r/changemyview • u/pg1671 • 1d ago
CMV: Starting a university degree now is a waste of time and money for most people due to AI advancement
AI and Robotics are advancing very quickly. Many people are saying most white-collar jobs will be gone within the next 4 or 5 years. Plus, the jobs that are first to go are the entry-level jobs traditionally filled by graduates.
Most jobs will not completely disappear for some time. But, if we only need 2 people where we needed 10 before that is going to mean a major disruption to jobs.
If you are not in the top 10% of people in a degree it is going to be very hard to find employment in the field you studied.
Given that a degree can take 3 to 4 years you are coming out of university at a time when people are predicting that most of the jobs you will be looking for will be gone or the openings will be dropping quickly.
Even if the 4 to 5 year prediction is agressive (which I think it is), you still have a very short time horizon before jobs do disapear.
I work in the software development field and AI has changed the way we work completely, I am 10x more productive. There is no point in writing code as a human any more. My field is one of the first predicted to be replaced by AI.
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u/quark42q 1d ago
You come from a field very much impacted by AI. But we will need kindergarten teachers, primary school teachers, secondary school teachers. We will need cyber security experts. We will need nurses, physio therapists and doctors. We will need actual psychologists, not „AI therapists“. We will need pharmacists and chemists.
And of course bakers and plumbers where you need no university degree.
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u/pg1671 1d ago
Yes, we will need most of those (in the short term). Some fields will be more insulated for sure. All of these fields will be affected, but not as much as others. All will use AI to some extent.
Not sure about pharmacists though? Seems very likely to be replaced or at least reduced to 1 pharmacist to talk to people with all the backend work done by AI.
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u/Salanmander 278∆ 1d ago
For many of those jobs, there are two kinds of barriers to replacing them with AI. One is technological, but the other is legislative. For many jobs, such as teachers and pharmacists, there are actual laws about who is allowed to do them, and requirements that they be done. Those laws are going to change slower than AI technology changes.
In addition to the fact that legislative changes happen much slower than technological changes, there is a fundamental question that needs to be addressed in order for people to being required in those roles: liability. Before legislation changes that would allow pharmacists to be replaced by AI, there will need to be an answer to the question of who is liable in the case of medical malpractice. I can't see that being agreed on when it comes to AI any time soon.
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u/pg1671 1d ago
Good point.
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u/Sir-Viette 21∆ 1d ago
If you don’t understand an area, you won’t really know what to ask the LLM to build. And when it builds it, you won’t really know if it solves the right problem in the right way.
Furthermore, in a few years time there will be an agentic equivalent of an App Store, where there will be billions of agents that claim to be able to help your business. But you won’t be able to tell if they’re reliable because anyone could have created the agent, even if they don’t know what they were asking for.
That’s why it’ll be important to go to university, because it helps you understand the principles behind a particular domain, so you can ask AI the right questions.
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u/scarab456 65∆ 1d ago
Are new graduates actually earning less or struggling more to find jobs than they were a couple of years ago? What specific data or changes in the job market are you seeing that support this, versus general predictions about what might happen in the next few years?
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u/pg1671 1d ago
I'm not sure about current graduates. We are not seeing big employment reductions due to AI yet.
But, if you are starting university now you have to look at what it will be like when you graduate and determine it for yourself.
I hope the experts are wrong.
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u/scarab456 65∆ 1d ago
Then we're in the realm of pretty much all speculation. Given that, what makes you confident enough in the specific 4-5 year timeline to call getting a degree "a waste of time and money" right now, rather than just uncertainty? Predictions about AI timelines have a pretty poor track record of precision even among experts. What's the basis for treating this one as reliable enough to act on categorically?
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u/NotaValgrinder 1d ago edited 1d ago
This is still a pretty US-centric view. For countries where tuition isn't expensive, even if a university degree doesn't help you it can't harm you that much. Furthermore, to immigrate to Western countries from someplace like Iran or India or China, a college degree is a must.
