Employers Rethink Need for College Degrees in Tight Labor Market (colleges, schools)

[mitsguy2001]

Originally Posted by RamenAddict

The UC system doesn’t have affirmative action, yet only 20% of the 2022 class is white. University of Florida is also in a state that doesn’t allow AA but only about 50% of students are white and almost a supermajority are women. I don’t see any evidence that AA disproportionately screens out poor white males.

That proves my point, since it proves that minorities are able to get degrees (even without affirmative action), so requiring a college degree was not done in order to screen out minorities.

[villageidiot1]

I battled with HR at several employers when hiring IT staff. HR wanted to require artificial qualifications such as a college degree and a certain number of years of experience. They wanted to screen the applicants to determine if they met those and some other vague qualifications. I had problems with this approach because they would eliminate people with the experience I wanted and send me resumes of unqualified applicants. The department head/hiring manager is the person in the best position to determine who is qualified, and in some cases, overqualified. I always gave a lot of weight to whether a person had a degree, what their major was, and my opinion of the college. But relevant experience always carried the most weight.

When I worked for one of the leading consulting firms, a partner was hired who had not graduated from college. The managing partner who made the hiring decision said he didn't think it made any difference if this person had finished his anthropology degree.

[MarianRavenwood]

Originally Posted by tnff

I'm not sure I'm totally following the point of your argument. Are you saying that architects don't need to understand structures and materials? That there's no need for professional standards for those who design structures? It sounds like what you're arguing is that professional standards are racist/sexist. I'm not following the logic.

Nope, didn't say that. Feel free to reread as many times as necessary to comprehend. I don't play the 'are you saying something completely different' siren-bait game.

[Ceece]

There's a ton of jobs that don't need a college education to learn. Sometimes people are just naturally talented and other times on the job training is all it really takes. Continuing education can be required for specialty jobs or high level stuff once someone enters a specific industry or field. College is overrated and has been for a long time and given the problems with student debt I doubt we'll EVER go back to how it was before. I think the reckoning is upon us.

[tnff]

Originally Posted by MarianRavenwood

Nope, didn't say that. Feel free to reread as many times as necessary to comprehend. I don't play the 'are you saying something completely different' siren-bait game.

You made the accusation that qualification standards were discrimination. But provided no reason why nor an alternative to ensuring people meet standards.

[villageidiot1]

Originally Posted by Ceece

There's a ton of jobs that don't need a college education to learn. Sometimes people are just naturally talented and other times on the job training is all it really takes. Continuing education can be required for specialty jobs or high level stuff once someone enters a specific industry or field. College is overrated and has been for a long time and given the problems with student debt I doubt we'll EVER go back to how it was before. I think the reckoning is upon us.

How was it before? I graduated from college in 1977. I'm trying to remember how it was?

I've also gone back to college three times since then. The only difference I've noticed is some colleges today have students who can barely read and write. In more selective schools, the students have much more knowledge and experience.

[EDS_]

Here's a big part of the problem. Depending upon whom one believes that average college graduate's IQ is around 112-114, high school diploma holders around 101/102, everyone else less well less than 100.


I get that some are put off by the social stratification posed by intellectual and educational attainment differences. At the end of the day we have near endless hard data showing that those with both higher IQ and higher educational attainment perform better across all but the most mundane of jobs. And of course there are job sectors in which both physical strength and manual dexterity are paramount but even then smarter people do better.

[redguard57]

Originally Posted by Ceece

There's a ton of jobs that don't need a college education to learn. Sometimes people are just naturally talented and other times on the job training is all it really takes. Continuing education can be required for specialty jobs or high level stuff once someone enters a specific industry or field. College is overrated and has been for a long time and given the problems with student debt I doubt we'll EVER go back to how it was before. I think the reckoning is upon us.

You know what's also overrated? Working your best years away and then dying with nothing to show for it. Jobs don't love you. They don't make your life better. We do them because it's what we do to survive. If all you got educated for was a job, than yeah, you wasted your education. I tell people all the time.. if you want a job, get a job. Don't need college for that. I got my education to improve my LIFE and it helped me with that.

Education is always over-rated until you need it. It's possible someone may go a lifetime without needing it. Others may use it every day.

Personally for me it was one of the great experiences of my life. Helps me understand the world so I'm not a complete fool. I gained a love of books and learning *because of college.* Before I went to college I was a dense unthinking idiot and I have the evidence to prove it.

In the U.S. we produce about the same proportion of college graduates per capita as our developed-world peers, around 1/3rd of the population. We probably don't need more but I don't think we need less either.

What other countries don't have is a student loan crisis like what we have. Somehow we pay for it very inefficiently.

[Ralph_Kirk]

Originally Posted by Vision67

Why require a 4 year college degree for a job that really doesn't need it?

-It demonstrates grit. The applicant had what it takes to overcome the obstacles and perhaps demonstrates cognitive ability.

-It's an easy and legal way to screen out minorities.

All it does is push back the hiring age to a point that the person might be a bit more mature.

That was never really a fact-based assumption, especially these days as college today (more than in the past) tends to allow students to extend their adolescence even farther. It's easily argued that someone who has a good four-year job resume since high school is more mature than someone who has gone to college during that same time.

[Ralph_Kirk]

Originally Posted by tnff

You sure anyone can be trained to do the job? It's a notion a lot of people have, but that doesn't match what I've seen in reality. I've watched that cycle happen several times. Start off requiring a technical degree AND then six months training. Able to do the job well. Then someone (HR?) decides it's to hard recruiting technical degrees and they can train anyway, so they change the requirement to any degree plus training. Except the washout rate in training goes up because they don't have the background knowledge. And more mistakes happen later because they lack the fundamental understanding.

But hey, this is working, so let's eliminate any degree requirement and just train. Well, the basic background knowledge is still required so now you're having to train that before you can train the job. And the washout rate is even higher. The understanding goes even lower, and you have to restructure the job to remove any thinking from it. The job just becomes a monkey job. But we're doing it with non-degreed people. Except now you have to hire a backroom of consultants to do the thinking part of the job. It didn't go away; you just moved it and hid it in the back room in a different budget line. Net result is you're paying more and getting less but can pretend to be doing it without requiring degrees.

The other thought is where does everyone get this idea the 23 year old in college has done nothing but sit in a classroom? The majority have been working to pay for school so when they graduate it's not the classic "4 years of work experience" vs "4 years of school" but vs a combination of work AND school.

False argument. The discussion is about whether the person needs a bachelor's degree. And the discussion is not about every position, but making the point that many today don't actually need that bachelor degree...that they they don't need any training at all.

Computer programmers and networkers do not need bachelor's degrees to begin work coding or wiring. They do need technical training, however.