On job requirements

   Recently I've been on the hunt for a paying job, because even great thinkers have bills to pay. The biggest hurdle I've encountered is that each job, no matter how much it pays, requires at least two to three years experience. That's part of the reason why I'm working so hard on the blog, so that in a couple of years I'll have something to put on my resume.
    The second biggest hurdle is that many of these jobs require a bachelors degree. Mostly they're jobs paying in the sixty to one hundred thousand a year range, but I've seen a few that only pay about forty thousand. I get why they do this, a lot of people think they can write but actually can't, so they need some way of vetting the pool of applicants. I like to think I'm a good writer, but my skills mostly lie in the "give me an example and I can emulate it while giving it my own voice" category (seriously, I built a resume that way). I love to create stuff, but putting it into words that really say what I want to say is tricky.
   I do wish companies wouldn't just use college as a way of vetting applicants. I'm told that people who went to college are more driven than people who didn't go to college, but in practice I find that to be grossly untrue. Most of the people who go to college aren't going to improve themselves, they're going because society expects people to want to study past high school, and if you don't want to than you're punished for it. Conversely, if someone forgoes college, they generally have a plan for what they want to do instead, and the ambition to stick it out.
   There's also nothing stopping a determined person from looking at classes, finding the text books they use, and learning the material by themselves. These days there are tons of resources for every subject out their if your willing to look for it. It's more difficult, but you also learn more because you aren't just a passive student listening to a professor, but an active participant in whatever field you want to research.
   Society puts a lot of importance on education, but very little emphasis on learning. We don't encourage people to do anything that might allow them to figure out what they really want to do, we just push them down the road that will get them the most money, which is often the road that requires expensive education. But going thousands of dollars in debt won't help the vast majority of people on a college campus, because most of what they want to learn doesn't require a professor. They could learn it just as easily from the library, or from free online courses. College is supposed to be a gate, opening to lead you to great opportunities. Instead, it's become a wall, blocking the less fortunate from getting ahead in the world.
    I realize that college is a good way of vetting people applying for a high paying position, and I don't fault the companies who decide this is the best way to get qualified applicants. But there are many better ways of doing this. Maybe for a writing job, you could have them write from a prompt. Maybe a marketing job could have them do a sales presentation. There's not a whole lot you can do if the job is for a lab, I understand that, but I don't think a college degree is really worth it for me at this point.
    College does have it's benefits, but I don't think everyone, or even most people, should be required to go. There are a lot of jobs that won't repay back a student loan or need college level skills that still require a degree, but it doesn't have to be the case. Ultimately, I think we need to have a discussion of if college, community, private, or public, is worth it for all but the most intense of majors, and if it is, how do we make it as accessible to people as possible. We also have to talk about those who can't handle college, like I wasn't able to. Should they be allowed to suffer?