Why Do Employers Require College Degrees That Aren't Necessary? (thestreet.com) 358
Slashdot reader pefisher writes:
A lot of us on Slashdot have noticed that potential employers advertise for things they don't need. To the point that sometimes they even ask for things that don't exist. Like asking for ten years of experience in a technology that has only just been introduced. It's frustrating because it makes you wonder "what's this employers real game?"
Do they just want to say they advertised for the position, or are they really so immensely stupid, so disconnected from their own needs, that they think they are actually asking for something they can have...? Here is a Harvard Study that addresses one particular angle of this. It doesn't answer any questions, but it does prove that you aren't crazy. And it quantifies the craziness.
The study's author calls it "degree inflation," and after studying 26 million job postings concluded that employers are now less willing to actually train new people on the job, possibly to save money. "Many companies have fallen into a lazy way of thinking about this," the study's author tells The Street, saying companies are "[looking for] somebody who is just job-ready to just show up." The irony is that college graduates will ultimately be paid a higher salary -- even though for many jobs, the study found that a college degree yields zero improvement in actual performance.
The Street reports that "In a market where companies increasingly rely on computerized systems to cull out early-round applicants, that has led firms to often consider a bachelor's degree indicative of someone who can socialize, run a meeting and generally work well with others." One company tells them that "we removed the requirement to have a computer science degree, and we removed the requirement to have experience in development computer programming. And when we removed those things we found that the pool of potential really good team members drastically expanded."
Do they just want to say they advertised for the position, or are they really so immensely stupid, so disconnected from their own needs, that they think they are actually asking for something they can have...? Here is a Harvard Study that addresses one particular angle of this. It doesn't answer any questions, but it does prove that you aren't crazy. And it quantifies the craziness.
The study's author calls it "degree inflation," and after studying 26 million job postings concluded that employers are now less willing to actually train new people on the job, possibly to save money. "Many companies have fallen into a lazy way of thinking about this," the study's author tells The Street, saying companies are "[looking for] somebody who is just job-ready to just show up." The irony is that college graduates will ultimately be paid a higher salary -- even though for many jobs, the study found that a college degree yields zero improvement in actual performance.
The Street reports that "In a market where companies increasingly rely on computerized systems to cull out early-round applicants, that has led firms to often consider a bachelor's degree indicative of someone who can socialize, run a meeting and generally work well with others." One company tells them that "we removed the requirement to have a computer science degree, and we removed the requirement to have experience in development computer programming. And when we removed those things we found that the pool of potential really good team members drastically expanded."
discrimination (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, let's say a company has 20% of its employees male, the rest female. They are open to a discrimination lawsuit prima facie. But if they only hire people with a X degree, they can say, "only 19% of people with degree X are male, we are doing better than average!"
As more people with degree X arrive on the scene, the requirement becomes harder and harder to avoid.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:discrimination (Score:4, Insightful)
What jurisdiction is this?
In most places there can only be discrimination during the hiring process. Having a legacy of being male dominated, for example, isn't actionable. Who would bring the complaint? How could they justify the company firing people just to fix the numerical issue?
Around here the degree requirement is usually just to filter candidates. Companies can't be bothered to train or even evaluate candidates properly, so put that lazy filter on.
Re: College grads are more desperate ? (Score:5, Insightful)
I hire people all the time, and I promise you everyone at my company just wants to hire someone competent who can get shit done, and we have no interest whatsoever in indentured servants. We require a degree.
Every few months someone says, "Maybe we shouldn't require a degree." And then everyone else shrugs. Nobody actually cares if anyone has a degree if they write decent code, but nobody is sure it's a good idea to not require a degree, so nothing changes.
People at the bottom of the totem pole always seem to think upper management has a scheme or a grand plan. We don't. We just have very limited time and a lot of inertia.
Re: College grads are more desperate ? (Score:4, Informative)
We actually have a blacklist of degrees - we found that not all degree programs are the same. Trade school degrees were found to be generally inadequate - employee under performance was generally noted over the years we've had them.
Then there were the degrees that produced useless garbage - it was a masters in IT program for non-IT students. The students there all interviewed so terribly we had to basically tell HR to not even consider it. I don't know what the program did, but it was not a good fit - none of those people could do a simple programming test. We kept an open mind, but it was clear by the third or fourth candidate that none of them were close to what we were looking for.
We had a degree requirement in the hopes of doing a filter for competency, but it ended up showing up how incompetent (or unsuited) entire degree programs were.
