What sort of non-stem degree field did you get into and and what point in your life did you learn the skills necessary for whatever career you have now?
The mentality comes from people in the more recent generations having to deal with harsher competition and lower economic prospects, and not having certain expensive pieces of paper lock you out of many opportunities. The problem is that trade schools need to be reformed/expanded, or employers have to reevaluate how they evaluate things.
Being poor is only something you can truly understand once you've tasted it yourself. The stress alone feels like it's shaving many IQ points from your baseline. Even then, I got only a limited understanding compared to people in the third world. (not going for the misery olympics here, just an observation)
It's not dumb, it just hides a cynical compromise. Companies need to wade through tons of applications, young people want a path through which they have some degree of certainty (pun semi-intended) that their work will lead to social capital + being with other people their age in a common setting. The college experience leaves no one very satisfied but many chunks of society tolerably satisfied.
Of course, the social contract is weakening and a new compromise will have to be found. That may simply be the broader acceptance of online degrees and certificates.
It's been a while since I read Dilbert but I've come to find you can often learn just as much from the Wallies of the world as from the Elons, and I don't mean it as cautionary knowledge.
He was hyperbolic but there most definitely is a ton of pressure to use Facebook and other forms of social media, especially if you are young. In some cases, people perceive the absence of a Facebook account as a red flag and even a sign of weirdness, or as an outright lie (similar to giving a fake phone number).
>People don't need lots of friends. They don't need 100s of possibly useful people on a website they have to maintain and update in order to "fit in".
I can guarantee that if you have the gregarious personality type that suits this type of lifestyle, having a large network of acquaintances that are conveniently accessible in a single location can indeed improve the quality of your life in a significant way. This is especially true for people who travel a lot or those who are in a university setting. It's not so much about social capital or social climbing but rather the simple availability of making plans and doing fun things with other people that would not happen without the specific dynamics made possible by Facebook.
My main point is that the lack of Facebook affects the process by which these real friendships form. In a context where Facebook is used by most of your peers, the lack of it creates an additional barrier to socialization that has subtle negative effects which compound over time. The result is that you can miss out on forming real friendships because the cementing period is stunted by the reduced amount of unplanned interactions. Of course, this is highly ironic when seeing that strong friendships are resilient to the absence of social media or the passage of time.
The concept may seem strange but it's actually no different than someone growing more distant from a group of friends because they habitually miss out on the weekly Quiz Night or something.
It's not so much that people force you to communicate by one means, but rather that the friction involved reduces the amount of interaction in an automatic way. As kinkrtyavimoodh pointed out, it's an organic process and not really a conscious choice by people to isolate others.
I stopped using Facebook for a variety of reasons years ago and I am starting to regret it. In my case it had a clear negative effect on my social life, since friendships are heavily based on repeated unplanned interactions and many of these now occur on the service. If you add to this the friction of contacting someone outside of the service (in a context where they are a clear minority), the slight difference builds up and affects how friendships develop during student life.
The privacy issue is certainly a factor but over time it feels more like an expression of vanity. I am just a face in the crowd, what matters is the relationships I can build with others in the present before my pubes turn grey. If Zuckerberg becomes the Dark Lord it will be a collective problem anyway.
I'm sure some of the strategists in Vietnam were well aware of the horrors of chemical warfare but chose to coat many acres of forests with Agent Orange regardless. Just like any sufficiently large organization, the military has members on every rung of the empathy/introspection spectrum.
When I first saw Hong Kong I fell in love with the place and have wanted to live there ever since. But I also quickly realized that it is a hellish place if you have no resources.
Only because we were fortunate enough that the culture that ended up banning it won out. In fact we are lucky that Western culture took this path at all.