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A New Kind of Tech Job Emphasizes Skills, Not a College Degree (nytimes.com)
Steve Lohr, writing for the New York Times: A few years ago, Sean Bridges lived with his mother, Linda, in Wiley Ford, W.Va. Their only income was her monthly Social Security disability check. He applied for work at Walmart and Burger King, but they were not hiring. Yet while Mr. Bridges had no work history, he had certain skills. He had built and sold some stripped-down personal computers, and he had studied information technology at a community college. When Mr. Bridges heard IBM was hiring at a nearby operations center in 2013, he applied and demonstrated those skills. Now Mr. Bridges, 25, is a computer security analyst, making $45,000 a year. In a struggling Appalachian economy, that is enough to provide him with his own apartment, a car, spending money -- and career ambitions. "I got one big break," he said. "That's what I needed." Mr. Bridges represents a new but promising category in the American labor market: people working in so-called new-collar or middle-skill jobs. As the United States struggles with how to match good jobs to the two-thirds of adults who do not have a four-year college degree, his experience shows how a worker's skills can be emphasized over traditional hiring filters like college degrees, work history and personal references. [...] On Wednesday, the approach received a strong corporate endorsement from Microsoft, which announced a grant of more than $25 million to help Skillful, a program to foster skills-oriented hiring, training and education. The initiative, led by the Markle Foundation, began last year in Colorado, and Microsoft's grant will be used to expand it there and move it into other states. "We need new approaches, or we're going to leave more and more people behind in our economy," said Brad Smith, president of Microsoft.
Appalachia is like a third world country inside the borders of the USA. Hiring these people is really not any different than offshoring. They'll work for peanuts and steal jobs from the rest of us, while living 10-12 to a small trailer and eating whatever carcasses the interstate provides that day and exponentially reproducing inside the family unit.
Now they've figured out that skills tests are just as easy and useful a measure of employability.
How long until people actually start seeing those jobs? Because they need them now, not in 5 years.
Universities are a HUGE business, if they had their way you'd need a PhD to flip burgers.
but you still need to fake it to get pass HR/Taleo.
And for an 80-150K piece of paper loaded with skill gaps.
that's sorta the trouble. Everybody's gunning for those one big breaks. Life in general, just basic life, has gotten intensely competitive as we fight among ourselves for scraps. I see it with my kid's college. She's Rockin' a 4.0 and will still have to interview to see if she gets into her 300 level courses.
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I've been seeing a lot of recipe videos on my Facebook news feed that call for heavy cream. I'm not familiar with heavy cream. Can anyone tell me what it is?
Now go get a degree while you can.
He'll eventually be shut out of 75% of job openings that require a degree by policy.
the college degree cost / loans are a turn off for smart people as well. Do you really want to spend 4-5 years and 80K+ to work at starbucks?? with an wage the does not cover the cost of the loans?
It seems strange to call this "new" since a few decades ago, it seems like there were lots of people like this in tech, including my high school buddy who never went to college yet did quite well designing computer printers.
Self studied and then paid a modest amount for some classes to obtain my first IT Certification in 1999.
Used that to get a support position in 2000.
Continued working my way up the ladder in IT jobs for the next 17 years.
Now making a 6 figure income
At least half the people I work with have gone a similar route and the company I work for even has an apprenticeship program for paid work/study position for one year and then advance them into an actual position and they will even take people with no computer skills as long as they have the right personality and drive to succeed in IT.
Just sees it as an opportunity to pay people less. Same reason they want more women in IT (that they pay 25% less than men) and they keep pushing for foreign workers. Not to say all of those things are bad, just know that Microsoft isn't jumping on the bandwagon because they are so magnanimously generous.
As soon as the government got into the college loan business, costs started skyrocketing and have never slowed down. Much like everything else the government touches, it became a money pit and completely ruined the supply/demand curve.
A New Kind of Tech Job Emphasizes Skills, Not a College Degree
Sounds like the GNU foundation is hiring.
This reminds me of a time in the 1990s when I overheard one teenager ask another if he had heard of that new band Aerosmith.
There is nothing new about this, and in fact it used to be the standard. Indeed, the techies without a degree that really know their shit have always been the best. We don't need hand holding to learn, have a passion not seen in most with a degree, and are experienced in a much more diverse way.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I would hardly call people with 4 year college degrees highly skilled. You can already be happy if they can code their way out of a wet paper bag. And that's for a technical or scientific 4 years degree.