Of course, the best hires have always been the employee referrals, and for those, all we require is a display of competence. If you don't have a degree, but can show you know your stuff (and conduct yourself appropriately with the team), we'd hire you.
If you can string lines of code together, solve problems, have decent personal hygiene and have good communications skills, that's all we want.
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(I don't know if it's true or not)
It's not true. I mean I have no proof, but some concepts are just too stupid to be true, and this is one of them.
More than likely it reduces the applicant pool to those "smarter ones" who have proven adept at navigating the meat grinder. This unfortunately means some very qualified people will slip through.
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While under the guise of finding better employees it is just a way to make sure they can hire the white man for the job.
No one cares about that. They mostly want to avoid getting sued.
Re:discrimination (Score:5, Funny)
It's all about finding the employees who are willing to sacrifice their life and time for the good of the company.
No one, and I mean no one can work themselves into an early grave for zero overtime pay quite like the average scared white male with an inadequacy complex. You don't have to worry about training them up and having a competitor hire them away to fill a quota. Their white skin and privilege is like kryptonite to any lawsuit they could bring against the company for discrimination, harassment, working conditions, or unfair treatment. They don't require maternity leave, and if their spouse gets pregnant they just freak out and work even harder than before. Most of them haven't had it rough before, so they are terrified of being unemployed, making them so much easier to control than someone who has come from a rough spot. They have very little dignity, so you can really mistreat them without severely affecting their performance. Also, if you push them too far and they lose their shit, they will go and shoot up a church, or a school, or a mall somewhere instead of their place of business. Well unless its the post office. Best of all, when they get older they tend to pop off with a sudden, unexpected massive heart attack or aneurysm, thereby saving the company millions in medical expenses. No weekly dialysis, no lingering diabetes, no years of fighting cancer. Just exploding hearts and brains and someone gets a new office.
So please, hire white males. It's the safe, economical choice for comprehensive corporate risk management.
Re: (Score:2)
If highly-specific minority groups are so awesome, they can make their own companies and compete with other companies made up of highly-specific minority groups.
Sure, let's try. Let's assume that women are paid only 75% money for the same job. So, here's a business idea: hire only women! To have them work for you rather than competition, give them a 6.6% raise, thus 80% of what a man would get. This leaves 20% pure savings, that you can use to lower prices, pass to shareholders, or get yourself another jet. A nice plan no reasonable company would walk away from.
(Obviously both your argument and the above idea ignore individual variance -- but the key part is t
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highly-specific minority groups are so awesome
This is why. Most of those "nearly impossible" job "openings" are posted only because they are required to post them because they want to sponsor an employee for his greencard, and this required proof that they could not find a local to fill the position. So to avoid having to interview a lot of applicants, they make the job requirements so specific that only a few people would be a perfect match. Their immigrant employee being the best fit of course.
The overly defined job position ploy also works well if you want to promote your best buddy to a management position (I've seen this many times). Or it may protect you from the worst case scenario of having to hire a qualified negro that may be able to meet less peculiar job requirements. But the C-levels have set a policy to publicly post all jobs, so you make up a job description that no one can meet, or one that exactly meets the career path of your pal.
Like women (Score:4, Interesting)
As soon as you stop looking at only the gorgeous ones, you'll enjoy many amazing sex encounters with the ones you previously ignored.
Does anyone not already know the answer to this? (Score:5, Informative)
I didn't RTFA, but I'm pretty sure this has been discussed at least nine million times in the last 20 years. The main reasons:
1. Demonstrated ability to stick with something for a while.
2. The average college grad is usually more literate than the average high school grad. Better chance that you'll get an employee that can do basic math, speak properly to customers, etc.
3. Employers will get many applicants for any given job, so this will at least filter out SOME people. And of those that apply for the job, #1 above applies.
Yes, it's lazy, but as long as you have more applicants than open positions, why not? (From the employer's point of view.)
Re:Does anyone not already know the answer to this (Score:4, Insightful)
Wish I had some mod points. I really hate that college degrees in the US are often viewed solely some kind of career prep/vocational training. Higher education does have to be geared towards some specific job; it can be an end in itself, and it has its own intrinsic value.
Re:Does anyone not already know the answer to this (Score:5, Interesting)
Your view is really the same view as the Enlightenment. It's only been around hundreds of years and most of Western civilization was founded on it, but that doesn't stop conservatives from rejecting the Enlightenment and wishing for the golden age of artisans, serfs, nobles, etc.: (might be behind a pay wall)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/... [washingtonpost.com]
And this is how science dies in America.
