I am seeing such amazing things happening in the field of education. I was bumming around on Edx the other day, and the geometry course there was terrific! and totally free!
My problem is…when are things really going to start changing in terms of what employers will accept? As far as I can tell, we are still in a world that lives by degrees. If you are going to get a job in this field, then you need this degree. If that field, then you need that degree. I am longing for the day when this will all get disrupted. Why don’t more employers recognize that a degree is increasingly becoming useless? How much longer before employers simply start looking for competencies?
I mean seriously…if a painter is looking to hire someone, he hires someone who knows how to paint. Why can’t a hospital do the same thing? hire someone who has the competencies you need! whatever that might be. and the worst offender is teachers. The silly things people learn in education school border on insanity. What makes schools think that someone with a teaching certificate is a good teacher? Why not hire someone who actually knows their subject and can teach it? who cares where or how they went to school? If they can teach, hire them!
Why the strict dichotomy between degrees and competencies? Why can’t the requirements for a degree be based on the competencies required for a certain field?
I’m not sure where you expect people to acquire the “competencies” for practicing medicine if not from attending a medical school and completing a degree program.
Also, it depends a lot on the field. Many jobs will say, “such-and-such degree, or equivalent experience”–including teaching jobs I’ve seen posted. And many teaching jobs don’t require a teaching certificate–just a bachelors.
I entirely agree with the OP. Many job postings in the software industry ask for “a computer science degree or equivalent experience.” Employers recognize that the degree is not necessary.
I spent 4 years getting a computer science degree. Net cost to myself, my parents, my grandparents, private scholarship funds, and the taxpayers was about $150,000. I’m still paying off my loans. Some of my high school classmates went straight from senior year to a programmer position. Since they have more experience than me, they now earn more than me. A computer science degree is for suckers.
Of course the good thing about the software industry is lack of regulation. Anyone with skill can write code, and the government doesn’t interfere. That’s why the industry changes and grows so quickly. In fields such as law, the government bars (yuk yuk) uneducated people from working.
Well, that’s kind of an issue, really. As the old joke goes, “in Old Country I am nuclear engineer. Here, I drive cab.” - because the US typically does not recognize the validity of foreign degrees, and recertification (when at all available) is an onerous process, especially for recent immigrants who may or may not have a great mastery of English yet, or means to support themselves throughout the process.
Then again, I’m not sure how you’d go about demonstrating skills & knowledges to a prospective employer without some form of normative exam or degree. No hospital is going to throw Sanjay in the ER on the off chance he’s not bullshitting about having self-taught cardiac bypass surgery :). In *some *fields it’s possible for a newbie or autodidact to demonstrate competency to an employer (e.g. in translation you’re very often subjected to a sample test) but I shouldn’t think that’s feasible in most jobs. How do you prove that you can teach and know your subject through and through over the course of a job interview ? I can English pretty good, but fuck if I could teach it.
Part of the problem may be that “college is the new high school.” (My link is to a google search which turns up quite a few articles on that theme from the past few years.) A high school diploma is no longer worth what it used to be. I’m not sure what, if anything, you can assume about a person’s skills or competencies from the mere fact that they graduated from high school.
First, we could change the laws to make recertification less onerous. Technology changes things. 50 years ago, if someone showed up and claimed to have an engineering degree from Pakistan or Argentina, checking the validity of it would have been almost impossible. Today it would be much easier.
Second, I think many employers could devise their own entrance exams. When I applied for my current programming job, the company had me write a PHP script. That largely replaced the traditional series of interviews. (I had only one short interview.)
Given the point that only around 7 pct of people worldwide have college degrees, and that most barely struggle to finish secondary if not primary school, then I think we have not yet reached a world where college education is the norm.
Let’s face it. Employers don’t use a job applicant’s college degree to inform them whether that job applicant is “competent”. A lot of jobs that require college were, at one time, performed by high school graduates. No, college degree is just one thing an employer uses to establish “Is this person one of us?” Any guy off the street can be an autodidact. But they don’t let just any guy into a prestigious university.
And “Is this person one of us?” does not have to be a question with nefarious intent. Being able to successfully jump through the hoops of college demonstrates some level of self-discipline and conformity–two things that are very much wanted in your typical workplace. A boss doesn’t want to have to deal with someone who has trouble with time management and performance under pressure, for instance. Who’s more likely to have problems in this area? Someone who has never had to simultaneously prepare for five final exams? Or someone who has?
I agree with it, much to the dismay of my “liberal” brethren, who I think are being awfully, literally, conservative here. If a person can be determined to have the skills needed for the job without the degree, more power to 'em. For years we’ve used having a degree as a proxy for competence, but it’s a piss poor proxy. I wouldn’t let some of the people I graduated with dogsit for me.
Nursing school was such a waste of time and money, I can’t even tell you. I literally learned nothing after the prerequisites (Microbiology and Anatomy and Physiology in particular were really useful). There IS a competency exam for nursing, called the NCLEX, and you have to pass it to get your nursing license…but you have to complete an accredited nursing program in order to take the NCLEX. It’s a racket. I could have passed the NCLEX the first day of nursing school. We could easily take people who can pass NCLEX, give them a few weeks of full time clinical training (which we already do, as nursing school doesn’t teach you how to place an IV or draw blood or put in a catheter or many other hands on skills), and have licensed nurses just as competent as the current system. Perhaps not all or even most, but some of us could do it, especially we older students.
Back when college was a rigorous weeding out process that tried to push people who couldn’t hack it out, perhaps a degree held some meaning. But in today’s environment when students are spoonfed the material and professors under great pressure to make sure everyone passes, and entrance requirements have been dropped through the basement and “bridge” and remedial programs try to catch people up and fail and the students pass anyway, it’s no longer what it once (maybe) was.
The first part (wanting someone like them" might be true, but the second part doesn’t make much sense to me. If the issue is really time management and performance under pressure in a work environment, it would be logical to pick someone who has demonstrated these skills in work environment than someone who demonstrated them in a college environment. Hence, you would hire the guy who worked during the last 5 years rather than the guy who attended college during the last 5 years.
I worked for a company where part of the application process was taking a test on Microsoft Word, Outlook, and Excel and these scores were weighed against any other skills the applicant brought to the table as well as against other applicants. Someone who did not score high enough probably wouldn’t be getting a call from us.
Cause the employers have the power at the moment, would there be more jobs than people to fufill them, then the requirements for any particular job go from a purple unicorn, to having a pulse (optional)
I agree. A college degree indicates that a person has the skills necessary to obtain a college degree. And that’s not a tautology. Getting a degree means you were able to follow a long and complicated process through to its completion. It doesn’t matter what the degree is in - just having done it shows that you have useful skills that will apply in the business world. The specific subject you learned in college may have no application to your chosen profession. But you’ve shown you can learn something.
That’s all true, but it’s rather an inefficient means, asking people to bear the costs of college for several years, possibly learning outdated stuff just to prove time management skills.
I think it’s a good thing that in my field (of computer science) that work experience and/or being able to demonstrate an ability to code, are much more important than a degree. And I’m saying that as someone with 2 degrees.
It all depends on the field. No way do I want to go to a doctor who didn’t graduate from a medical school. I want my pharmacist to be my second line of defense against drug interactions and I want him to learn that in college. Your computer programmers, not so much.