When I was at Bell Labs a long time ago we had a bunch of people with Associates Degrees who got Bachelor’s Degrees (paid for by the company.) They didn’t get automatic raises, but they were qualified for the next job level. Mostly the characteristics that made them do this extra work also got them good raises.
One person tried to get the company to pay for an MBA, and was turned down flat as it was considered less than useless for engineering and computer work.
Outside of certain union jobs with contracts that require it, I’ve never heard of anyone getting an automatic raise for completing a college degree. But it’s fairly common for the degree to increase your odds of a promotion.
I did get an automatic raise for passing actuarial exams, but completing the exams made me more qualified to do my job, and studying for them was helpful in doing my job, too.
Why would it, unless it increases your value to the company?
Not a raise, but when I got my first job after college I was told that my salary was increased slightly from the standard entry level salary for my position because I had a college degree. The thing is, my degree was a BFA in Theatre, and the job was preparing sales reports for data entry (this was in the mid-70s).
During my first career I was not required to have anything more than a high school diploma. The employer paid up to 90% of tuition if you took courses while employed (90% for an A, 80% for a B, and 70% for a C) so about 85% of my tuition was paid for.
After I retired in 2007 I took a full time position with another agency. By that time an Associate Degree was required (though I was grandfathered because I was on the job prior to 1994).
By then I had an Associate, a Bachelor, and a Masters Degree. I get annual bonuses for having the Bachelor and Masters Degrees, $1000 each. I. Also get a bonus of $1000 per year because I don’t take the health insurance (mine is provided by my previous employer).
I grew up in the UK at a time when only a quite small percentage of people went to university; about 4% I think. So a university degree had some amount of scarcity value.
Since then there has been so much of a push to get ‘almost everyone’ into some kind of college (both in UK and US), that I think an initial undergrad degree has been devalued almost to insignificance.
Yeah, this sort of generalized gatekeeping as a job requirement has always slightly irked me. I had a co-worker in my old grey-collar job who was looking to advance to a particular front-line supervisory position (with shift work and paid standby and overtime, non-salaried). It required a degree - any degree. He was a very smart guy, but had gone the Navy route out of High School rather than college (which is where he became qualified for our gig) and now would have preferred to get a regular college degree in something that interested him. But between family, job and commute he couldn’t do it in any reasonable length of time, so he took the pragmatic path and got an accredited “correspondence” business degree from the for-profit University of Phoenix. Relevance to the job he was trying to get - absolutely zero.
He got the job, was good at it, retired from it and I was happy for him. But it was a bullshit waste of everyone’s time and resources. He was no more or less qualified with or without that piece of paper.
It’s not so much that it’s been devalued into insignificance as that it’s the new entry level for any even vaguely professional job.
I had absolutely no luck landing a job with any real prospects for progress until I got a degree in my mid 30s.
I was basically told repeatedly in interview feedback that they would expect someone applying for anything other than cleaning or maybe a receptionist position to have a degree or specialist qualification. I decided to go to uni in my 30s, and hadn’t even finished the full 3 year degree before I got a professional level job (which turned out to be a nightmare so I quit and wound up starting a PhD, but that’s not the point).
The entire ten years I worked at a very employer-friendly pharma company, one of my good friends in the Environmental Health & Safety department was working on his BS. He could not advance any higher without a degree. I think it meant being able to get promoted from Assistant Manager to Manager, with a bump of over $10K/year.
That guy did everything he could to slow the process down. The company was paying for it, of course, and they had certain rules for the program. For example, I think he had to take at least three courses (quarters) each year. He’d try resetting the “year” after taking two courses in nine months. Sometimes he’d search the catalog for the most obscure and gut course he could take that would still count towards his degree. One time he scheduled some elective surgery so he’d have to miss the final exam, then tried to count the same class for the following quarter.
Not sure why all this was necessary, but he kept it up for nearly ten years. Maybe his annual review depended on him not dropping out of the degree program. Or he needed to be able tell his wife that he was working hard on a promotion.
Bummer of a typo. I think.
FYI, as a side note regarding the company paying tuition:
If the company is paying the tuition and/or fees/supplies, the IRS allows employers to provide up to $5,250 per year in qualified educational assistance benefits tax-free to you, but anything over that is taxable income to you and must be reported.
There’s an exception if the education expenses qualify as a “working condition fringe benefit.” This means the education is required by the employer or the law to keep your present job, salary, or status, and it maintains or improves skills needed for your current job (it cannot qualify you for a new trade or business). In this specific case, the entire amount, even if it exceeds $5,250, can be tax-free.
Indeed!
Yes, your company can bill the government at a higher rate because of that P.E.
For government employees, the federal agency I worked for had minimum grades for employees with degrees (grade X for a bachelor’s, grade Y for a master’s). But I think it depended on your job (as mentioned above).
We’ve got a bunch of answers from a bunch of perspectives.
I’m now sorta curious what the OP’s friend’s job is like, what sort of company, and what the OP’s thinking was about the whole degree / raise / promotion situation in the USA.
IIRC my sister said that nurses would get a salary bump if they got a BS.
As I said in the OP, one person is a team lead though not formally a manager while the other is an individual contributor. I’d rather not describe the nature of the company, though it’s quite a large one with roughly 200,000 employees. And I hadn’t thought too much about the subject, but the idea (as presented by several here) that you’re not just going to get a big fat raise while staying in the same job does make sense. (Though I like both of the people I work with, so I wouldn’t want them to move on just for more money.)
Thank you. That’s plenty for my curiosity. A specific factor I wondered about was whether you and they worked for a small, medium, or huge business. Huge is the answer.
In my experience the two fields where you can get a salary bump for getting a degree will though changing your job are public K-12 education and law enforcement.
Colleges offer extremely watered down Masters degree programs to accommodate this market.
My mother talked about the difference between RNs who (usually?) have a BS and LPNs who have less, but that was decades ago.
Yeah, my knowledge is decades ago, too. At that time, she said there was a good number of nurses (not LPNs) without a BS. The hospital was pushing them to get degrees, though, so I’m sure the number is smaller today.