Every Job Should Be Its Own School

Peter Diamandis said something on his podcast recently that I haven't been able to shake.

The group that's out of work the longest in America right now is people aged 22 to 28. They got a degree that was useful when they started college. By the time they graduated, it wasn't as valid anymore. Computer science, he pointed out, is the case in point.

He says the old social contract, do well in high school, get into a good college, get a degree, get a job, is falling apart. And Elon Musk went further on the same show: he's not sure why anyone would go to college right now unless it's for the social experience.

I believe them. I'm not the only one who thinks so, and the math gets worse the more you look at it.

"If you're a sophomore right now, you're cooked"

That line isn't mine. It came from someone on the podcast, but I haven't stopped thinking about it, and I agree with it. If you started a four-year degree in tech or the sciences in 2024, the field you're studying will have reinvented itself two or three times by the time you graduate. And even if the material somehow survives, AI will probably do most of the work you trained for.

This isn't a vibe. A study out of Stanford's Digital Economy Lab, built on ADP payroll data, found that employment for workers aged 22 to 25 in the most AI-exposed occupations has fallen 16 percent relative to everyone else since generative AI took off. Software developers aged 22 to 25 specifically are down about 20 percent from late 2022, while older workers in the same jobs kept growing. The jobs AI can't easily touch, nursing aides for example, are still hiring across every age group.

And here's the punchline for anyone who finishes the degree anyway. The New York Fed puts underemployment for recent college grads aged 22 to 27 at about 42 percent as of mid-2026, meaning they're stuck in jobs that never required the degree in the first place. The World Economic Forum expects 39 percent of workers' core skills to change by 2030. So even if your degree isn't obsolete at graduation, it's on a timer.

The real trap is the pivot

Everyone who talks about the future of work says "reskill" like it's free. It's not free when you're older.

If you're making $70,000 or $80,000 a year with a mortgage and kids, you can't decide your field is dying and start over at the bottom. That's $20 an hour. You can't feed a family on that while you spend four years in a classroom. The system asks you to choose between staying in a sinking field and going broke to escape it.

That's where I land: every job should be its own school.

My fix: an apprenticeship for everything

Say you want to be a nurse. I've been in that situation before, looking at what it would take to become an RN and realizing the only door I could see was four years of school. It shouldn't work like that. You should be able to walk into the healthcare system and start training inside it.

It doesn't have to be every hospital running its own program. I'd have the big hospitals in each state pool money and fund one network of schools, a couple per state, so everybody has access.

You walk in, and the first thing they do is figure out aptitude. Can you actually do this job? Think of it like the ASVAB in the army, except it doesn't have to be a written test with one right answer. There are humans in the loop. Maybe the smartest person in the room doesn't make the cut, but the person with a decent IQ and a really good work ethic does.

Then you start working. As an apprentice nurse you do vitals first, pretty low-stakes stuff, always under supervision, and you work your way up until you're a full-blown nurse. Standardized testing along the way makes sure you actually know the procedures, the regulations, HIPAA, all of the stuff that matters.

And here's the part I've never understood about the current system: why am I taking three humanities classes and an arts class to learn a job? Everybody agrees the way to make the most money in life is to get highly specialized in one thing. So why are we muddying the waters with subjects that have nothing to do with it? I don't give a shit about political science, and I'm taking political science this semester. It's boring, hello!

This already exists. It works.

This isn't a fantasy. England's NHS has run nursing degree apprenticeships since 2017. You get a salary from day one, the employers cover the tuition, and after about four years you qualify as a registered nurse with the same degree as the university route. No debt, and four years of real hospital experience on top of it.

It's not just the UK, either. A company called Mission U tried exactly this in America. Founded by Pencils of Promise founder Adam Braun, it was a one-year alternative to college that charged $0 upfront. The curriculum was built with companies like Spotify, Uber, Lyft, and Warby Parker.

Students spent the first trimester on soft skills taught by Bain consultants and Stanford lecturers, the second on technical skills, and the third working inside the partner companies. Instead of tuition, graduates paid 15 percent of their income for three years, and only if they made at least $50,000 a year. CNN called it perfect for young people eager to launch their careers. WeWork bought it in 2018.

The other bonus is the pivot. Say you're a year into an apprenticeship and you hate it. You walk, you move into a different field's program, and you just saved yourself three years of your life and a ton of money you would have paid a school to figure out that field wasn't for you. Finding out at month twelve is cheap. Finding out after the degree is expensive.

I'm not saying college is worthless for everyone. Some paths still require it, and some people genuinely want that experience. But the default, the thing we tell every 18-year-old to do because that's just what you do, is now a four-year bet of around $30,000 in borrowed money on a curriculum that can expire before it's handed out. Per the College Board, that's roughly what the average bachelor's borrower leaves with, and in-state tuition at public four-year schools has doubled in real terms over the past thirty years.

We should build the alternative, and we should build it inside the industries that actually need the workers.

I'll be honest: I'm not even sure I want to stay in school myself. But if a degree can expire that fast, the least we can do is build a door that doesn't cost four years and $30,000 to walk through.