Is it my imagination or are those of us without college degrees slowly being phased out of the U.S. company hiring process for higher salary white collar (office) workers?
I do recognize that it’s an employer’s market these days and that they can afford to filter in degreed candidates first.
So if you agree this to be true, how are you dealing with it, particularly if you’re in your 40’s or 50’s and you’ve decided against going back to school?
Resigning yourself to the rest of your life at low or medium level salary cap?
I’ve already nabbed two “professional” positions sans college degree, in my short time here. Granted, one of them did they a college degree was “required,” but that seems to rarely be enforced, at least in the industry I work.
I don’t have a degree. It has never been an issue for me. Never even came up…
…except once…at my current job, they had a third party company do the reference checks and they wanted to verify my degree. I told them I didn’t have one. Things got weird after that.
The only time not having a degree hurt me was when a particular manager told me flat out that he would not hire anyone that didn’t have one. he didn’t even really care what it was in, as long as you had one.
Other than that, I’ve done pretty well for myself with a GED and a couple hours of college credit.
I have a degree from the University of Chicago and can’t get a job at Target. I’ve been in the hotel industry most of my life and I’ve never seen a degree make or break someone.
Oh I’ve seen H/R use it as an excuse to pay someone less but it doesn’t seem to work the other way. In otherwords they may say the controller only makes $75,000 a year because he/she has no degree, but when the non-degreed controller quits if they can find a candidate with a degree that’ll take $75,000 that’s OK. So companies use it as a fake reason to justify paying someone doing the same job less
I work in inventory management. I’m about as far as I can go without a degree in most large companies. Small companies pay the same as I make for a higher position and, since many are self insured, shy away from those of us in our forties and up.
I’ve thought about returning to school. When all is said and done, it would be hard to get even an associate’s before I turn fifty and I would be paying student loans off until I retire. The option may not be so much of an option, though. Should I change companies (a distinct possibility in this economy), it might be necessary.
I tend to do office/clerical work and have never had a problem with entry level work or appropriate experience with a degree. All the postings I see now are Bachelor’s only, no “degree and/or experience.” And they all pay next to nothing.
Jobs that 20 years ago you could get with a HS degree and make a career out of it are now degree only and not salaried in a way you can live on forever.
