I think there is a lot of bias in hiring and Human Resource departments that place an unnecessary emphasis on a college degree. Someone with a college degree is usually perceived as being better qualified for the job than someone without a degree. Although I’ve never cornered a HR dweeb into a confession, there is a general impression that many will simply discount an otherwise perfectly acceptable candidate without a degree in favor of one with a degree.
For a number of irrelevant reasons, I was never able to finish a degree program in English Language and Literature back in the early and mid 80’s, even though I was only one or two classes short. A few years ago I enrolled in another degree program at a diploma mill college called Strayer. I was studying Network Engineering; the classes were too easy and only superficially covered the subjects; the professors often had a shaky (or incomprehensible) command of the English language; in the VB class the mathematics professor taught from the textbook, not really knowing the subject of the class himself, and was found of giving examples by saying “This is how it would be done in Q-Basic.” To top it all off, the college was still teaching NT as 2000 was being released. By the time I would have finished the degree program (right about now) NT wouldn’t be dominate anymore. So I dropped out.
Now there is a woman where I work who did complete the Network Engineering degree from Strayer. On paper and by HR standards she would be better qualified than me. She is, however, a complete nincompoop. Just the other day she came to me to say, “This program isn’t responding. Can you fix it for me?” I sat there for maybe a second before replying, “Have you tried shutting down all open applications and rebooting?” BINGO. Problem solved. I kid you not. You would think that a woman who had six or seven “college” level classes in NT could have figured that out on her own.
Nor is this the only the time this “college” educated woman has shown a genius for idiocy. I’ve programmed a database for my department and it has a number of processes to analyze the incoming data. Process 1 sets the stage for process 2 and process 2 prepares for process 3, etc. etc., all according to predefined business rules. This woman is habitually skipping one or more process, saying “Oh, that doesn’t apply to my data,” thereby not applying all the required business rules. Then she comes whining to me why nothing is as it should be when she is done. Getting her to understand the logic behind the database, that each process has an order precedence that must be followed by everyone at all times is daunting. College degree not withstanding, she needs to wear a conical cap. (Well, I guess she is good for something, proving the old saying that nothing is fool proof because fools are so ingenious, and I end up tightening the code to disable any chance of someone trying to skip a process. “Would she be foolish enough to try to do this way? Ayup. Put in a few more lines of code to prevent it.” Her idiocy forces me to be a better programmer.)
Despite all the heavy postulating and glorification of “critical thinking” skills and general knowledge benefits, I think it is important to realize that a degree is only calligraphied sheepskin, and there may or may not be an education behind it. With the influx of many students into college who can’t perform simple math or writing and the increase of adult education diploma mills, it might be wise to utilize those “critical thinking” skills and not to place such a sacred cow importance on the value of a college education. There may well be some people who exit with diploma in hand better able than they entered, but it shouldn’t be a universal assumption anymore.
I think there needs to be more stringent access to colleges and what can qualify for a college degree. Diploma mills like Strayer to be reclassified as vocational (at best) training.
