Fitz

While not red hot [APPLICANT UNKNOWN] news, it is pretty new news for me:

I got a haircut. First one since....
..November.

I am making steady progress towards the MSOL. I've completed 12 units in two weeks with 27 left to push through the baccalaureate checkpoint.

It is unsurprising to me, Grown Ass Man Fitz, why 1991 Fitz did not take to studying business and dropped out to be on the radio for 35 years. 1991 Fitz made so. many. bad. CHOICES. But radio was not one of them. I am so lucky to be able to say I have no regrets.

Returning to college feels a bit like auditioning to do the hero's work of creating TPS reports. I am proving to my professors I can perform mild tasks in Excel, PPTX, Word, and certain Adobe Products. And write both professionally and creatively.

After a few more weeks of mild tasks, I will have two of the three credentials I am pursuing: BLS and BBA undergraduate degrees.

I am seeking a credential. I treat it like client work built to spec. Read the ticket, hit the knockout list, never think of it again.

And this is where the breaking haircut news turns into something larger and considerably dumber.

I will now expand upon the mild tasks: they are the sort of mild tasks that anyone who has had either access to a computer or any sort of job could perform.

Any sort of job.

The Ontology of Hiring: Companies need the best human capital. Without the deep and substantive undergraduate training required to open Excel, answer an email, make a slide deck, and sit through a Teams meeting without visibly dying, the organizational risk is simply too great. Corporate Gandalf draws the bright line. None shall pass.

The New Barrier:

61% of surveyed employers admit rejecting qualified, experienced applicants who lacked a four-year degree.

Experienced applicants can be rejected before a human ever sees their name.

90% of large companies use applicant-tracking systems. About half of all applications are filtered out during screening.

And when I tell you these tasks are mild? They are miiiild. Any competent human could walk in off the street and perform them professionally and competently.

But this process? It's just fu***ng dumb. Not for me. I had a career. I get it. I'm a guy looking for something to play while I lope down the back nine.

I'm thinking of young people.

It's a crime with a capital GANNNNDAAAAAALLLLLLFFFF that young people are made to waste time eating these runny eggs.

People with degrees tend to earn more. But not reliably more than earlier entry into the workforce provides.

The demand for degrees for white-collar jobs has saddled three generations of Americans with occasionally unruly debt.

The degree doesn't guarantee employment. It grants the opportunity to compete for jobs.

Jobs performing mild tasks.

Which, from where I am in life, reads as a tremendous waste of time, money, talent, and human potential.

Thirty-five years ago, a professor doing the real hero’s work of teaching algebra to my middling mind said, “It would be best if we just gave everyone who wanted a bachelor’s degree a bachelor’s degree out of high school if they just want to get a job. Master’s, Ph.D., maybe no. But just a bachelor’s, yes.”

At the time, I could not understand how a man in the business of teaching business could believe that teaching business was bu****it.

Looking back, I realize it was the one real-life lesson I learned in college.

Are you sh****ng me right now or are you Taylor Farms sh****ng me right now?