Re: Does anyone not already know the answer to thi (Score:2, Interesting)
If you have two applications with no work experience, then I would go with the one with a degree as a baseline filter. But if both have several years of experience then I don't think it matters as much, and if you reject the non-degree candidate in the prescreening phase you might be missing out on a great programmer with a nontraditional background (and in tech not having a formal degree isn't all that uncommon anyways, compared to most STEM fields)
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(and in tech not having a formal degree isn't all that uncommon anyways, compared to most [science, tech, engineering, and math] fields)
HUH? The T in STEM stands for 'tech(nology)'. Parsefail
It makes more sense if you read the first "tech" as information technology as opposed to other technology.
Re:Does anyone not already know the answer to this (Score:5, Insightful)
While these are good skills the degree shouldn’t be a baseline for employment. Because too many people are wasting 4 years of their lives in education just so they can get a job. Many have these skills beforehand but knowing they need to work the system they get the degree to get the job.
College isn’t designed to be a job training center. They want to focus on learning and education.
A lot of good people are wasting time in college just for the degree and not for the enlightenment of learning.
Re:Does anyone not already know the answer to this (Score:4, Informative)
Because too many people are wasting 4 years of their lives in education just so they can get a job.
The problem is that there is a negative feedback loop. Too many people go to college and get worthless degrees, so the job market is flooded with psychology grads. Therefore there is no downside to employers demanding degrees since these grads are plentiful and willing to accept the same low wages as a HS grad ... which puts pressure on the HS grad to go to college and get a degree in something.
I don't know what the solution is. One reasonable proposal is to require taxpayer subsidized student loans to be combined with an internship or apprenticeship to match up students with employers and ensure they are learning something useful.
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How to break the loop is a good question.
Degrees are being used as a (really lazy) litmus test. If the costs weren't as simple as "It took me 6 weeks to hire people when I opened the job up to everyone vs. 3 without," then there would be a variable that could be weighted differently. It would be great to see people incorporate "for the good of society" into their thoughts, but right now, the bottom thought, even if it doesn't need to be, is "Is it cheaper for me."
I've heard a whole slew of reasons why pe
Re:Does anyone not already know the answer to this (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know what the solution is. One reasonable proposal is to require taxpayer subsidized student loans to be combined with an internship or apprenticeship to match up students with employers and ensure they are learning something useful.
Here's another proposal. Let's have the students either have to pay for their own educations, like in working through college, or have to apply for a loan through a private bank. If you pay for your own education up front then no one cares if you study transgender dance theory because that's your money. If someone has to go to a bank and they see an application for a loan to major in transgender dance theory then chances are the bank will refuse the loan. If someone shows up with an even slightly higher than average SAT or ACT score, good grades in high school, and wants to go to college to be a registered nurse then that person is quite likely to get a loan.
Government subsidy just artificially raised the prices and reduces choices. I remember this with the switch to digital television. The government said they'd pay UP TO $50 for a device that received digital TV and had a few other requirements. Guess what happened? Every device was priced at exactly $50. I wanted a device that did something the government would not subsidize so I had little for choices. I could choose the crippled government subsidized solution or a very expensive feature filled device for many times more money. There wasn't a $100 middle of the road digital TV converter device, only the $50 crippled devices or $300 whiz bang devices.
Why is it that an engineering degree costs as much as a degree in transgender dance theory? Because the student doesn't pay for it, the government does. If the student had to pay for it then perhaps the student might give more thought in the value of the degree. If a private bank had to put a risk factor on each degree on every student loan they they'd be handing out loans for things like engineering, nursing, law, business, and so forth but not transgender dance theory. They'd also set standards on who got the loan. The government really only cares if a person has been accepted to a college, not if the degree has any value or the school is any good. Mostly they do this just so they know who gets the check and for how much.
A private bank would also put a market based check on the amount of the loan. They might give a $15,000 loan for studying dance. For someone that wants to be a surgeon, and they have demonstrated ability, the bank is quite likely to give a $250,000 loan. Oh, and the dance school loan would probably have a 15% interest rate and the medical school loan a 5% interest rate.
Oh, and the bank might also get in the business of finding people work if it meant getting paid back on the loan. What incentive does the government have in finding people work? I mean they don't want people destitute but really all they want is people that won't cause trouble. The government doesn't much care if they get you a job, put you in prison, or get you on welfare. It's not their money so some government bureaucrat will "find you a job" just so they can be rid of you and move on. They won't care if you like the job, if it matches your degree, or even if the job pays better than minimum wage. It's not their money.
