How Often Is a Degree a Negative
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And so that when I explained why college was bad and not working that people wouldn't use the lame excuse that I couldn't know because I didn't attend. I know, as a hiring manager, that anyone who thinks college means they are smart are way, way below the minimum standard that I would want to hire. College itself was worthless, but knowing for certain that it is worthless is valuable.
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I don't have a degree, and it hasn't hindered my IT career at all. In fact, I believe I would be worse off if I did have a degree. However, that isn't true for everyone. The "colleges" mentioned in the article that was posted are a complete joke. The smallest about of research would show that. It's difficult to compare Everest College with a state college. Degrees from bigger state colleges are seen as valuable most of the time.
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Depends on the "bigger state college" and where you are. UT is a big deal in Texas but a joke everywhere else.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Depends on the "bigger state college" and where you are. UT is a big deal in Texas but a joke everywhere else.
Yeah, I could see that. I suppose it doesn't matter as much once you get at least 5 years experience.
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But they are useful as a hiring manager as I don't speculate about college, I actually went, and I know when someone brags about having a degree that their bar for success is so low that they are immediately disqualified.
This seems really limiting. There's so many variables here that making a blanket statement like this is shooting yourself in the foot. What about the kids who are forced to go to college by their parents? Want about dumbshits that learned better after they got older? What about people who may actually agree with your (in whole or part) and include it on their resume because that's just how it's done?
But to get back on topic, I never went to a U, and just went to a vocational school (now defunct). Does it help me now? No. Did it help me get my first job in IT? Yes. I also wasn't 10's of thousands of dollars in debt so I'd say the program worked.
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@Martin9700 said:
This seems really limiting. There's so many variables here that making a blanket statement like this is shooting yourself in the foot. What about the kids who are forced to go to college by their parents? Want about dumbshits that learned better after they got older? What about people who may actually agree with your (in whole or part) and include it on their resume because that's just how it's done?
None of those people need brag about it. Lots of people go to college. Present it as what it is, but pretending it is hard or means you are special just means you are not. Nothing about a parent forcing a kid to go to college (which, by the way, can't really happen in the US, but I understand the point) means that the kids has to pretend that it was hard when in an interview.
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Someone in an interview can easily say "I chose to go to college because it made my parents happy. I learned some things while there, it wasn't all bad." and do great in an interview.
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@Martin9700 said:
Did it help me get my first job in IT? Yes. I also wasn't 10's of thousands of dollars in debt so I'd say the program worked.
Personally I would defined "worked" only if it was able to get you into your first job sooner than an alternative approach. What if you had been teaching yourself and job hunting during the time you were in college.... could you have gotten a job sooner that way? People who go to college them get a job always say that the job helped them to get that first job, and sometimes surely that is true. But they rarely consider the cost of lost opportunity and wonder if they had not gone to college if that would have helped them to get a different first job sooner.
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For example, I worked in hotel management, long ago. Lots of people I knew went to college for hospitality management. When they graduate, universally they would all get jobs in hotels and say "my degree helped me to land this job." But lots of us who didn't go to college also got those jobs, two years earlier than those people and had us in the positions of being the hiring managers hiring them into the positions we had done two years earlier.
To them, college "got them the job." To us, college held them back two years and cost them a fortune.
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@scottalanmiller said:
To them, college "got them the job." To us, college held them back two years and cost them a fortune.
And in most cases the reality is probably somewhere in between.
I didn't do a degree in computers and yet my degree still got me jobs early in my career (you'd probably argue I'm mistaken on that, but hay ho). I think a lot depends on which University you went to. In the UK, rightly or wrongly, going to Oxford or Cambridge opens a lot of doors, followed by other Russell Group Universities, one of which I went to. I imagine it's similar in the US with Ivy League graduates.
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I've Have an AAS degree that along with my knowledge (I usually end up talking for 2-3 hours with people at interviews) Can get me in the door. I probably wouldn't without out it. I still have about $7,200 in debt from it for both tuition & books. I didn't get any tuition assistance for college as the college counted per parent income when I had went rather than household income and my mom made more than most individual people but, being a single parent made much much less than the average family income (And they don't let you not count your parents income until your 26 even if you live on your own).
I have had not having a degree be a negative once. I got told the hiring manager would hire me for a job however the pay would be much less and he would only let me plug in keyboards and mice because he was looking for "higher level employees" for his help desk techs. and wanted me to get a bachelors within 2 years of higher and a Masters within 4 (no tuition assistance). I told them no thanks.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
To them, college "got them the job." To us, college held them back two years and cost them a fortune.
