Dispelling the notion that "college is not worth it".

Great Debates
101

The value of that signal will deteriorate as colleges water down their programs in response to a wider swath of people going through. And if everyone has a degree, no one is special.

Perversely, what this actually might do is widen the gap between an Ivy League education and everyone else. If it still requires excellent grades and a lot of money to go to the Ivy Leagues, but anyone can go through state U with middling grades and student loan money, then the ‘signal’ of a State U education will be lost or diminished, and the relative value of the Ivy League education will grow.

So the attempt to push everyone into college might just result in a wider gap in outcome between the rich and poor, while saddling the poor people with enormous debt.

In some fields you’re already seeing the value of the degree drop. Valve software does not require a college degree for any job - they hire based on interview and testing. My own company (a huge multinational) looks at degrees but doesn’t require them if you have equivalent experience/skill, and once you’re in the company the degree is irrelevant. We have two-year diploma grads leading teams of Harvard-educated engineers. We’ll promote whoever can do the job.

One of the reasons college signaling has been important is that we have hamstrung employers from finding out a person’s real talents. We’ve disallowed all kinds of tests an employer might want to give an applicant to determine if they can do the job, in the name of ‘equal access’. But perversely again, this may have the result of punishing people who can’t afford to go to good schools because the have no other way of showing their ability to an employer.

Another perverse result occurs when we pass legislation that makes it harder for an employer to fire an employee. This raises the stakes for hiring, which excludes a lot of marginal people. You can really see this in countries like France, where large numbers of young people are essentially frozen out of the job market because they don’t have the background or references to put an employer’s mind at ease. This is especially true of the immigrant population who employers see as being more risky because of their unknown backgrounds.

Instead of just adding more student loan money to the system to ‘help’ people with rising tuition, we’d be much better off to examine alternate educational paths along with reforms that make it easier for employers to take a risk on an employee with a non-standard background. But that probably won’t happen because the higher education lobby has a very vested interest in maintaining its status as the gateway to a good job, and once you have a degree you have a vested interest in keeping all those non-degreed people from competing with you.

102

If almost everyone can go to college, then those who don’t are even less special, and the gap between college and no college widens even more. And the stuff in your second paragraph will happen. As I mentioned, it already is happening.

except for those who go to rich schools who can afford to let them go almost free - if they are smart enough.

Harvard engineers? What did you expect? They were probably spending all their time getting ready to run for office. Of course I went to the good school in Cambridge.

From what I read, job applicants get all kinds of tests. I don’t hire in an area where tests would be appropriate. I can judge talent just fine without them, and I have a pretty good track record. I did take a test for a summer job at the post office, and they discovered I could sort addresses. Not all that useful for delivering mail, actually. Anything more than a cookie cutter job probably requires skills beyond what tests can measure.

103

In my field the HR people don’t even pretend to understand what we’re looking for, and I’ve always gotten along very well with them.

104

Actually, I think as everyone gets the opportunity for a degree, the value of better degrees will go up, as that degree will better reflect achievement rather than your parents socio-economic position.

105

A few things for you to consider: if you want to do psychotherapy, there is little to no benefit in going on to complete PsyD/PhD type work. Managed care rates for PhD vs MS-level therapists is an extra 10-20 hour in most regions as best I know currently, so it doesn’t make the extra loan debt worth it. This is probably only worth it if you want to teach, and even then, you need a FT, tenure-track position to make it worth it. If that’s what you want, the PhD is absolutely necessary. Otherwise, a PhD is good if you want to spend a lot of time doing psych testing (and writing reports subsequently, no thanks).
The key after getting the Master’s is to get the license in your state to do therapy. In Calif that means collecting enough supervised hours as an intern, then taking the exam. If you get the LCSW or the MFT license, that’s a good outcome at the end of the master’s and you can make some pretty OK $. (That’s pretty much my current position).

106

Most HR degrees have very little to do with interviewing. They cover areas like employee benefits, employment law and payroll management.

107

It’s already sort of like that:
Princeton / Harvard / Yale typically jockey for the Pepsi / Coke / Sprite position as top college in the country. Typically viewed as elite, even within the elite schools.

The next tier are the top ten colleges which would include the rest of the Ivy League, Stanford, Duke, MIT. These are schools where grads are typically considered among the “best and the brightest”. Careers in Wall Street or Silicon Valley are common.

Then from there you would have maybe the top 50 or so schools (Carnegie Mellon, RPI, Boston University). Not Ivy League or MIT level, but still prestigious. Good reputation and strong alumni network at a lot of top companies. Typically a pipeline into the upper-middle classes and corporate middle management.

Below that, you start getting into state schools, regional schools and lower tier colleges (UConn, Syracuse, Rutgers). While I wouldn’t just handwave them away as a waste of time, you need to be smarter and more strategic about how much it costs and what your career prospects are when you graduate.

And really once you start getting into schools that aren’t even tracked by the people who track these sort of things, I wouldn’t bother.