Re:Does anyone not already know the answer to this (Score:4, Insightful)
Just no. Part of the solution is for the government to stop paying any part of any degree program that doesn't have high in field employment after graduation. That means kick those programs off public school campuses.
A generation of 'poetry majors' publicly starving in the streets will also help kids focus on getting value for their education dollars, borrowed or not.
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That means kick those programs off public school campuses.
What? Private for-profit colleges have a way worse track record than public colleges. Both the dropout rate and the loan default rate are higher than at public institutions.
A generation of 'poetry majors' publicly starving in the streets will also help kids focus
No it won't. At 17 years old, a HS senior is way to naive and oblivious to make the connection. They need better guidance, from either their parents or their high schools, ... or maybe their loan officers. My daughter wanted to major in psychology, and it took me quite a while to dissuade her. I finally convinced her by showing her
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That means kick those programs off public school campuses.
What? Private for-profit colleges have a way worse track record than public colleges.
Then split the difference with private non-profit colleges, like Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology or University of Notre Dame.
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Private colleges use private money.
You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
I don't care what they teach, so long as they aren't using any of my money.
They are using your money.
When a student from ITT or DeVry drops out and and defaults on his government guaranteed student loan, who do you think pays the lender?
Job traininc (Score:3, Insightful)
Universities are not supposed to be vocational training facilities. That's one of the reasons why it's inappropriate to use a degree as a job requirement. You are part of the problem.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
> Universities are not supposed to be vocational training facilities. That's one of the reasons why it's inappropriate to use a degree as a job requirement. You are part of the problem.
Sure they are. Academia has just lost track of it's own history and drinks too much of it's own kool-aid.
Unless you are part of the idle wealthy, you don't have the resources to waste on "finding yourself". It's always been this way since the very beginning.
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At no institution is gender studies a requirement for graduation.
Declining School Standards are the Cause (Score:4, Insightful)
lack of a trades track as well germany has a good (Score:2)
lack of a trades track as well! Germany has a good system.
also get the nfl / nba training grounds out of college and on to a real minor league system like the NHL and MLB.
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Germany USED TO do a relatively good job with their bottom 20%.
But that ship has sailed, they now graduate into apprenticeships not knowing how do basic arithmetic.
Yes my Aunt is a teacher in a German high school. They don't know what to make of it or do about it. It's like the idiot kids have been replaced by American idiots.
Re:Declining School Standards are the Cause (Score:5, Interesting)
I think there's a lot of truth to this. The local newspaper is prone to running the occasional feature article with essays written by school children in the 1900-1930 era. The ones they run are often written by 7-8th graders and read like they were written by adult college graduates -- language, sentence structure, composition, even the ideas expressed are mature and sophisticated.
I cannot imagine a contemporary student of high school writing these essays, let alone junior high school kids.
I can't decide if its the curriculum, the instruction, the kids, the parents, or some kind of emergent aspect of our culture that's made our kids so less capable than they used to be. I'm kind of inclined to a get off my lawn argument about TV and technology making people distracted and less capable in general literacy, but I think there's room for a sound criticism of our crass, commercial cultural content, too.
Re:Declining School Standards are the Cause (Score:4, Interesting)
Partly, it's that back then not all kids stayed in school through 8th grade. Only the academically promising ones did.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Here are the counter-arguments (from the employers point of view).
Why it is better to hire people WITHOUT a college degree.
1) You can pay them less. A lot LESS.
2) You get people that are more loyal. They know it's harder for them to get another job.
3) You get people that have experience working long, hard hours rather than staying out late and drinking, then doing a half -assed job to finish off projects at the last minute.
4) You get people that think getting into a ton of debt just to prove how smart
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Often they list a degree and a bunch of irrelevant stuff just so that they can pay you less because "you are underqualified".
Re: (Score:3)
4) You get people that think getting into a ton of debt just to prove how smart they are sounds off to them.
You sound like you have a massive chip on your shoulder. Going into massive debt so you can spent the next 40-50 years employed rather than unemployed is almost certainly the better choice. Also:
1) You can pay them less. A lot LESS.
Yep, going into debt to massively increase lifetime earnings is not a terrible plan.
3) You get people that have experience working long, hard hours rather than staying out
Re: Does anyone not already know the answer to thi (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I met so many people with masters degrees that had no idea how to actually turn a Windows server into a domain controller
Benefit of doubt: Were they Solaris, *BSD, or GNU/Linux admins who had never been in front of a licensed copy of Windows Server before?
