Telling kids graduating high school what to study so that in 4-5 (or more years) they might get a good job doesn’t work.

But it’s very frustrating that Kurtzleben, and essentially our entire elite policy media, doesn’t go a step further: trying to predict what particular set of discrete and limited skills will be useful in the future is a mug’s game. It’s a fundamentally risky way for an individual to behave, and for policy decisions that are supposed to be based on the most good for the most people, it’s incoherent strategy. Jobs in petrochemical engineering have been exploding, because of a largely-unpredictable boom in American fossil fuel reserves. Becoming a contracting engineer for a construction firm was a great idea in 1999, but by 2005, was a very risky proposition. Going to law school was the epitome of mercenary self-interest until, suddenly, it was the epitome of laughable, deluded foolishness. Teaching kids how to code Python now, when they’ll be hitting the job market 20 years from now, is ludicrous, especially in a world where there’s every reason to think that tech firms will continue to have very low employee to market cap ratios and where computers might take over the bulk of coding. Individuals can navigate the markets, if they’re smart, privileged, and lucky. But great masses of people never can. If you’re telling me that you know what every freshman should start studying in 2014 so that s/he can get a good job in 2019, I think you’re full of it.

The economy changes quickly. I know IT really well, so I’ll talk about that.

Roughly 80% of the day-to-day technologies and skills I relied upon to do my job in 2004 are now irrelevant or quickly being deprecated, or just weren’t used widely (or present at all) in the enterprise. There’s 20% of them that will basically never change – the core knowledge of the field such as binary math, etc.

So what does this mean?

Well, in general, universities tend to be behind in most IT/CS-related fields by 10-15 years. So if you get an MIS degree, by the time you get out of university you are likely to be 15-20 years behind the leading edge of tech (where the money is).

So you then have a lot of debt, and at least in IT are extremely far behind.  Yes, you are probably more likely to get a job than someone with no college degree, but if you didn’t get an internship and get some real-world experience, you are going to have problems because your knowledge is so archaic.