"Rimmer, I'm going to pass me exams and become an officer by actually KNOWING things" - Dave Lister
The problem is that Colleges are not for everyone. However the Job Market makes them as a benchmark to what they want.
Colleges are stuck in Victorian Culture, with a rigid set of requirements for success. Historically people with above average IQ were able to pass college. However now that so many jobs require it. Colleges have lowered the requirements, as to make sure people can still pass college and survive.
Now college for me was valuable, however its value wasn't in Job training, most of the stuff I knew how to do before I got into college. But it did teach me on how to teach myself much better which allows me to focus on new problems with far more confidence then if I didn't go to college. But with the Skills That I had outside of college and if businesses would had hired me, I probably could had worked up to a decent job. Higher then some people with college degrees achieve in their lifetimes.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
what the fuck is that exactly? what does he actually do?
The ability to build a computer, but not understand things like von neumann architecture or how a stack machine works is essentially trade work.
I've seen guys build networks with only a rudimentary understanding of subnetting and routing and no knowledge of the OSI model.
And all of that is OK.
Do you think the guy servicing your car understands the metallurgy behind the castings that make up the block and heads? Probably not.
IT needs a formal apprentice/journeyman type of arrangement for the jobs that simply do not require collegiate level knowledge. An IT union for these jobs probably wouldn't be a bad idea either.
This model works well for many other skilled trades - it could also work well for IT jobs.
I don't have a college degree either but I got into this field in 1997 in the same way. I did attend college for almost 3 years though. I had been programming since a child and had been messing around with computer hardware as well. This is not a new thing. I have friends who did the same a LONG time ago.
The other thing is, this person's ability to tinker with computer assembly and a community college information technology course has little or no application to a role of Computer Security Analyst. I know about this, I've been in nearly every IT and Software Development role there is. When I was a Computer Science major there were also Information Technology roles and the like and those were for people who can't hack it in full on Computer Science. I have a close friend that was like this. He fully admits he couldn't hack it. Brilliant at Physics, not so much at Computer Science. So, he switched to Information Technology.
The other thing is, this problem of not hiring people has nothing to do with people lacking education credentials. People with Computer Science degrees can't find jobs. Today, many companies require ridiculous amounts of experience sometimes they even ask for more years of experience than a particular technology has existed. I do believe in many cases they make the requirements ridiculous just so they can whine and say they can't find "qualified candidates" and have to turn to H1-B Visa.
If we are going to talk about how to make more economic opportunity for people in this field, two things will make the most positive impact in this situation: 1) Companies revive the philosophy to hire smart people and provide on the job training that they might be missing for the company's particular technology preferences and 2) Shut down the unethical H1-B visa game by instituting better criteria and increasing oversight. For #1, I mean I don't understand. Let's take the NFL for example. Bill Parcells would go coach the worst team in the NFL, unlock their true potential and then make them Super Bowl winners. Why can't we do the same thing in this field and why shouldn't we?
We'll make great pets
The real problem here is that HR is not interested in hiring based on skills, even if you provide them with the opportunity. Their interest is purely on a resume of checkboxes for the position. These checkboxes always include "X years job experience or a degree in XYZ" and then a list of software you may work with no matter how little. The problem with this is that you cannot get experience if nobody will hire you, so you are stuck with "must have a degree" for entering the the field. HR always insists on the perfect candidate and until you retrain/fire those fools, you won't solve this problem.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Absolutely. Lucky for me I figured out the pay-to-play society that was being set up and decided against leveraging myself to get a stupid degree. All any degree other than a PhD shows is that you are good at jumping through hoops.
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“Education is the one thing that no one can take from you.” Remember this? Big corporations will always want cheap labor, especially in IT where the specs change every other year and high school students in Asia can do the job. How about making these public corporations (also) invest in education? You, know all that cash stashed away in overseas tax heavens, that makes the investors happy.
My career started in a similar manner back in the mid-1990s. When I graduated from high school and started community college, my experience with computers and networking was limited to the skills I developed at home with my PC, and a couple of ROP classes that I took through high school on Novell. When I started college, I was able to leverage those skills and knowledge to get a part time job doing IT support.
