However it happened, the absolute maniacal obsession with job experience has ruined the market. Yes the more involved jobs in information security do require widespread knowledge that can't necessarily be taught on site. A lot of the entry jobs in tech though are not complicated and can easily be taught on site but even then, companies have defaulted to requiring years of prior experience even for those positions.
The problem isn't necessarily with job _experience_. It's the acronym. Most employers seem to believe that YOE stands for years of _employment_, which has effectively cut off anyone who wasn't previously employed at a relevant position. You can gain experience in almost anything by working hard at home (and 90% of that would absolutely carry over to a FT position), but you can't do the same for employment (unless you accept fabricating your job history). Cybersecurity is actually a field where hacking away at home, messing around with codebases, doing ctfs can actually give you TONS of experience, but barring you coming up with major zerodays, no one cares.
They are doing the bare minimum for cybersecurity insurance requirements, thats it.
1. Pessimistic, harsh, etc: the quality of US graduates has been falling. Reading comprehension has been on a downward trend over the past decade. Mental illness, depression, and attention disorders are on the rise. Grade inflation, social media, AI availability, we spent years talking about how all of these things would be bad, and now the experimental cohort of kids growing up in this world are graduating and can't find jobs; maybe its not a coincidence.
2. AI automates processes. It doesn't just "do stuff" broadly speaking. AI has increased the leverage that process experts bring to the table: Doing 100x more of the right thing is infinitely more valuable than 100x more of the wrong thing, and with AI proliferating at the rate it is, the differentiator actually isn't in the 100x; its in the driver. Companies need senior talent; its like low-background steel.
I doubt we will see reversal on this in the near term. If anything I expect the "unemployment in their field" chart for every seniority bucket to continue up-and-to-the-right, just lagging behind new grads. But, whether that surfaces in general unemployment remains to be seen: Generally, I think the value of a college education is just going to drop.
We will likely have a similar concept in our country as China's "lying flat" movement unless we make a big shift.
No, you miss that "lying flat" is only possible when cost of food/living is low and housing is abundant.
That was/is the societal narrative for the last forty plus years, yes.
But as the graph also shows, graduate unemployment rate was lower for much of 2010s and before, so in some sense it really was "easier" with a college degree.
College doesn’t prepare you for work as effectively as work, but it also teaches interesting things and prepares for academia (graduate school).
> New grads have not fallen behind their peers who skipped college, either. Young workers without a degree sit at 7.2% unemployment, well above the grads' 5.6%. A degree still beats no degree. What it no longer does is beat the average.