Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

1/2 While I agree with your last sentence, I think there's more signal in a college degree. For a (relatively) small group of effective autodidacts, there's low or no value. But forced-ish exposure to new ideas builds useful frameworks for a lot of people.

2/2 I think the key insight is that universities are too expensive and inefficient as a mechanism to deliver that value. But they're well-understood (lower info costs), so more efficient methods still have a lot of work ahead of them to create a widely-understood credential.

Coda: capturing *actual skills* moves the info costs to a different place in the supply chain. A better credential-er still has to reduce the cost of assessing *actual skills.* One reason why replacement credential will start in technical fields, where skills can be measured.

The problem isn't that non-technical skills can't be measured; the problem is that a lot of non-technical students are leaving college *without skills.*

"I'm wearing beautiful robes, my people, but their beauty is impossible to assess because they are invisible."

I'm not sure these are completely separable problems. If there were easy ways to quantify and communicate (at scale) most non-technical skills, then I suspect fewer students would graduate without *actual skills*. Also, my robes *are* beautiful, trust me.

Most real abilities are evaluated through portfolios and confirmed via references; this is how the economy manages to handle the churning of experienced labor. In reality, this is also how hiring works for inexperienced grads seeking top-tier gigs, but we don't tell the kids that

The truth is that if you're completely incapable of demonstrating a skill, you don't have it. Employers don't actually demand evaluations that can produce numeral rankings to place humans at some discrete position on a normal distribution. They just need demonstrated ability.