Twenty years later, I'm an IT architect helping to set strategic direction for a publicly traded firm with nearly 5000 employees. There was obviously a lot of hard work between then and now, but I never got a college degree. I was able to pick up all of the skills that I needed from my employers and by continuing my own education. (Thank you O'Reilly!).
It's only now that I am nearing the Director level that my lack of a college degree is looking like it might be an obstacle to further career growth. Having said that, I'm making nearly $200,000 a year. If my career and salary plateaus here, it is not the end of the world. I am making enough to pay the mortgage and give my kids a solid foundation.
Whenever I applied at a fast food restaurant, grocery store or a move theater, the questionnaire/skill test always implied that EMPLOYEES will STEAL from their EMPLOYERS.
I don't know many people who can do electrical engineering without a degree. So there is another thing that it shows.
How does "built and sold some stripped-down personal computers" equate to the job skills necessary to be a security analyst?
No wonder why everyone is getting hacked. They are throwing button pushers and screwdriver experts into security at 45k a year. That is well short of the 65-75k starting average.
This whole story is just a way to drive down market prices of the actually skilled.
Good job Sean Bridges, you are an unqualified Scab for the new Robber Barons.
Its not so much that college has lowered quality so people can pass to survive, they've lowered quality so more people can pay to attend. It is literally a business at this point, not an educational institution. A college degree is hitting that point where it costs more than a house mortgage, which is INSANE! And while some might try to argue this claim, remember that a college education is per-person, whereas a house generally can fit multiple people.
That seems insanely low. Here our lowest paid SecOps staff make at-least 100k+.
Anyone else remember when the emergence of a skills-based tech market was news? This article is hilariously out of date. When was the last time a real tech recruiter asked you about your college degree? (Hint: real tech recruiters don't ask about college degrees.)
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
It's going to cost about $160k to get my kid through college. She'll make somewhere between $2-$4 million more over the course of her lifetime as a result (no, I'm not exaggerating). The question is who's gonna pay for that? If you're parents aren't like me and a) have a good job and b) willing to sacrifice for 6-10 years taking on debt then you're just SOL. The amounts of money involved are so huge you can't work your way though college. You can't even borrow enough money to pay for it unless your parents borrow some (well, a lot actually).
OTOH, who cares? The corps can just go to Congress, tell them they can't get American talent (true, since nobody can afford college) and bring in as many H1-Bs as they choose. Problem solved. Unless you're an American Worker.
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If you lack the education to back up your experience, every time you hunt for a job you will need that "One big break" again not to start off at entry level and work your way back up. Seen too many people drop out of college with maybe a year to go to graduate. Some make good money and work for a few years, but they are always at a disadvantage when the job markets tightens up and they find themselves looking for a new job.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Yep, my company won't hire you as an engineer without a degree. No need to risk hiring someone without one. It takes years to get a freshly degreed EE up to speed anyway, so an average, it would take a non degreed person longer.
there are many different criteria to hiring and skills is one of them. but the other thing to look at is why some companies just don't hire. Some do it so that they can bring in H1-B's, some do it to save money, some don't hire simply because they have no idea what they are looking for.
The problem is that a lot of people near the top of organizations are all using the same play-book (mostly from MBA's) and while it works in the general sense, it doesn't fit every company perfectly. We also live in a society that prides its self on specialization, and hence we have HR departments that don't have a clue about the subject matter for the positions they are trying to hire for.
The article says nothing about how he was able to demonstrate his skills to get the position, The problem we have today as noted is not a lack of skills but how to get through the onerous process of actually getting through the HR gauntlet and into a place to demonstrate those skills.
They could have just as easily stated that Current HR practices are broken and need to be seriously looked at.
The entire facility is just a way to outsource without outsourcing, and pad IBM's numbers as a result. They pay developers there VERY little ($40k-ish), and use "cost of living" as an excuse. Gas and food aren't magically cheaper in the country, you know. They also hire a bunch of former vets, also to pad their numbers.
I can't believe the amount of Federal bloat projects that come through that place-- it's basically nothing but government fat.
Keep in mind that federal data is being protected by a guy who was formerly slinging burgers, has no degree and makes $45k a year. How is that good?