Re: (Score:2)
1. Demonstrated ability to stick with something for a while.
So require someone to waste 4 years of their life while not earning money and accruing debt just to prove they can stick with something. Nice.
I'd bet that a lot of people would be willing to accept a much lower starting salary if they didn't have to finance a student loan.
2. The average college grad is usually more literate than the average high school grad. Better chance that you'll get an employee that can do basic math, speak properly to customers, etc.
That's a failure in the high school system if true. But the quote in the summary of the article says "even though for many jobs, the study found that a college degree yields zero improvement in actual performance"
3. Employers will get many applicants for any given job, so this will at least filter out SOME people. And of those that apply for the job, #1 above applies.
Yes, it's lazy, but as long as you have more applicants than open positions, why not? (From the employer's point of view.)
Why not? Because it's a
Re:Does anyone not already know the answer to this (Score:4, Insightful)
Translation, there is no STEM shortage. We have so many we can afford to round file people without reading past the top of page 1.
Re: (Score:2)
> Ãoeactually bother to go to a good oneÃ
>
> Take that silver spoon out of you ass and put it back in your mouth.
That's only the case if you're a liberal whining about "institutional bias". For the rest of us, quality is not a function of some over hyped over priced brand.
You can go to a good school and not be a Bush or Kennedy.
There are different reasons. (Score:5, Insightful)
One reason is to filter out some of the applicants, because you have too many. Might as well filter out the ones that don't have a degree first; they might know less than the other ones, and they definitely have demonstrated less willingness to jump through hoops.
Another potential reason is to disqualify applicants because you want to hire a H1B.
Another reason is that the HR employees want to protect the value of their bullshit degrees.
Re: (Score:2)
they definitely have demonstrated less willingness to jump through hoops.
That would be awesome if you own a hoop jumping company. But I've found that companies will more often value people that can dispose of hoops (at least the ones not mandated by government or legal requirements).
'Course, the hoop jumpers are controlling HR. And so we have this story.
In part, I think because it shows... (Score:3)
Although of course, YMMV.
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I agree with this. There are certainly jobs which more or less require specific training - physical therapy comes to mind (maybe because I’m currently getting PT). But for a lot of careers, what you study in college amounts to general (but still useful) background knowledge instruction.
My physics degree courses taught me things which have been useful in my jobs; but I’ve never worked in an actual physics job. I must admit that I’m still waiting for the chance to apply quantum mechanics or
Re: (Score:2)
I think this is used all of the time. I don't find it to be an accurate test. Most jobs are plug and play and under one subject. I don't need to know if Johnny or Sally can push through subject matter they find boring, because if I keep giving it to them, they'll probably go find a job that is more interesting to them. I just need to know they can RTFM when it pertains to why I hired them.
--
"Indecision may or may not be my problem" - Jimmy Buffet
Idiot Filter (Score:5, Interesting)
Because it filters out idiots.
Yes, there are plenty of smart people with no degree and plenty of idiots with degrees, but the mix is more in their favor with a degree, though it's getting to be less of an advantage now that most people have one.
Because it costs them time & money to interview people, simple filters that make their job easier are widely used, even if there's some opportunity cost of overlooking people who are good but who don't pass the filters.
They make up for that anyhow by using employee recommendations. If someone is willing to vouch for a person, they can often skip some of the requirements as long as they have some evidence of being good at the job.
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Well, it filters out extreme idiots. The common run-of-the-mill idiots make it through college just fine.
It's the hiring process... (Score:2)
.
The HR department loves a checklist, and a checkbox saying "college degree required" is an easy item to screen for.
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Whichever IT Manager let's HR screen their staff is a moron. Most of the time HR knows nothing about the skills or mentality that makes a good IT person.
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I used to be able to hire candidates without degrees based upon other factors, such as experience (e.g. in the 1990s). Today I don't have that option anymore - of no fault of my own. It's not a matter of letting HR do the screening. It is a matter of company policy as established by the executive board in conjunction with HR best practices. Someone may be a moron in all of this, but it's not the hiring manager.
Re: It's the hiring process... (Score:2)
The reason is Griggs vs Duke Power (Score:5, Insightful)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].
Griggs is the basis of credentials inflation in the US.
As a result of Griggs, most companies began halting their own applicant testing entirely, and simply began to require more and more education--assuming that this would still weed out the ineffective applicants.
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It is likely because a degree is essentially an IQ test.