I think what happens with most established industries is that they tend to hire based on long-time institutional relationships and the established social order. IOW, top law firms and investment banks tend to keep hiring from the same pool of Ivy League and other specific top universities that they have been hiring from since the days of the founder. And that works because most of their business is based on handshakes made on the country club golf course. But when the industry or technology changes, they need people who actually know how to get stuff done. They are forced to turn to non-traditional sources, so that provides an opportunity for smart, talented people who don’t have the “right resume” to challenge traditional players.

But then what typically happens is that those new industries mature. They start to create their own institutionalized processes and business relationships. You can see this to a certain extent in Silicon Valley. For all their talk of “thinking out of the box” or “disruptive technologies” or whatever the term du jour for “doing things differently” is, Silicon Valley seems to be moving towards a fairly structured ecosystem of colleges (Stanford), “prestige” companies (Facebook, Google, Apple, any established startup) and VC firms (Sequoia).

But I took this position of power so I would be loved! Ironically, the more people I crush to gain more power and love, the more people seem to hate me!

Seriously though. What people hate is the Pointy-Hair Boss who seems clueless about how things work and just sort of comes in and shits all over everything.

OTOH, everyone always seems to think they know everything and are the best employee and that the company can’t live without them. When you’re the boss, you see the big picture. So where one employee seems himself as the smartest SME in the group, the manager might see a guy who, while he knows his shit, is so arrogant and abrasive that he is turning off clients and team members.

LOL! He thinks engineers is people!:smiley:

108

Yet they can’t manage to do that right.

109

Is it difficult to find stable work with these licenses? How much is pretty OK $?

110

Cry of the mediocre.

111

Yes, very much so.

The MBAs you work with probably either went to school a while back, or else went to a lousy school. IME, the “soft skills” are very heavily emphasized now, in response to 80s/90s criticism.

And FWIW, IME 95% of MBAs fall in one of two categories.

Quants: Smart people who were undergrads in finance, accounting, engineering, etc. and want to add management skills.
Poets: Smart people who majored in humanities or something else unmarketable and who realize after undergrad they don’t have enough job skills.

Undergrad degrees in “business” or "management’ are largely the province of the kind of people msmith describes, who were told a bachelors degree would get them a good job, and for whom “business” was vague and a lot easier than finance/accounting/etc. I am a TA; I’d say less than 5% of the undergrads in our top-20 undergrad business school would get into our top-40 MBA program.

112

Of course, this is a pretty subjective question, and depends greatly upon where you live, and so on. In general, I’d say that Social Services jobs are pretty stable in the sense that Child Protective Services workers, say, don’t tend to get laid off *en masse * very often. My field is kinda weird in that the newest members of the profession tend to enter the field working with some of the most difficult clients in stressful employment, and can, with growing experience, move more easily into working with more functional clients in better work environments.
As far as money, I’ve always been able to support myself since licensure and never gone unemployed for any significant time, there was always other jobs available for me to go if a job ended. I have been able to support a family of 4 in Southern Calif on my income alone when the babes were babes, so that’s a solid middle-class income, I’d say. Some in my profession also make a living as a psychotherapist in private practice, but that’s not generally been my preferred route, I’m pretty happy to be an employee…

113

You’re taking this too seriously. msmith gets it, I’m talking about the Pointy-Haired Boss, an MBA type. It’s a characterization, something expected to be exagerrated.

I am serious about the HRs though.

114

Poll the workers in your office and ask how many of them have education in their “particular fields”. I know 40-odd people that work in finance and few of them have degrees in accounting, economics or even general business.

115

[QUOTE=Really Not All That Bright Quote]

Poll the workers in your office and ask how many of them have education in their “particular fields”. I know 40-odd people that work in finance and few of them have degrees in accounting, economics or even general business.

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I’m sure they have all different sorts of background (a couple I know even have no college degree). But very little of the work is “monkey work”. At least not in the sense that any idiot off the street can do it. They are mostly all business analysts, developers, web designers, software architects, project managers and salespeople.

Even the sales guys and project managers have to have years of experience in technology and business consulting to confidently sell and lead engagements.

And anyone not on the client delivery side (HR, accounting, so on and so forth) is there to perform a specific function.
The point is, at least at a company like the one I work for, there is very little room to bring on someone with absolutely no skills or experience who can learn on the job. Occasionally we bring on a non-technical intern (paid I think) who will start off covering the phones or front desk, but then moves into a roll in HR or marketing or something like that.
Anyhow, the point is that most people I work with have some prior knowledge or skills required to do their job. They might have learned it on their own or through a formal education system, but either way, it’s always a much easier sell if you can articulate what job you are looking for and back up why you are qualified to do it with some sort of tangible proof like a relevant degree or portfolio of prior work.
OTOH, larger companies (like the ones that hire us) can be a big more flexible with their hiring. The irony is that because the jobs they might hire for might be a bit more nebulous or "monkey-work"ish, they tend to look for “smart” candidate who can adapt. Although this often just means they tend to do recruiting out of specific colleges where they had past success.
So therein lies the paradox. Large companies have more bullshit jobs any monkey can do, but they tend to have a rigid selection system for picking which monkeys will do those jobs. OTOH Smaller companies can be more flexible in terms of picking candidates with non-traditional backgrounds. But those candidates need to already have the skills in place to do the job because the small company doesn’t have the resource to train or wait for you to “on board”.

