Yeah, keep telling yourself that.
But if you can’t even get your foot in the door of her office, how can you show your prospective boss what you can produce?
I have Ph.D and I don’t think my job requires an advanced degree. A lot of the skills I’ve acquired have been on the job, and even though the background knowledge is nice to have (like knowing the systematics of cychlids or the geological history of south Florida), it’s not necessary for the day-to-day duties of my job.
About the only important skill that I had prior to being hired was my writing ability–something that was honed from my college and graduate school experience. Sure, I had mad writing skills when I was in high school. But it took years of school for my writing to become sophisticated. The same goes for my speaking ability. You can often tell if someone has seen the inside of a college classroom based on what comes out of their mouth. Unfortunately (or not), you will be judged on the way you speak and write wherever you go. The best way to improve your communication skills is to go on to college, regardless of major.
No, the degree doesn’t ensure that your communication skills will be great. But it does tell someone that chances are you aren’t illiterate and you probably are presentable to the public. It does tell someone that you have drive and commiment. Most important, it tells your boss that you are trainable and malleable. College doesn’t grant you these things (I know plenty of people who went to college who aren’t presentable or malleable, for instance) but the degree says you are these things. And that’s nothing to sniff at.
College can be overrated if you expect someone to hold you hand the whole way. But if you set high expectations for yourself and have a plan for what you want to get out of it, then it can be a very fulfilling experience.
Yeah, it’s really too bad that in the vast majority of cases you can’t get that 2-3 years of experience without a degree.
Going to college is no different than buying your future. $25,000 and four years later if all goes well you have bought yourself a job that pays a living wage. That’s about it.
Agreeing with Doors. More to the point, I suspect in many fields a degree usually establishes a minimal acceptable salary in deference to your training and education regardless of experience. Your experience in a field may grant you work but may also fetch you a lower salary even if your skills and experience are superior to some college kid right out of school.
When I was a student teacher, not only did I know more about the subject matter and using the computer equipment in my mentoring teacher’s classroom, I did just as good a job as she did when it came to classroom management aaaaaand I had passed all my qualifying EEE and NTE exams already.
I think a lot of people go to college when they really don’t need to. So yes, it’s overrated.
I dropped out when I was 19 and in a few months had set myself up with a fulltime job (working in a cubicle for a blood sucking corporation) in a field that I enjoy, using skills that I had already taught myself. That started my career which I love, which six years later has me earning far more than most college graduates in my field get (plus most of them are stuck paying back student loans.)
It doesn’t work everywhere, though. You can’t be a doctor or something without going to college and medical school. But for me, it worked great, and I am less and less motivated to go back and finish my degree with each passing year.
That’s hardly evidence. I studied civil engineering in college but went into computer consulting after college. While the fields are not directly related, many of the skills I used on the job - project management, spreadsheets, quantitative analysis - I had already learned in college.
As someone who hires extensively for my firm, I see all types of resumes. I can tell you that there is a huge difference between someone who uses college as a “place-marker” and someone who takes full advantage of college to enhance their skills and experience. Mr place-marker is the guy with the 2.5 GPA and irrelevant job experience who calls me through the alumni website asking for a job he has no understanding of (meeeeh,I think I like consulting).
The other guy has impressive internships and credentials and when he calls, he knows exactly what my company does and what kind of job he wants.
Yes, people do work in careers outside their major. Sometimes intentionally. But if you go to college for four years, get nothing out of it, and then end up in a dead end job, who’s fault is that?
I have a similar experience. I have an MBA in finance. I work in marketing. It doesn’t mean my college and graduate work gave me nothing I use in my job. In addition to the communication skills you mention, I use stats and calculus on a regular basis. I had some of that in high school–but not nearly enough. I also learned how to prioritize when I have 8 hours of work to do in 5, how to work on something I’d rather not do just then, and other skills that my employer would rather not teach me. The mundane details of my job didn’t come from school (and many would have changed in the years since I’ve graduated), but many of the basic skills I need did.
Most of the responses so far have focused on college’s role in preparing you for a job. What about college’s role in preparing you for the rest of your life? If you’re at all curious; if you value learning and thinking and reasoning; if you want to become exposed to a wide variety of ideas and philosophies and cultures and art forms and historical people (and if you don’t, what are you doing here at the SDMB?); a good college experience can take you a long way on this track. (Disclaimer: not all college experiences are good in this sense, nor is college the only means to such ends.)
