7 Votes
College Degrees a Waste of Time
Everyone hears the mantra, "You have to go to college in order to get a good job." Some numbers seem to back that rule of thumb, showing higher average salaries going to those with increased education. Many people, however, have observed what they were taught in their colleges (with exception to some engineering and sciences) often has little bearing on their ability to perform in their chosen careers. Yet, degrees continue to be a benchmark by which employers turn away applicants who may actually be superior to their seemingly superior peers. Would a system based on appropriate certifications make more sense?
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Degree not to blame. by EyeOfSage
A Scenario by gnifyus
I know of someone who never went to college, but started out in the trades right out of high school. Now this person certainly had the brains to excel in college, but because of family tradition/expectation etc., did not have the means, and at the time, the desire to go. He is probably one of the better mechanical designers you’ll find anywhere, and even taught himself the ins and outs of 3D CAD design and all the computer knowledge that has to go with it. Here is a talented person who can design and also build if necessary some of the most complicated projects in his field. At first, a person with this talent starts out with a pretty good pay rate compared with their peers, even the ones who went to college. For a long time I think there even was a sort of "thumbing his nose" attitude towards those college yuppies. But years go by, industries change, times change, and suddenly a person like this might be sort of stuck in a place that has limited means of escape without that piece of paper called a degree. He can move around in his specific industry, but only laterally as a rule, and usually only in smaller companies. The bigger companies won’t even schedule an interview or acknowledge that a resume was sent despite the 25 years experience. One way out of this income ceiling for some people is to start their own business, hope to be successful and sell it later on or something like that; but not everyone has the knowledge or even the passion to do this, so the advantage is limited to a few. It’s not all about income either. When you’ve been doing one thing for a long time, maybe you want a change. Not having a degree can limit what this change can be. Some of these things were not so true even 20 or 25 years ago, but I think for better or worse, they are true now with fewer and fewer exceptions. As an aside, I would be curious if people have found their pertinent military experience to be just as valuable an asset in the civilian work world.
Personally, I can say I almost never used any specific knowledge learned in college in my working life. But the general knowledge gained, whether it was simply the experience of suddenly being (more or less) on my own for the first time, the new social interactions and the most valuable skill of "learning how to learn", are something I would not have wanted to do without. (Though like most things in life I would do a few things differently, now.)
The above example makes me initially want to say that a certification program for jobs makes a lot of sense. Knowledge is knowledge, experience is experience. If a person can do the job well, the degree or lack of is superficial. Standardized tests worry me though. How would a program like this be administered and by who? What entity comes up with the guidelines for tests containing every industrial or administrative skill imaginable? Someone who didn’t go to college may not be ‘used’ to taking tests and be at a meaningless disadvantage right there depending on the job. Currently there are certification tests given in many of the engineering/computer fields, but they are usually taken by people who first went to college or took classes for that specific subject.
I don't think it'll help by scottb
The university system is pretty screwed up, but I don’t think certification programs make any more sense.
Now, let me be up front, here… I don’t know how things are in other fields, and I think mine is a little different from most. I studied computer science in college, and I work as a software engineer. We use very highly specialized knowledge.
There’s a sort of myth, pushed by the makers of software development tools (compilers, IDEs, and so on), that, with the right tool, anybody can program. There are quite a few self-taught programmers out there who really want this to be true, so they believe it. It’s just not. It’s not ordinary for those sorts of folks to ever get beyond the most junior level of competence.
We also already have some extensive "certification" programs – pushed by industry. MSCE, CCNE, A++, CNA, and so on. I find they’re worth just about the same as the paper they’re printed on.
I think the article makes some good points about how the BA was originally intended for something different than what it’s become – but I think it also misses one critical element. There’s an enormous pressure from industry to lower the costs of hiring – especially for technical positions.
I’ve seen estimates that hiring a new programmer and getting them up to speed costs about three times their annual salary. If you’re managing minimum-wage labor, you can afford a trial-and-error process for finding good staff, but if you’re hiring $75k engineers, and a "trial" costs $200k, that won’t fly.
So industry is desperate for anything that will help it identify good job candidates. It saw a correlation between degrees and job success, and so, over the last fifty years, we’ve seen a growing reliance by industry on degrees. They’re not really a great indicator, but they’re the best we have.
That same pressure is what causes this ongoing infatuation with certification programs. If degrees aren’t a great indicator, why not make a better one? The success of the CPA program only encourages them.
It never really works, though. The CPA exams work because accountants all follow roughly the same standrds – GAAP. If an accountant understands GAAP, they’re going to be able to do most of what an accountant does.
The industry-driven software certifications, like MCSE and CNA, fail because there really aren’t any sort of "generally accepted practices" for the industry. Microsoft and Novell would like there to be – Microsoft wants industry practice to be "buy all our products". So that’s what they test – does the candidate show sufficient familiarity with the Microsoft catalog of products?
And I only pick on Microsoft here because they’re a favorite whipping-boy. Virtually all of the certification programs are like that. Cisco’s CCIE is really the only one that’s really an indicator of competence – but that shows how hard the problem is. A CCIE certification usually takes thousands of dollars and months of preparation to accomplish, and there are fewer than 17,000 CCIE holders out there.
Cisco keeps the CCIE meaningful by making it hard. But there’s a real market for certifications – people want to be able to show a cert without doing that hard work (or actually being competent in their field). So Cisco also offers a host of other certification programs. With really mixed results.
Part of the "degrees are a waste of time" thinking (on the part of the degree-holder) comes from the fact that degrees are expensive and time consuming to attain. For industry, they aren’t a great indicator of success. But history is showing us that a better indicator, if it’s going to work, is still going to be expensive and time consuming.
On the whole, I think the dissatisfaction with degrees and the flirting with certification programs are a reflection of our increasing anti-intellectualism in society, dumbing down the whole population. Proper university-level work is "too hard", so we look for ways to cheat. It never works.
hunter college(nyc) is PROVOKER commie traSH by Anonymous
THIS place sucks….I waste 100 hours a week on this garbage….I am throwing my books and almost ALL of the garbage that I learned trash in the garbage…never implement the SKELS I need….spy trash, distractors and SKELS at the HUmAn TRASH FACTORY… debt disease and UNWANTED LOITERERS