116 
First, check into the licensing requirements.  A master's in psychology may not meet the licensing requirements- it depends on the specific courses taken. Psychology isn't like social work - an MSW probably meets the licensing requirements for LCSW everywhere, but master's programs in psychology can be focused on anything from industrial/organizational  (which will probably not qualify you for any sort of  license) to mental health counseling or school psychology (which in my state are separate licenses) 

If you look , you may find a number of jobs that you are qualified for without the master's or license as they don't involve providing psychotherapy.For example, CPS workers in my state do not provide psychotherapy and the job requires a bachelor's degree. That's how I started out. There are also jobs in probation ,prisons, foster care agencies , substance abuse programs , etc that only require a bachelor's degree. In addition to the more difficult clients and more stressful conditions, the jobs open to the less experienced often pay much less than jobs requiring a few years of experience so that after a few years in CPS/probabtion/foster care, you'll find people either finding less stressful assignments (handling adoptions is less stressful than investigating child abuse) going to more highly paid jobs reuiring experience ( in my case, parole officer)  and/or start climbing the supervisory/management ranks. In most cases, the jobs actually working for the government are more stable than those with agencies dependent on government funding. You'll rarely hear of mass layoffs at CPS etc, but it's not so uncommon for a non-profit agency to lose  government contracts and be forced to lay off staff.
117

I agree to an extent. If the only signal of a college degree is that you’re one of the 80% who graduated college, then it will really suck to be in the 20%. On the other hand, the degree will also be useless as a meaningful signal to the employer, and they’ll have to start finding other ways to evaluate potential employees. I think this trend is already starting.

It is incredibly hard for a poor person to go to Harvard, even on a full scholarship. Living expenses are very high, travel costs are difficult, etc.

Heh.

You can give tests that directly relate to the job. That’s the saving grace in engineering - we give tests that are thinly-veiled IQ tests sometimes, but couched around an ‘engineering problem’. We can make software developers write code (although most new grads are horribly bad at this).

But you aren’t allowed to give IQ tests, and I don’t believe you can make a psychology test like the WAIS a requirement for a job application. You’re also very limited in what kind of background information you can ask of an employee. The law’s constantly changing around this and I’m sure it’s different in the U.S. than it is in Canada, but by and large aside from job-related questions and whatever’s on the resume, an applicant is a cipher. That forces more emphasis on formal credentials and work history, and freezes out people who are qualified but not credentialed, and those people who have yet to develop a work history or who have been out of the workforce for some time…

118

Larger companies have more room for growth, so to some extent hiring is done not only to fill a particular job but also to find people who can grow into bigger jobs. Thus the desire to hire smart people.
But training is way down and there is a lot more of wanting to hire someone who can jump into a job the first day. These are the people who complain about skills gaps.
The two buildings next to mine used to be exclusively for training. Now one has been totally converted to other uses, and I seldom see any training opportunities. The only training anyone does is take on-line compliance classes mandated by the company.

From another post

True, but how should kids find out? High school teachers don’t know this stuff. Kids may get what their parents do. Take your child to work days are pretty useless. And the ideas they get from TV are worse than useless.

119

I guess I have to question what sort of training people expect. I’m hiring project managers. My firm will train them on our particular processes, procedures and systems related to how we manage projects. I think it’s a bit much to expect that we train external hires in the basics of project management. I expect they should already know how to do their job. OR go pick up the PMI PMBOK handbook or a “Dummies” book or even just surf the web so you can at least speak to how you would do your job.

Books. Magazines. The Internet. The library. High school and college guidance counsellors and career centers. People doing work around town. Businesses in the area. Friend’s and acquaintances parents. Even TV might be a good starting point for more research.

One of the advantages of having gone to a “good” college is that I was surrounded by students who had a sense that they needed to figure out something they wanted to do after graduation. And the school had a lot of tools to help them do that if they wanted.

120

I’m thinking of more specialized skills. In Computerworld a CIO was quoted as saying that colleges weren’t doing their jobs because he couldn’t hire people who know the particular packages his company was using. Therefore there was a skills gap in his opinion.

I’ve yet to see a book, magazine, or TV show that shows what engineers do. “The Soul of a New Machine” by Terry Kidder comes as close as anything, but Kidder correctly focused on the people not the work.
From my kids friends the issue was not them not knowing they had to do something - it was the lack of opportunities to do anything. Even the one or two slackers work.