On 26 March 2014 10:46, Grant Shipley <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 9:42 AM, Jonathan Grotegut <[email protected] > >wrote: > > > Why as a hiring > > manager would you choose > > someone with a piece of paper that says they spent a ton of money on > > learning something, vs someone > > who has spent a TON of time learning on their own? > > > > > Because the person who has spent a ton of money on their degree also spent > *a ton* of time getting it.
----snip Or - they spent four years at a frat house and coasted through. The thing that no one has yet to bring up is a degree means you sat the classes. In my experience it is entirely possible to pass one's classes with C's and still get a degree. They could have done the bare minimum and still passed. And they would have forgotten it all by the time they graduated anyways. > If you were a hiring manager and had two > candidates with similar job experience and only one had a degree, who would > you hire? > > It's usually not this cut and dry - and there is almost always a pay premium attached to someone with a degree (which I would argue much of the time is un-deserved). If you find someone else my age with a degree, more likely than not they are going to have at least 4 years less experience than me (because I didn't spend my first 4 years out of High School at a traditional college - I worked in the profession). I think its bizarre that so much importance is attached to degrees - especially given that the knowledge gained from them is so temporal. Five to ten years after the degree is granted, the words on it mean nothing. If your entire point is that someone spent time sitting in classes - and if the knowledge is out of date after five or ten years - would you give someone more credit if they had an art history degree or someone with an acting degree (I used to work with a guy, who taught me Java, who had an acting degree - probably one of the best programmers I have ever worked with but his degree was completely meaningless). The only thing it means (as was said) was that someone paid a bunch of money - which gets to what I think is the crux of the problem that the degree is more or less a source of social control which prevents those without the means to pay for the education from moving up in society (limiting social mobility). Just my perspective - but then again I am looking at it from someone who doesn't have a degree. Put another way - when I graduated my parents couldn't afford for me to just sit around taking classes for four years - I had to pay for my life as an adult. People who don't have that demand place on them go to a traditional school, graduate, and then have something I don't. Neither of my parents had degrees (my father is an immigrant from Greece who didn't even graduate high school) so my ability to move up in society is directly limited by the importance society places on going to a four year college. Add to that the fact that I am trying to go to a school and when I get my degree I will still get people who say "well its from WGU - which I don't recognize as a good college - so you aren't hired." I find it somewhat offensive. Also - as I eluded to - not all private colleges are created equal. In fact, there are plenty of good professionals that graduated from UoP - and it is by no means a fly by night college. You can google UoP alumni and you might be surprised the people who graduated from there. The college I am going to (which, again, others might think is a joke school) also requires people to learn real skills - almost everyone going there is currently working - and it takes just as much (if not more) dedication and effort to pass through as a traditional college (again - i have attended a regular college, I speak from experience). Furthermore, it isn't possible to pass with just a C since most of the classes require getting a certification, which in many cases has a higher minimum pass rate than almost any exam I took. Its almost always a once and done thing. When I took calculus, I actually flunked two of the tests, but still passed the class with a C because I was able to get "bonus" points on a couple of the exams, enough so that i could still pass the class. In fact, I have had several classes where it was possible to coast through with doing fairly mediocre and doing "extra credit." To the core question - who would I hire? The person who could prove that they knew what they were doing through an aptitude test. In the end, does a persons knowledge mean any more or less to an organization because they got it at a four year school? I would argue not. The one thing I can say that I see as a good trend in the industry is more importance placed on actually being able to prove you can do something over just having qualifications on a piece of paper. Look Here: http://careers.stackoverflow.com/ High importance is placed on employers who actually test employees. Bottom line, when I have a server down at 2 am, I care more about whether or not the person has the ability to resurrect it. I don't really give two kopecks as to whether they went away to a university for four years. Kind Regards, Aleksei _______________________________________________ UPHPU mailing list [email protected] http://uphpu.org/mailman/listinfo/uphpu IRC: #uphpu on irc.freenode.net