I'm going by memory here so if someone has better numbers then I welcome corrections. The average IQ of a high school graduate is about 105, slightly above average. The average IQ of a college graduate is about 110. The average IQ of someone with a graduate degree is about 120. The 50/50 point of graduating high school is an IQ of around 80 or 85 as I recall. I can assume that if someone has a college degree then there's a high probability of a pe
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
A 1971 supreme court case named Griggs vs Duke Power found that if an employer engaged in their own employee or applicant skills testing, and that testing was found to result in racial discrimination, then the empoloyer was guilty of racial discrimination even though that was not their intent.
This is not true. The ruling was against tests which are not applicable to job performance. You're suggesting otherwise, with your "applicant skills testing" description.
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From wiki-- "As such, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits employment tests (when used as a decisive factor in employment decisions) that are not a "reasonable measure of job performance," regardless of the absence of actual intent to discriminate.
What this means in practical terms is that the employer cannot impose such tests, done themselves. If the applicant has passed such tests elsewhere or not, was not a matter considered by the decision.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/g... [forbes.com]
College Degrees are even more white privileged (Score:3)
Re:The reason is Griggs vs Duke Power (Score:4, Informative)
The funny thing is that the judgement condemns both an aptitude test, as well as a requirement for a high-school diploma. In fact, the requirement for the degree gets somewhat more condemnation. Therefore it seems like this ruling could easily be referenced to actually strike down policies of credential inflation, in almost exactly the same phrasing that many critics here are putting forward. Quoting from the Griggs vs. Duke Power Co. judgement (1971):
On the record before us, neither the high school completion requirement nor the general intelligence test is shown to bear a demonstrable relationship to successful performance of the jobs for which it was used. Both were adopted, as the Court of Appeals noted, without meaningful study of their relationship to job performance ability. Rather, a vice-president of the Company testified, the requirements were instituted on the Company's judgment that they generally would improve the overall quality of the workforce.
The evidence, however, shows that employees who have not completed high school or taken the tests have continued to perform satisfactorily, and make progress in departments for which the high school and test criteria are now used...
The facts of this case demonstrate the inadequacy of broad and general testing devices, as well as the infirmity of using diplomas or degrees as fixed measures of capability. History is filled with examples of men and women who rendered highly effective performance without the conventional badges of accomplishment in terms of certificates, diplomas, or degrees. Diplomas and tests are useful servants, but Congress has mandated the common sense proposition that they are not to become masters of reality.
Control over employees (Score:5, Interesting)
People with degrees start life later, and often times with a lot of debt. They are organized in the most traditional sense, and will probably be buying a home a few years after graduation. This debt load makes mobility hard, and the chances that the person is living paycheck-to-paycheck are a lot higher. However, unlike someone with less earning power living paycheck-to-paycheck, the person with the degree will have a higher chance of having more to lose. You want the employee that needs you, not the one that will just wander off and say fuck-all when they're pissed at you the employer; they don't have anything, much less anything to lose, so why put up with you? The college grad has a credit score, mortgage, car, and family to protect.
Re:Control over employees (Score:4, Interesting)
There's no question that the employer-employee relationship is unbalanced, with power mostly in the hands of the employer. But the counter-argument is that, degree or not, people jump from one job to another in order to advance their career. And that has become much easier to do in the past couple of decades, with job websites like monster and careerbuilder, and networking services like linkedin.
Changing from one employer to another is an onerous decision, one that you want to initiate on your own terms, not your employer's. But people can do it even if they have debts. Start by building up an emergency fund, with enough to cover about 3 to 6 months of your living expenses, in case you get laid off. Then -- start to save up for a down-payment on a house, if buying one makes sense. (It may not if your career requires you to be mobile.)
TL/DR: From an employer's perspective, I don't think that a candidate with a 4-year degree is necessarily "stickier" than one without. It comes down to the liquidity of the market for the skills the candidate has.
Because its a bullshit detector (Score:2)
It's a sham how private education has jacked up the price so college is only available to upper class people, or with the burden of huge debt, but also, if you haven't hired for a position, you wouldn't believe the bald-faced bullshit hundreds of people will send you.
Re:Because its a bullshit detector (Score:5, Funny)
Degrees are Useless Now (Score:2, Interesting)
but as you work into masters and higher Irv Tower (Score:2)
but as you work into masters and higher you start going up the Irv Tower and way from skills and stuff that are needed in the work place. The higher up the more skills that only really work good for Irv Tower.
doctors have an association to keep there wages high so they can pay for an full 4 years of college + 4 years of an trade school after that and then some. Now office jobs don't pay $100K-150K so you can't drop $200K-$300K on student loans.
