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That's where the community colleges come in to play. You can (right now) get a $60K/year job with a two year AAS in manufacturing technology from our local college. There are currently 9500 (and growing) open jobs in that field, within our college's district boundaries, that cannot be filled due to a shortage of workers. 




$60K/year with no debt, or $12-15/hr, with $150K debt, to flip burgers with that History of Greece degree?

i'm not sure doing away with them is the right call. maybe being more realistic and limiting the numbers enrolled. look at the ones mentioned above (early childhood education and human services and community organization), they're all necessary for a healthy society, and do provide an opportunity for gainful employment, just not for as many as are enrolled. same for history, writing (non-journalists) and art degrees (my wife is artist, self employed, does ok).
i can't think of many degrees that don't have a potential for gainful employment, though some (many?) are limited opportunities.
as a society, we need to be honest with ourselves, and stop telling ourselves everyone should go to college. no, they shouldn't. but we'd also be doing ourselves a disservice to completely remove those majors. we need to start limiting our student populations overall, and specifically within those specialized, but not in demand, fields.

I was nodding along thinking "yeah, yep, yea!" but then recalled conversations in my field. That there are just too many physical science majors, too. At least too many who choose graduate school for the number of good jobs out there. To the extent that, on one hand, maybe the problem is that far too many kids are enrolled in college. Full stop.

However: While it is jarring how many students earn physical science degrees but end up working outside their dream realm, too often just to behave like pipetting robots, there is a counter-benefit:

Perhaps no more at any prior time in human history than now do we desperately need a human population with scientific literacy. This is a rapidly growing era of scientific revolutions that need to be consistently parsed from misinformation. Even or especially by non-experts. 

And no matter what side one's opinions originate, when it comes to hot button topics (like cloning, evolution, anthropogenic climate change, stem cell biology, vaccines, GMO foods), society can only benefit from maximizing its skills of emotionlessly/methodically reasoning through things scientifically.

I'm now curious of the break-even point there, in terms of societal good. At which point, for example, do the societal benefits of a thing like scientific literacy outweigh the societal damage of this many people finishing in careers they feel are beneath their level of training?

The only chance would be for the NFL to start a viable (and well-funded) national minor league system.

I thought they already had.

imo, hs should also require at least a couple years of things like shop and home ec. and in many cases, like around here, not only is it not required, it's not even offered anymore. it's disgraceful.

The idea that there is an easy solution to this is probably the worst of all.

The NCAA's rules are made by the member institutions voting. It's not just 65 or so P5 programs, its hundreds of schools that make up the NCAA. They don't all have the same interests. Their common interest, though, is to create competitive athletic programs. Those programs offer a lot to their students, both the athletes and the non-athletes. And it isn't athletic department revenue that drives most of these schools' interest in athletics--it's recruiting for general enrollment. To give but one example, that's why Donna Shalala invested so heavily in the Wisconsin athletic department. It wasn't to make the athletic department more profitable, it was to raise the University's exposure and profile.

But how to make a fair athletic competition isn't the same as how to fairly compensate the participants. Most of these participants won't be professional athletes, and most of them have a negligible impact on revenue for the athletic department. Even in the "revenue sports"--and even for the programs making money on those sports (not all of them)--figuring out how much impact the second-string linebacker has (good enough to see the field a lot, but not a star) isn't easy. And it's different from school to school.

So just let them strike their own private deals? Seems like a good idea, but for the non-powerhouse schools they seriously worry (with good reason) about their ability to compete for those players, which makes the competition less fair. Without fair competition, the sport doesn't work.

Does that mean there isn't already imbalance? Heck no. There is. The question is how to balance it all, and the answers--again--aren't easy.

Take piece of hay out of his mouth and drawls "SEC SEC SEC".

Differing admissions standards from school to school is not fair either.