And this is why many lie. Half the time they don’t check anyway. But community college graduates always do better. Cheaper or free so no debt. Gets you in the door at most companies. Tend to be more skilled then ivy league graduates and more self driven.
Really what they want is a way to narrow down candidates at the end of the day.
The unfortunate part is that these methods are often the things that actually prevent diverse workforces.
Recruiting from expensive ivy league schools rather than state schools guarantees that you end up with a similar ethnic and gender make-up as those schools.
It doesn’t guarantee that you’re getting more qualified or harder working candidates.
Usually something as simple as getting your recruiters to focus their efforts elsewhere is what will increase your company’s diversity, without having to change any other aspect of your hiring process.
School is where you go to learn how to learn. It may seem like you are learning a profession, but you are learning how to learn about that profession. Work is where you will actually learn about the profession.
And do you really need college too, to learn how to learn?
My point is, I have programmer colleagues that have a psychology degree or none at all. Do you think that they “learned how to learn” programming in college? No, they are good programmers because that is their passion. Learning doesn’t have a single recipe.
I sometimes interview what could be people that will write code in my team. The college part in their resumes has zero importance to me, and I’d argue that it should be the norm. If we’d do the “college degree mandatory” when posting a job offer, like many companies idiotically do, we’d lose a lot of good candidates just because they wouldn’t be able to apply.
I just said “school”. You don’t need a higher education, but it’s a relatively good way to learn to learn. You may not be looking for that in the resume, but you are looking for other indicators this person has learned to work through challenges. For entry level positions, an education goes a long way in showing that.
I’m a University drop out and also the principal engineer of my department in a 40+ billion dollar company, I definitely don’t think education is that important, but it does count when you don’t know the candidate at all.
I once worked with a guy that said he prefers candidates that went to college and got a degree, because it shows endurance and a basic level of competence.
Depends on the field. For example, in IT, competence can be tested. Especially when a large percent of job positions aren’t filled with people that got a degree in that field. I have dev colleagues with psychology degrees and whatnot and one that only finished highschool, that are better programmers than others I know that do have an IT college degree. Good programmers are hard to come by, and the main aspect that makes you one isn’t a college degree at all.
University (especially masters) prepared me for a professional life in a number of ways. It taught me how to absorb information quickly and in vast quantities. It taught me how to organize and take useful notes. It taught me how to organize my ideas, and a long list of other things.
Here’s the thing though, I went to a small state university. Fully accredited with good programs, but still small and rural. I also studied Finance instead of computer science since I had realized that just about all CS degrees I could afford were trash and I already knew more about systems than they could teach (it was obvious that I wasn’t going to need COBOL, Pascal, or VAX knowledge). The second plot twist is that I only sat in the masters degree classes to keep my now wife company. I did the papers and studied for the tests with her for the hell of it.
The bottom line is that although I believe that a college education is very useful, I do not see the benefit delta between a cheap state university and an Ivy league school. The value of those pricey schools is in the network of friends you develop, IMHO.
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