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Filtering (Score:2)
Interviews are expensive, you don't want to waste them interviewing poor candidates.
If you're looking for really high end people most of them have a degree already. So the degree requirement just gets rid of extraneous candidates.
If you're looking for lower to mid-range people requiring a degree filters out some qualified applicants, but there should be plenty left.
That's not to say companies are hitting the right balance, our most talented hire by far had a degree is a field completely unrelated to softwar
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Can we just stick with "HR needs to be fixed"? Working with small local companies up to multinationals over 30+ years I have remained friends with essentially all the useful people that I ever met in HR! That is sadly rather few.
Rgds
Damon
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Why would you be friends with HR?
Because HR people are highly networked. Once you (or they) no longer work for the company, they can help you find jobs, and you can help them find candidates.
Desperation and entrapment (Score:2)
tech schools are better then college for ready to (Score:4, Insightful)
tech schools are better then college for ready to work skills. To bad they got roped in to the college system and got an bad rap.
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tech schools are better then college for ready to work skills. To bad they got roped in to the college system and got an bad rap.
The nice part about a traditional college is that, regardless of what you may get your degree in, English 101 is required.
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Good god this. Years back I was the "IT Manager" for a very small organization. I was alone but shortly added one person. The process of hiring someone for a position a bit higher than help desk was painful. Bad candidate after bad candidate walked through my door.
I finally hired a woman who appeared to be a self taught, motivated individual who did not have a degree. She was fantastic. Personable, hard working, picked up on things quickly. She was a god send. Until I told her to send out an Email to
The usual suspects. HR, cliqes, and greed. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Having a degree" proves nothing in specific, but statistically speaking, it may (vaguely) indicate a few things in general. You'd sure as heck better not depend on those vague indications, though.
What requiring a degree (and various other tickmarks unrelated to actual skill and capacity) does, though, is frees businesses to (a) pretend they can't find viable candidates capable of the work, and (b) consequent to a, allows them fish in pools of skill that are much less expensive without alerting the stockholders.
And of course, all of this facilitates and amplifies various other types of discrimination: age, health, arrest and conviction records, social media participation, political leanings, gender, religious outlook, etc.
The current tech job market is truly a hellhole. I'm really glad I no longer outright depend on it, and I feel intensely sympathetic with those skilled and capable candidates who are trying to crack the corporate wall.
The good news, I expect, will be that none of this will mean bupkis within a few decades, because I highly doubt there will be any jobs at all of this type remaining. Pervasive automation looks to be coming, and if/when it does, it's going to eat the need to be employed outright.
Re: The usual suspects. HR, cliqes, and greed. (Score:2)
If all you do is meetings... (Score:2)
... then you indeed do not need any CS types in IT, because you do not have a productivity above zero anyways. In that situation, I can well understand at least hiring people that make these utterly pointless meetings more pleasant.
Companies run on this paradigm probably hire consultants for any real work anyways, because they cannot do anything themselves anymore. A slight problem may arise when these consultants realize how indispensable they are and refuse to work for cheap. My last negotiation with a ma
"non-degreed" candidates tend to stink (Score:2, Flamebait)
Because of my age, I've had many colleagues and candidates who lacked degrees, especially advanced degrees. Most computing work was relatively new, and people strongly interested in it at the start of my career often did leave college to pursue the technologies that fascinated them. But over time, that technological fascination has become less critical. The interaction with managers, customers, and collaborators have come to matter more in the IT and developer world, and the educational opportunities have
College should be replaced with apprenticeships (Score:2)
College is really best for doctors and lawyers mainly, who need to have a high level of rote memorization functioning since they need to be able to react quickly in situations where fast decisions have to be made in life and death situations. This is the way things used to be. This is why college programs are designed to filter out most people except those with very high memory retention. And thus, colleges have 50-80% failure rates. For all other jobs, its overkill, its wasting years of peoples lives, it c
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You were on to something talking about undercutting the work-force. When you devolved into saying this was a political game run which one side runs, you went off the rails.
--
"A day without sunshine is like, you know, night" -Steve Martin
They don't actually require them (Score:3)
Often enough if you apply they will still accept you without the mentioned degree as long as you show competency in said field. Bring a portfolio and show your previous professional works as well as personal works.
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Many reasons. One being that College ... (Score:2)
... is a filter for Wussies.
That's doesn't mean you're a wuss if you didn't go to College. It's only more likely that you *aren't* a wuss if you did go to College and got a degree that actually means something, i.e. STEM.