I know this dates me, but I remember a time when I had been working as a computer tech (were no teachers of it in my day as you learned by tearing apart a computer that couldn't be opened) so you could figure out what was wrong with it, and then when the world wide web came around, I started designing web pages. I remember an older company was in need of a web designer and I applied, but then realized they wanted seven years of web page design experience. They didn't seem all that cooperative when I explained the Internet hadn't been around for seven years so NO ONE except maybe some DARPA guy somewhere would have seven years of experience. Ended up not taking the job when I realized it was more or less a secretarial job, as they didn't really know what to do with any tech people they might hire. Their IT section (not the name used) was basically a guy who switched out IBM selectric typewriters.
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I only have a 2-year degree it's only applicable for my field. I still apply for jobs that require "Bachelor's degree" or similar because I have 10+ years experience in my field, and of course my resume includes a long list of skills outside of a degree. Any recruiter or hiring manager worth their salt should know experience and skills are more important that degrees and certs.
I can understand that college can give a person a short cut but to discount a person's knowledge just because he didn't get it a university is just plain mean, mostly just snobbery, and somewhat just payola to get a job or keep others from doing so.
This is made more possible because the education system in the US sucks. Most people gain very little from it other than it showing they can waste a lot of time and money learning very little.
By the time I got to elementary school in the 80's I knew more about programming than even people with degrees. I made it all the way through my Computer Science degree without learning anything new. I taught the teachers more than the other way around.
I'm a fan of the apprenticeship concept, basically for any IT or development job. Start with a baseline of knowledge, or give that knowledge in parallel to on the job training, just like the other skilled trades and professions do. In states with strong unions, it's not uncommon to have people come out of high school and do a union-sponsored internship. THe union sets them up with a total newbie job, pairing them with someone more experienced. At the same time, they run classes to teach the theory needed to do the work. Some people might turn their noses up at this, but what do you think medical residents are doing for years and years of on-call duty? The attending shows the newbie how to do something, then has them do it next time, then has the newbie teach an even newer newbie. The residents don't come out of medical school ready for independent work -- they've spent the last 2 or 3 years being pumped full of book knowledge.
I'm actually still a proponent of a college education if done right, and not as a substitute for OJT. Having a CS degree shouldn't obviate the need for training though -- maybe you would just start a few rungs up the ladder because a lot of the theory was covered. Similarly, having a non-CS degree should not be a bar to employment -- I got a degree in chemistry and wound up doing quite well in IT, moving up through the job progression slowly until I got to systems engineering/architecture. I think a guild-style system is the way to go because the knowledge you have upon finishing a degree gets stale so quickly. The only way I've found to keep up is to fall back on the basics I've learned when trying to figure out what the latest overhyped product/method/framework is an improvement on.
People say college is a scam, but I do think you get benefits proportional to what you put in. If you're going just to check a box, then of course you'll be unhappy. Back just before I graduated (around the mid 90s,) just going to college and finishing was almost a guarantee that someone would hire you. Today, there are no guarantees and like the people in this story, even the educated are hoping for that "one big break." I think going to college vs. not going is still a good idea if you have a plan and take steps to make yourself marketable. I know I was a lot more mature when I left than when I entered - having to navigate a bureaucracy, deal with all sorts of different people and perform under pressure are all good things to have under your belt and make you more employable.
You can get a PhD by jumping through hoops too. When I was getting mine, the grad students that did meaningful work were kept far longer than the ones who didn't. If you were good, your adviser would give you more work to do (just run one more experiment, publish in one more journal, etc). This drove a lot of the best and brightest to leave early with a Masters. If you could jump through hoops, you could get the degree with far less effort and far less contribution to the field.
As I understand the problem, the abuse of for profit "schools" taking advantage of government funded education loans was almost "allowed" to happen.
Meaning, as long as the trough was full the pigs would come to slurp it up.
An entire industry sprouted up to take advantage of it...
The problem isn't the loans, it's that there was no oversight or accountability.
But whenever oversight or accountability are mentioned, "free market" types will shriek in horror.
Microsoft throws out most job applications they receive, even from highly educated computer scientists and engineers.
When I was in college in the 1960s, there was a common argument that the purpose of college was as a holding tank for potential employees, so the job market wouldn't be flooded.
I know an HR person who says that the hiring managers are the problem. They are too picky. He said they found a perfect candidate who was out of work for a year - this was in '10 where a LOT of folks were out of work.
The manager didn't want him because "he forgot his skills".
