There's an ongoing debate about whether degrees are really necessary far wider than just IT (in terms of my career, thank god I teach in a medical school, so no worries about collapsing student numbers and resultant job losses in my field).
It is accepted that full degrees act in many ways as "signals" of competences rather than actual necessity, and act as workers competing against each other beyond the actual requirements of the job. In the UK, clearly the government is looking at moving away from full 3-year bachelors degrees to more vocational training or other, shorter courses. It also reflects that companies largely gave up on apprenticeships: why should they spend money training staff when the staff can pay for it themselves, especially when chances are they'll skip off to a new firm in a few years?
That's true and I won't argue the point, but it's also not my point. It's just part of it, and my point has a lot further-reaching implications for the tech sector at large than other industries. The tech sector went to great effort, over a very long period of time, to make itself as unattractive a career field as possible to entrants in the job market, largely part and parcel to outsource and abuse visa programs.
To a certain extent, that goes way beyond inflated educational and experiential requirements, endemic underpay, and shifting the financial burden of certification to employees and prospective employees. It's cultural, too, all the way from the "tech bro" phenomenon, to tech companies' farcical adoption of progressive aesthetics which has proven itself a colossal house of cards through repeated industry-wide wage discrimination scandals, union busting, shady government contracts, and the sector's head-first dive into the sewage tank of K-street politics. Amazon itself, as an example because this is what the thread is about, is explicitly and obviously guilty of all three of the latter.
It's an employment sector that seemingly goes out of its way to piss people off, employees, end users, and third parties alike, that wants to immediately turn around and whine when no one wants to work for them or use their services (but have little alternative, due to monopoly status and fiercely anti-competitive business practices).
The question that's gone perennially unaddressed, unasked even, is
not "why are there so few people going into STEM?". There is no shortage of STEM workers, the "STEM crisis" is a myth. Qualified workers are being shut out by inflated job requirements and refusal on the part of employers to cert, or they're just not seeking in that field because of its unattractiveness. The question is rather "what about STEM fields makes them so unattractive to prospective employees in the first place?".
