Bachelor's Degree: An Unnecessary Path To a Tech Job 287
dcblogs (1096431) writes "A study of New York City's tech workforce found that 44% of jobs in the city's 'tech ecosystem,' or 128,000 jobs, 'are accessible' to people without a Bachelor's degree. This eco-system includes both tech specific jobs and those jobs supported by tech. For instance, a technology specific job that doesn't require a Bachelor's degree might be a computer user support specialist, earning $28.80 an hour, according to this study. Tech industry jobs that do not require a four-year degree and may only need on-the-job training include customer services representatives, at $18.50 an hour, telecom line installer, $37.60 an hour, and sales representatives, $33.60 an hour. The study did not look at 'who is actually sitting in those jobs and whether people are under-employed,' said Kate Wittels, a director at HR&A Advisors, a real-estate and economic-development consulting firm, and report author.. Many people in the 'accessible' non-degree jobs may indeed have degrees. For instance. About 75% of the 25 employees who work at New York Computer Help in Manhattan have a Bachelor's degree. Of those with Bachelor's degrees, about half have IT-related degrees."
Degree (Score:5, Interesting)
I got a Bachelors in Network Administration from a state school. It wasn't required for my current job, but it certainly helped get me noticed and hired. Beyond that, the main advantage of the degree was having hands-on experience with Cisco gear and server OSes in a simulated production environment. Of course, you could find a training course that does that for much cheaper and without the bullshit lib arts requirements. In the end, I'd say it was worth it because I was able to get it at a reputable state school and my ending loans were about 2/3rds of my first year's salary, which wasn't bad at all. I certainly wouldn't have paid private school tuition for it.
It's just a badge... (Score:4, Interesting)
/. Your killing me (Score:2, Interesting)
Aside from the fact that I saw this load of crap on reddit awhile ago, this summary is painful to read again. The "is accessible" just made me want to cringe. Any job is accessible without a degree when there is no legal requirement for the practitioner to have a degree. You might as well post that 44% of the 128,000 jobs are prime candidates for H1B. I can spin these figures too.
Re:Certifications and experience are more importan (Score:4, Interesting)
Having managed myself to generate counter-factual results with such industry certifications, I have zero faith in them. A University may not be your idea of a suitably custom crafted trade school but it does imply a bit more depth than cramming for some multiple guess exam.
Re:So basically... (Score:5, Interesting)
problem of academia not tech (Score:5, Interesting)
this is a problem ****across academic disciplines**** and not in any way related to tech specifically.
dropping out of college is a reductive concept...and using people like Jobs or Gates as examples is patently foolish
if you realize your college **program** sucks, transfer to one that doesnt
if you realize your career goals cannot be reached through a degree, then drop out
if you want to have a **career** in tech, get a degree in tech
these stupid studies are so reductive & leave out so many salient factors...disregard!
Re:That isn't what a CSci degree is for (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree. Using the term "Computer Science" for what most degree programs teach is purely the result of the growth of the industry. 70 years ago you couldn't get a Computer Science degree. 50 years ago, you could get a Computer Science degree without ever having used an actual computer. 30 years ago, the only degree in computing you could get was Computer Science, and it encompassed the whole of the field. 20 years ago, Computer Science began to mean "software" instead of Electrical Engineering's "hardware". 10 years ago, the field was so broad, so diverse, and encompassed so many disparate technologies that required significant specialization that you could get a specialization certificate on your CS degree. Today, you can get a 4 year Bachelor's in any number of fields including Information Technology (sysadmin, netadmin), Information Systems (DBA, Systems Analysis), Information Management (management for IT), Software Engineering (web design, application programming). Computer Science is again a theoretical area of research and development on the theory of computers. All these other fields born from this CS research once again free it to be what it once was: mathematicians and logicians playing with number machines.
Re:So basically... (Score:2, Interesting)
Why? Would the idea that your non-degree earning colleague managed to learn just as much as you without wasting 4 years of their life and tens of thousands of dollars? Do you feel the need to tell yourself you're smart and special because you attended college, and working with someone who didn't would shatter your world view?
Honestly your statement is one of the saddest things I've seen in a discussion about degrees v's no-degree.
Re:Modded down? (Score:5, Interesting)
Or we could turn it around again and point and laugh at losers like you who think everyone should be psychic and not buy homes with a 30 year mortgage because they should see that 15 years in the future some cretin will say "why should this person get paid $33 or $37 an hour" and work to cut their pay.
What does your crystal ball see in your future?
Mine sees wages continuing to deflate. Of all my friends during dot com boom, only two of us kept our houses after the bust. He, because he fully committed his salary at the time and now owns it outright, and me because I bought a smaller house in a child friendly neighborhood, and managed to find enough work post boom to keep up payments. Those who bought huge show pieces in gated hives are all gone now. Living in apartments or had moved out of state looking for work, or in very rare cases moved into sales or management. And don't let the rhetoric fool you -- sales and upper management are worked like dogs, constantly aware that they need to justify their inflated salaries or be replaced at a moment's notice.
My crystal ball sees a continuing flood of third world workers willing to accept convenience store salaries, and a lot more locals out of work. My boss actually brags in status meetings how much money he's saved with H1B workers, and how he intends to hire them whenever possible. (I'm a "legacy employee" grimly determined to hang onto my job.) In the meantime, morale has never been lower, communication suffers, and project continuity is almost nonexistent. But as long as the practice looks profitable on the short term, it will continue.
Part of me thinks that business is running mostly on inertia at the moment. Eventually we'll reach the point where consumers can't afford the non-essential trinkets that make so much money, because there aren't jobs anymore that pay enough to afford them. Currently it's a downward spiral, with companies paying less, causing consumers to have less to spend, reducing sales, which cause companies to find more cost cutting measures. (Currently, the biggest fad of which is hiring third world workers.) In the meantime, it's just a different kind of race to the bottom.
Oh, and I'm not just sitting around waiting for the axe to fall. I'm working on starting a new business in a completely different kind of work, one that involves directly interfacing with people, a skill that H1B employees generally lack. As a local, communication skills are your biggest advantage. Don't forget that, it might become useful some day.