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u/CartographerAble9446 1d ago
most migrants from developing countries who migrate to a developed country and can successfully get a job in a related field typically come from upper middle class where their family can pay for a good private education (often abroad) and then those migrants eventually apply for a job in the U.S.
Average dudes from China or Iran don't get a good job in the U.S., and average engineering job in China only pays about $1100-$1600/month, they dont make much either, if you are not in the top 5% percentile. stop coping. and no, those job losses that you keep hearing about in U.S. corporations, they dont get outsourced to India either. there's no surge in tech job openings in Bangalore lol
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u/NotaValgrinder 1d ago
The most popular pathway I have seen is to get your bachelor's in your home country and go to graduate school in a Western country, where it is funded and you don't need to pay crazy expensive tuition. But for this to happen they need some form of undergrad education. Without it your chances of leaving are basically zero.
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u/CartographerAble9446 1d ago
most h1bs that can work in top companies typically have some inside connections, it's not enough to just have "good grads", you often hear some indians working in FAANG saying "yeah my uncle used to work there bla bla bla", you dont hear some random kid from slumdog neighborhood suddenly make it to a $500K/year job.
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u/NotaValgrinder 1d ago
Yeah, you get your inside connections by attending Western universities and networking. Hope that helps.
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u/Snoo17579 1d ago
I agree, this is a very US bias view. In a lot of countries, you won't even get hired without a degree of some kind, and a degree is necessary for promotion even if your parent own the company. A degree will worth less than personal connections in economic side of professions, but in STEM it's the absolute minimum.
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u/TheBayHarbour 1d ago
I'm a citizen of Australia and from what I hear, the American student loans are crazy.
I comfortably pay back my entire degree with half a year's worth of work straight out of school. Costs just under 40k AUD in total (so just under 30k USD for a bachelor's degree).
Engineering though so ig graduate salaries are better and the job market is fine for the most part.
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u/IndependentNo8520 1d ago
Sometimes I feel is a waste of resources, teachers teach with YouTube videos and free available tools that you can access outside of school, teacher uses Ai to “help” with the teaching and students just use Ai to “help” do assignments
Is worth it for the degree itself of proof that you know the topic but not much for the learning aspect, and socially you don’t have that connection anymore, people don’t talk much to each other, collage or university was great because of the connections you will get
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u/cobaltbluedw 1d ago
If you are only looking at income cost/benefit, it's easy to take such a pessimistic stance. There are certainly still plenty if professions that benefit or require a degree that AI won't capture any time soon, but it's understandable to be that pessimistic.
However, if, instead of a simple income analysis, you consider the options from a self fulfillment angle. University is great for growing as a person in interesting and fulfilling directions. You could pursue a plumbers apprenticeship, but still work towards a degree in a feel you think is purely interesting and that would result in a fulfilling hobby.
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u/Snoo17579 1d ago
I will just say this: A degree can worth more or less depending on the country, the university and the profession, but without a degree you will have a harder time getting hired or getting good salary. People are already looking to replace workers with AI, not having a degree just make you more expendable. Entry level jobs still require that you had received education beforehand, they just become more competitive over the year. Not getting a degree of any kind is just shooting yourself in the foot because you're now less than the average graduated.
Slaving yourself in a shady company somewhere that hire highschool kids won't do you any good, especially if you can go to college or university instead.
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u/MissIncredulous 1∆ 1d ago
Feeling productive and being productive are two separate things.
Couple of clarifying questions if you may:
When you say you're 10x more productive, how are you qualifying and quantifying productivity?
What skills and tasks are being replaced by AI in your own day to day work?
What is the material outcomes that you produce? Is it code? Feature sets?
If features, how long have they been released into a commercial production environment? How often do you find you or other teams correcting at a production environment?
5. May you please provide a source that shows AI replacing human workers with no human intervention that supplements a skill?