This is quite simply put, but has solid truth to it. A degree is only a small piece of the mosaic that is your career, but a significant one that can mean quite the difference.
Exempt from overtime (Score:2)
I didn't see anyone else mention this, so here's my understanding.
There are three common categories of employees are are exempt from standard overtime rules: supervisors, administrative, and professional.
A college degree (usually expressed as degree or equivalent experience) is evidence that the position has professional requirements, and can qualify for a Fair Labor Standards Act [dol.gov] exemption from overtime rules [dol.gov].
Never asked for my degree... (Score:2)
I have never been asked for my degree, what university or my majors. All my customers care about is that I deliver quality and solve their problems.
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All my customers care about
"Customer". Not "employer". You will be hired on contract to do the actual work. The person who will take credit for it is a member of the CEO's alma mater, plays golf at the executives' country club (but knows who to lose to) and has an expectation of a lifetime comfy position.
Cultural fit (Score:2)
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Don't want any of the unwashed getting in, eww.
This.
But culture varies from company to company. I did a short stint* for an outfit that liked to hire people with engineering degrees from midwest colleges. Where they were the first generation to have gone beyond high school (or possibly even completing it). People from blue collar and agricultural backgrounds that were easily impressed by making a few dollars an hour more than their parents did steering a plow.
*I wasn't a very good fit culturally. My people came from a background of Harvard medical and
Some life skills (Score:2)
The applicant can study, retain what they have studied and recall new and complex information over time to some set standard.
Some long term, risky and unexpected health problems with the person could have been expected to show within the many years of the education system and its work load.
A persons politics and personality should have developed to a stage that can be tracked. Is t
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The person knows they have to get up, arrive on time
Sadly, no longer part of a high school curriculum. The trend today is to let the teenagers sleep in because "Muh biological clock."
10 years experience in language that existed for 2 (Score:2)
Another instance was a job posting for a programming language that had only existed for less than 2 years, but the job posting required 10 years experience.
It was pointed out to me by a friend who has been in t
We tried that, it was terrible (Score:2)
We tried removing the requirement for a degree - it opened up some extra good candidates, but it completely exploded the number of terrible applicants by about two orders of magnitude. Yes, flooded with over 100x crappy resumes, and we don't have a giant HR department to handle it (plus they'd bitch about having to stop chatting and playing their mobile phone games that much).
And in the end we ended up hiring a guy with a degree, though there was a strong contender from the degree-less contingent. But it wa
Doesn't make much difference (Score:4, Insightful)
I have a degree and I have worked in IT for many years, both as a developer and someone that hires developers. As near as I can tell, a degree doesn't make one bit of difference. I have worked with smart people that had degrees and smart people that didn't. I have worked with people with advanced degrees that were as dumb as the day is long.
I think it is a mistake to assume that people that did not attend college or finish college are less intelligent than people who did. One of the big problems is identifying talent. The gatekeepers - HR - are largely unskilled in my experience and often unable to identify talent. Simply excluding people without degrees dumbs it down. It makes their job easier. Relying on software that scans resumes for key words just compounds the problem. This leads to people gaming the system and tailoring resumes to trick the software into thinking they are the better candidate. People that can't or won't play the game are left on the sidelines.
Higher education, particularly in some of the more prestigious schools, is little more than a giant country club. Some people are able to milk these sorts of relationships for their entire career. As the old saying goes, it's not what you know it's who you know. This holds true mainly in executive positions and less so in individual contributor positions. But there is a discrimination of sorts and a stigma attached to those without degrees.
military Technical Training should count for somet (Score:2)
military Technical Training should count for something at the very least be like an devry.
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Sorry old man, your experience isn't relevant to the current economy. I have to tell my parents this all the time.
It's a foot in the door... (Score:2)
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A tiny %.
The rest are mostly second generation morons, or their parents would cut off the funds after a year of 0.5 GPAs while taking only remedial courses.
I blame 'Animal House' and I'm generally from the 'Pro Party' camp.
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Yes!
I do have 10 years bullshitting experience from before products shipped.
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"Unless you work in a licensed professio, job requirements often represent an "ideal candidate wish list" by the employer. Smart job seekers know that and aren't afraid to apply to jobs where the fit isn't clear or the requirement match isn't all there."
Pretty much this. I just dealt with a recruiting company for the first time on the hiring side, and it really is interesting and eye-opening.
A lot of the stuff is just buckets. And the required experience in years next to it is really. For example we wanted
Re: Diploma mills (Score:3)
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they just want to hire smart people?
smart != educated
That being said, the two often correlate.