again, after so many millions of student loan dollars pumped up school coffers, only to see small, liberal arts colleges shutting down from the rise of STEM? What was the money spent on? Upgrading facilities to luxury accommodations, while adding administrative overhead, reducing the number of tenured faculty and relying upon adjunct professors. Not a good mix.
But there’s the problem of those fields of study being seen as “woke.” In my entire life, from the Cold War, to Viet Nam, through Watergate and its aftermath, I’ve never witnessed such a completely screwed up political environment as what Donald Trump has managed to create.
In my opinion, it all began with Ronald Reagan, acting as “Barry Goldwater Lite,” and being fond of saying, “I think you all know that I’ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.” Here’s the funny part. Republicans are acting only on that statement. In one instance, the next thing Reagan said was, “A great many of the current problems on the farm were caused by government-imposed embargoes and inflation, not to mention government’s long history of conflicting and haphazard policies.” Which is exactly what Trump is doing.
https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/presidents-news-conference-23
Am I ranting today? Sorry.