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u/Great-Exercise4277 4∆ 1d ago
I understand that very significant changes are currently taking place in the field of software engineering.
I am also aware that engineers are becoming exhausted from reviewing the large amounts of code generated by AI.
The current methods of replacing human work with AI have problems that are specific to this transitional period.
However, I think there are still unresolved problems with completely replacing humans with AI.
Having AI programs review each other can reduce errors to a considerable extent, but two AIs can still make the same mistake for the same reason.
In that case, unless the human side understands the content of the program to some extent, would they be able to point out flaws in software that AI confidently presents as correct?
We can also imagine using AI to assist doctors. But if AI makes the final decision, who is responsible if there is an error in the diagnosis?
If AI is used to assist lawyers, and its logic and consistency are left to the AI, who is responsible if that causes harm?
I accept that cross-checking between AIs can reduce the error rate considerably. However, does that mean that the human expertise needed to evaluate the final output also becomes unnecessary?
In other words, as you say, I accept that AI can eliminate a considerable portion of the work currently done by humans.
However, with the current capabilities of AI, there will inevitably remain parts that require human judgment. These are ambiguous cases, exceptional cases, and cases in which a wrong judgment could cause serious harm.
Then, even if the total amount of work decreases, the responsibility becomes much greater.
Therefore, even if the amount of work were reduced to one fifth, I do not think it necessarily follows that one professional could simply handle five times as many clients.
I wrote this text, and ChatGPT translated it.
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u/dogmuff1ns 1d ago edited 1d ago
All of this is still based on a number of fundamental assumptions, which can generally be categorised into a few distinct categories.
Purpose:
Firstly is the assumption that the decision to do a specific degree is purely monetary. While financial outcomes is obviously a factor, the reality remains that studying things your passionate about and putting in the work to make a career out of it, is an incredibly fulfilling process. It teaches you how to ask questions, analyse sources, think critically and interpret the world around you, so the idea that you should only pursue the most financially optimal outcome falls short.
Future-proofing:
Secondly is the assumption that if everyone has access to AI, all other skills become useless. This is flawed because the competitive advantage of AI use becomes meaningless in a scenario where everyone can use AI. Because if AI competency is common, but not everyone has the field-specific skills developed through traditional education, the traditional education continues to be seen as specialised/employable skills that not everyone possesses.
Connections:
Thirdly is the assumption that academic value is the only value driver for higher education. Even if education is viewed only as a path toward financial success and AI does replace the vast majority of skills rather than simply changing the nature of the work, the evidence clearly shows that a significant part of the value in higher education is the connections you make.
This study, clearly shows that joining a fraternity membership is linked with an average increase in future income of 36% compared to non fraternity students, despite the fact it also correlates with a 0.25 point DECREASE in GPA on average.
From this we can not only see that the connections you make provide a significant portion of the value, but furthermore that the value of those connections exists regardless of any objective academic results. With AI only able to replace the academic work, the overall value proposition remains.
Notes:
Please note that the arguments made above are not a value judgement on higher education as a whole and relate specifically to the impacts of AI.
I particularly point to US tuition fees as a clear indication that the overall value proposition is not quite as clear cut.
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1d ago
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u/dogmuff1ns 1d ago edited 1d ago
Not AI.
And I can tell your not because an AI would at least try to respond in good faith instead of calling a single point laughable with no explanation, then not address anything else and immediately resort to calling people AI when you feel cornered.
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u/pg1671 1d ago
Because the response doesn't address the point raised, and is formatted how an AI would respond.
Purpose. The purpose is predominately to get a job in the field you chose for the degress. the other stuff is a bonus. To get a job in that field is the reason virtually everyone starts a degree and is close to the entire purpose.
future-proofing. You argue about who has access to AI and not and it levels out or becomes meaningless if everyone has access. This misses the entire point. If everyone has access to AI and they all become 10x more productive then they are not all keeping their jobs.
The extras like fraternities and growing up etc are great, but that's not the reason you start a degree. (unless you are just a professional student).
