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Bachelor's Degree: An Unnecessary Path To a Tech Job
dcblogs (1096431) writes "A study of New York City's tech workforce found that 44% of jobs in the city's 'tech ecosystem,' or 128,000 jobs, 'are accessible' to people without a Bachelor's degree. This eco-system includes both tech specific jobs and those jobs supported by tech. For instance, a technology specific job that doesn't require a Bachelor's degree might be a computer user support specialist, earning $28.80 an hour, according to this study. Tech industry jobs that do not require a four-year degree and may only need on-the-job training include customer services representatives, at $18.50 an hour, telecom line installer, $37.60 an hour, and sales representatives, $33.60 an hour. The study did not look at 'who is actually sitting in those jobs and whether people are under-employed,' said Kate Wittels, a director at HR&A Advisors, a real-estate and economic-development consulting firm, and report author.. Many people in the 'accessible' non-degree jobs may indeed have degrees. For instance. About 75% of the 25 employees who work at New York Computer Help in Manhattan have a Bachelor's degree. Of those with Bachelor's degrees, about half have IT-related degrees."
I got a Bachelors in Network Administration from a state school. It wasn't required for my current job, but it certainly helped get me noticed and hired. Beyond that, the main advantage of the degree was having hands-on experience with Cisco gear and server OSes in a simulated production environment. Of course, you could find a training course that does that for much cheaper and without the bullshit lib arts requirements. In the end, I'd say it was worth it because I was able to get it at a reputable state school and my ending loans were about 2/3rds of my first year's salary, which wasn't bad at all. I certainly wouldn't have paid private school tuition for it.
Absolutely true. It makes sense if you want to go in college or university is should be for academic reasons only and not for getting a higher pay. But lets be honest here, people who go to university have a higher chance of getting a higher pay because of their efforts and work they've done to get their diploma at the end. Would you accept working with someone who has the same pay as you do but he don't have a university diploma but has the same knowledge that you do... To be honest and truthful, I don't think a lot of people would accept that.
I agree. Using the term "Computer Science" for what most degree programs teach is purely the result of the growth of the industry. 70 years ago you couldn't get a Computer Science degree. 50 years ago, you could get a Computer Science degree without ever having used an actual computer. 30 years ago, the only degree in computing you could get was Computer Science, and it encompassed the whole of the field. 20 years ago, Computer Science began to mean "software" instead of Electrical Engineering's "hardware". 10 years ago, the field was so broad, so diverse, and encompassed so many disparate technologies that required significant specialization that you could get a specialization certificate on your CS degree. Today, you can get a 4 year Bachelor's in any number of fields including Information Technology (sysadmin, netadmin), Information Systems (DBA, Systems Analysis), Information Management (management for IT), Software Engineering (web design, application programming). Computer Science is again a theoretical area of research and development on the theory of computers. All these other fields born from this CS research once again free it to be what it once was: mathematicians and logicians playing with number machines.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.