From September 10, 2018
Hey! Y’know that one or two hundred thousand dollars you spent for that bachelor’s degree in Gender Superhero Studies? You could have saved your money.
A lot of big, high-end corporations have decided to start hiring people who don’t have college degrees–including IBM, Nordstrom, Apple, Google, Bank of America, and the mega accounting firm of Ernst & Young (https://www.foxbusiness.com/personal-finance/more-companies-dropping-college-degree-requirement-for-new-hires). All they want is an employee whose head is on straight, who’ll work hard, and can learn.
Which doesn’t describe a lot of college students.
So what happened to “You’ve just absolutely got to go to college or you’ll never get a decent job and get ahead”?
Yeah, well, that just kept getting more and more untrue as college got to be more and more a waste of time and money. America’s colleges and looniversities benefited big-time from one of the greatest sales pitches in human history.
We have way too many colleges, way too many people in those colleges, and spend way, way, way too much money on a load of bunk that passes for an education. Not to mention the colleges’ new role as a breeding ground for neo-Stalinism.
No more public funds for universities! Let them sink or swim in the free market, like everybody else. If any of them are worthwhile, they’ll survive and prosper. The others will go extinct–and they’ll deserve it.
A new paradigm is definitely needed (like competition and a level playing field). More internships. More incentives for kids with their heads on straight to get a college degree while still in high school. Less regulations for entrepreneurs to pursue their ideas. The abolition of the Dept. of Education on federal and state levels. An abundance of on-the=job training opportunities.
All good ideas
Five years ago, I looked into government jobs doing what I do best. To go in at my level required a Master’s and a timeline of when one would be getting a Doctorate. If the applicant had a Doctorate, they wanted a written explanation of what you had been doing so as not to stagnate academically. What were they hiring, network engineers or college professors?
Nowadays the same job requires significant experience and they don’t have educational requirements unless you have no experience. For higher grade positions they have no interest in education whatsoever, but require verifiable experience in the field. The last time I hired I chose experience over education.
Colleges have succeeded in marginalizing themselves right out of contention.
“bachelor’s degree in Gender Superhero Studies” You got me laughing out loud there!!!
Since this was originally posted, I worked both for the US government and for a multinational corporation. I saw people entering the workplace in that multinational who had shiny new degrees, and absolutely no clue of how to accomplish anything. I remember one project manager who was pushed into a telecom project I was doing who started by announcing that he knew nothing about telephony. As it turned out, he knew nothing about managing a project, either, and managing a telephony project; he had not even the slightest notion of what to do, making him a grossly overpaid appointment secretary.
BTW, the only appointments he made were for the weekly project update meetings, which he sat through trying to sound like he knew what was going on. Meanwhile, the two people who actually knew anything about what actually needed to be done did out spiel for the benefit of everyone else in the meeting, but any actual, meaningful communications regarding the advancement of the project had been taken care of long before the meeting, in real time, according to the actual demands of the project.
Because there was involvement of the phone carrier, Mr. Junior Wannabe Project Manager offered to help me in “handling” the people at the phone company, many of whom I had worked with before and none of whom would have cared in the slightest about Junior’s input or opinions. If he’d tried throwing his weight around, the would have stalled him and called me, anyhow. IOW, it was a joke, but this joker thought that he was actually qualified to manage something that he admitted to knowing nothing about. 🙂
That sounds like a combination of pitiful and annoying. Promoted many steps beyond his capabilities.
This guy may have been better than Joe Collidge, but maybe not.
Ha Ha