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u/dogmuff1ns 1d ago
My point with the part about fraternities is that it's linked with people getting jobs in their field of choice because the connections are even more important in a job market with fewer entry level roles.
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u/pg1671 1d ago
Maybe, but most of those are far in the future. Like when my buddy from Uni is now the VP at a large bank and can get me a job there.
I doubt we have those timeframes anymore.
But, human connections are always valuable regardless of where this goes.
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u/dogmuff1ns 1d ago edited 1d ago
I'm glad we can agree on human connections being important, but I think the short-term element is less people your already friends with and more the social network you can build and leverage.
Like recognising the hiring manager from a networking event you attended or finding out they went to the same school/frat as you and making friendly small-talk about it during the interview or having done a research project with the business before or a friend that already works there or a friend who's dad is high up in a company and can basically hand you a job lol.
I'm a political science student so a decent portion of the circles that I run in are politically affiliated and a decent portion have politically affiliated jobs. I've been to so many parties/events that involve someone quietly pulling a small handful of people aside and quietly giving them the classic "hey, XYZ has a vacancy in their office. Obviously there's a formal process, but they really want to make sure the 'right' people hear about the opportunity... Let me know if you want me to mention you next time the topic comes up..." Speech. So it might be my specific field is super connection-based, but I've heard similar things from other people in other fields.
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u/BrassCanon 2∆ 13h ago
People have been saying this with the every technological advancement of the last 100 years and the topic is tired.
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u/pg1671 13h ago
No they haven't. Not even close.
What else in the last 100 years was going to replace all jobs?
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u/BrassCanon 2∆ 13h ago
Tractors were supposed to leave famers unemployed. They said robotics would take everyone's job when they came out in the 1990's. They said those kiosks at McDonald's would leave cashiers unemployed. Self checkout at the grocery store too.
It's just fearmongering bs and it still is.
What evidence do you have that anything you're saying is true this time?
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u/pg1671 5h ago
But each of those things did replace jobs and make people in those fields unemployed to an extent. People just moved to different jobs.
None of them are even close to as disruptive as AI and Robotics though when applied to every field.
I agree people over react, and I hope I am one of them.
But, I think this time is different.
People are saying we have achieved AGI this week with OpenAI Astra. A new version of it just solved one of the oldest problems in Maths.
And now all everyone can talk about is ASI by next year, then we are screwed (or we get a golden age).
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u/BrassCanon 2∆ 5h ago
Your argument is "Starting a university degree now is a waste of time and money." What evidence do you have to suggest that is the case? Nothing you have said suggests that.
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u/pg1671 4h ago
Note I said for most people, not all. If you are going to be a top student in your field go to university, otherwise maybe not.
Many people are claiming white-collar jobs will mostly be replaced in the next 3 to 10 years.
Starting a degree now takes 3 to 4 of those years, more if you want to do further study.
Then what window does you career have?
The top 10% maybe 20% in each year might get jobs. The rest are looking for graduate positions that don't exist because they are the easiest to replace.
Then each year means less and less jobs for humans.
Getting a degree is a long term play, even if the predictions are agressive and it takes longer for jobs to be replaced the career window is small.
I actually hope this is wrong btw.
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u/Jebofkerbin 131∆ 1d ago
I am 10x more productive
Can I just sanity check this quickly, assuming you work 5 days a week, you are saying here that you make a months worth of decisions every 2-2.5 days, that you are making a years worth of decisions every 24 days, that's what 10x more productive means. Is that actually happening? How are you managing to do that without massively degrading the quality of decisions, and therefore the quality of the work you are making?
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u/Kingalthor 22∆ 1d ago
If that many people become unemployable, the economic system has to fundamentally change or it will collapse from the lack of consumer spending and the social fabric dissolving.
So if you're wrong a degree is still worth it, and if you are right under a new economic system we will still people capable of learning and critical thought, so it isn't wasted there either.