Just an opinion: The actual college degree is the valuable part. An education is great on in own merits, but that simple piece of paper is worth an overrated amount in getting jobs.
There are many ways to learn a job. I find with Computers a good school can train you in logic and code but still can’t train someone as a troubleshooter. I find a 26 year old that can troubleshoot but has only a certificate is worth more to me than a 22 year old with their BS. It would be nice if more colleges could design troubleshooting courses.
If you have the option of going to college, do so and work hard at getting that degree. It will make the rest of your life a little easier and it is how the system is rigged.
That’s not even true of liberal arts degrees. For many of those “generic cubicle worker” jobs, employers just want someone with college and don’t care so much about the type of degree, since they traditionally train from within.
But that’s just it. They were all “majors” in something else, meaning they did go to college. I work in IT–my undergrad degree was in German literature of all things, and my colleagues include history majors, English majors, and of course, comp sci majors and a smattering of physical science and engineering majors. Although in the past I have worked with one or two gifted programmers who didn’t have any college, there is no one in my office today who doesn’t have at least a four year degree.
Can I also point out that “generic cubical job” isn’t exactly the height of professional achievement? Some people actually go to college to train for specific careers. Programming is kind of a different animal since many programmers can learn their skills without being formally trained. I suppose that’s true for many jobs, but you don’t often find people who dabble in finance or materials science in their spare time like you do with computers.
Also, for jobs in consulting or other “prestige” careers, the degree itself is often important. We are selling out consultants as “highly trained and educated experts” even if they are really kids right out of undergrad / business school.
True, but you generally need college to even get that type of job, and at least you’d be likely to start out with decent bennies and a reasonable if not spectacular salary. I assume you’re talking here about staff jobs like accountant, programmer, insurance adjusters and underwriters, and so on.
Well, apparently it was necessary, to the point where your uncle had to commit fraud.
And he wouldn’t have felt the need to commit fraud were it not for the fact that people are unwilling to even look at people without a degree.
Like I said, it’s buying a job.
I learned to troubleshoot in college. Not in a class, but when I was TAing a PDP-11 assembly language class. Having ten people lined up at 1 am, all saying “my program doesn’t work, there must be a bug in the computer” is a great way of learning. And of the students thinking you’re a genius, when you find the flaw in thirty second that they’ve been looking for for 2 hours. You don’t tell them that five other people made the same mistake. 
People in industry are fully aware that a person with experience is better than a person without - but a person with a degree has more experience than someone fresh out of high school without a degree. Plus, they at least have shown they can make it through college.
I’ve recruited for several top companies, and where you go counts also. I can assure you it is easier to get a good job with a degree from Stanford, say, than Southern Podunk Bible College.
Pretty much agree. My PhD was necessary, but I got a job out of school in industrial research, and those kind of jobs are damn scarce these days. Very little of what I did my dissertation on was relevant to my job, but that was expected. The research skills I got were very relevant. The education I got on how conferences and journals run from my advisor were very useful. I continued to be active in my dissertation field for about five years after I left school, and that helped also - especially when my boss came with me to a conference and saw that my survey paper got referenced a lot. (He had a PhD also, so I had an advantage there.) Feedback from my advisor on speaking at conferences, and paper writing, was probably as important as the actual research.
When I got my BS degree, I didn’t think I was ready for anything, so I went to grad school. But I discovered that I had learned how to think. I am convinced that my increased earnings more than paid off what my father paid for my degree, and is paying for the degrees for my kids.
And I met my wife in college too.
I think college is incredibly important for developing the skills of questioning what you think you know, expanding your world-view, meeting people of different backgrounds ~ in short, learning how to think independently, analyze, evaluate and draw your own conclusions. It’s an opportunity to examine what you were taught as a child, and reframe your sense of self within a larger framework.
Especially in the current political/religious climate, it’s vital to becoming a thinking, voting member of the world community.
When I was in college, I would estimate a good 10% of the students there had any of those skills, and they were mostly older non-trads. The truth is that for most people “learning to think independently” in college consists mostly of student groupthink and laughable attempts at rebellion against The Man.
This is pretty common while still in school, but I think the critical skills are learned there, then are likely to be applied throughout their lives as they mature.