And in most cases the reality is probably somewhere in between.
I didn't do a degree in computers and yet my degree still got me jobs early in my career (you'd probably argue I'm mistaken on that, but hay ho). I think a lot depends on which University you went to. In the UK, rightly or wrongly, going to Oxford or Cambridge opens a lot of doors, followed by other Russell Group Universities, one of which I went to. I imagine it's similar in the US with Ivy League graduates.
Depends on the field. The Ivy League has some universities with reputations similar to DeVry and Phoenix. The largest of the Ivy Leagues is famous in academic circles for being the place that the rich buy degrees for their kids who couldn't make it through community college. America's most important writer of the last fifty years wrote an entire book mocking the university. In some cases, it will get you in a door, in others it will get your resume binned before you ever talk to someone.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I didn't do a degree in computers and yet my degree still got me jobs early in my career (you'd probably argue I'm mistaken on that, but hay ho).
I don't think that college grads can every know when their degree helped or hurt them as they can never see the lost opportunities. It is simply the nature of the beast. Every college graduate things that their degree helped them, because it was part of what got them a job, but none know if they would have gotten a job earlier because they were in college instead.
Those who didn't go to college know that every job that they have their degrees did not get them because... they didn't have one. But they, likewise, will never know if a degree would have opened yet other doors for them.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
To them, college "got them the job." To us, college held them back two years and cost them a fortune.
And in most cases the reality is probably somewhere in between.
I didn't do a degree in computers and yet my degree still got me jobs early in my career (you'd probably argue I'm mistaken on that, but hay ho). I think a lot depends on which University you went to. In the UK, rightly or wrongly, going to Oxford or Cambridge opens a lot of doors, followed by other Russell Group Universities, one of which I went to. I imagine it's similar in the US with Ivy League graduates.
Depends on the field. The Ivy League has some universities with reputations similar to DeVry and Phoenix. The largest of the Ivy Leagues is famous in academic circles for being the place that the rich buy degrees for their kids who couldn't make it through community college. America's most important writer of the last fifty years wrote an entire book mocking the university. In some cases, it will get you in a door, in others it will get your resume binned before you ever talk to someone.
Havard isn't respected anymore. I know that. It's just thought of as a party school now.
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I think Princeton and Yale are still pretty decent. Maybe UPenn. Honestly, outside of odd businesses that have Ivy League grads running them, I know of no business that cares. And the one business I was ever involved with that made a point to hire from there sure paid a price. Completely staff of incompetence. No one know anything about the real world. They were useless. Took ten people to do the job of one normal person in every department.
Problem with the Ivy League is that most people aren't even aware of who is in the Ivy League.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
Havard isn't respected anymore. I know that. It's just thought of as a party school now.
What??? Harvard is still ranked as the second best Uni in the world according to The Times and I think there are 3 Ivy League unis in the top 10
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2014-15/world-rankingAnyway, many top Universities are still at the cutting edge of research in modern technology, so if you want to operate at that level I still think they are the places to be. I work in SMB which isn't generally cutting edge so it would be of little use to me. But if you want a career at CERN or NASA I imagine a good degree is essential for most
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@Carnival-Boy said:
What??? Harvard is still ranked as the second best Uni in the world according to The Times and I think there are 3 Ivy League unis in the top 10
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2014-15/world-rankingYes, it is well recognized that US degrees are inflated around the world. People come here for educations all the time, which we laugh at, because our schools are the worst. We have the best marketing.
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@Carnival-Boy Rankings don't mean a thing. I know many people going there and who have went there recently. It's a party atmosphere now. and most all professors are just giving easy A's since the students were able to get it to the college.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Anyway, many top Universities are still at the cutting edge of research in modern technology, so if you want to operate at that level I still think they are the places to be. I work in SMB which isn't generally cutting edge so it would be of little use to me. But if you want a career at CERN or NASA I imagine a good degree is essential for most
Universities are good for doing research. I agree. That doesn't mean that they have good educations. A major US university became famous when they said they had no mandate to educate students and that students only existed to fund the researchers. So that's why that is the way that it is.
Yes, CERN or NASA. But those are very, very rare programs and I bet even there there are other ways in that people just don't talk about or try. But you are talking about tiny pools of government jobs. If you want the cutting edge of IT, universities are nowhere to be seen.