The HR person was incredulous, "Not ten years of experience."
HR works for management. Don't ever forget that. They take their direction from them. So, if HR is the problem, then management is the cause.
Oh, and that guy never found work again. Total waste.
I'm sure there's gonna be folks who are gonna say shit like "well he was no good" or "didn't keep his 'skills' up" or some such thing so that they can pretend that it'll never happen to them. (His company closed his entire department down and sent it to India. All those guys looking for work at the same time....the younger ones got hired first.)
We are all one layoff from career oblivion.
I went to college for four years, but didn't graduate. I got a job at a prestigious company in Dallas as a computer operator. They wouldn't let me get into programming (now called software engineering), so I went to a head hunter company and explained what my life goal was. The head hunter company put me with a company where anyone was allowed to advance to any level they desired and qualified for. No degree requirements. I worked in operations for 9 months and was moved into programming. I had done some self study to learn COBOL and assembler ahead of time. If someone wants to get somewhere, no suppressive company like the first one I worked for is going to stop you.
like a mechanic? You don't say.
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Man, the egos on display in this thread are pretty embarrassing.
Academia lost its value when it became subsidized corporate training. Further, there are tons of people with degrees and no job to match. That comes down to two possible reasons: employers are setting their standards too high, or education isn't actually educating anyone. Neither are reasons to throw money at college, since the odds of getting a return on your investment are shit.
What we need are more vocational schools. I'm talking schools that work with regional employers to form curricula that tackle things they would actually encounter on the job. Couple this with proper education of theory behind this work, and they'll produce graduates that are ready to hit the workforce that still know their shit.
In its current form, college is a money sink with questionable returns.
schools don't like transferring stuff as it hurts there profits so they come up with BS to block classes from transferring
more job need an apprentice/trade school system vs the old college system.
the 2-4-6+ year blocks are a poor fit for some rolls and some jobs need hands on learning.
CS is a real mixed bag some schools are loaded with theory other have a good amount of hands on work.
Now the ITT's and devry's used to be good but over time they got roped into the the degree system leading to a bit of a bad HR rep.
Now they do have less fluff and filler classes but they can be better off by just being an trade school not tied to the collage accreditation system but to more what trades needs.
This is a perfect example of what IBM has been doing. Hire minimally skilled employees, replacing experienced employees. I'm not saying that you have to have a college degree, but I have no doubt that this tactic is being used to depress wages. In a few years, he will move on to something better, but at the same time without a degree he will still have troubles.
-- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.
People with Computer Science degrees can't find jobs.
I really don't understand why I keep hearing people say this. I'm guessing you don't live near a major metropolis?
Move to one of the tech hubs and you'll have no problem finding work. I'm in Chicago and there's more openings than people to fill them. We just interviewed a Java programmer for a Python job because there's a shortage of developers.
However, a computer science degree isn't enough, you actually have to be able to program, be proficient with version control systems, be able to write tests, etc. Quite a few people with C.S. degrees can't actually do any of this.
With the high cost and poor quality it seem like we are approaching an inverse relationship between degree and IQ.....
love is just extroverted narcissism
This is all well and good for jobs that only require basic technical skills, but all that does is increase the pool of available people for jobs that only require basic technical skills.
And really, this has *always* been true for pretty much *any* company who isn't divorced from reality and think they need a PhD graduate with 20 years of experience for a junor java position.
However, this will be a massive problem if people blindly try to apply the same technique to higher skilled jobs that require not just the ability to push buttons and mechanically crank out whatever they're told to crank out. I've lost count of the number of people I've run into who have massive Dunning-Kruger syndrome, and think that they grok more than they actually do. These are the kind of people whose projects end up on sites like http://thedailywtf.com/ .
It's one thing to have "the skillz". It's another thing entirely to understand which of those skills is appropriate to use in a given circumstance. It's the equivalent of a carpenter that knows how to use a hammer, a screw driver, and a saw, but uses a hammer to bash a piece of wood in half instead of using the saw.
I would agree with this, college entrance requirements have pretty much been watered down, and given the number of students who need remediation (60-80% in some cases), it's nothing but a business anymore. I was working during the dot-com/bomb phase, and certifications back then were simply a joke (you could book study the entire setup without having actually touched any physical gear).
If you want to make IT viable again, get rid of the "every skill imaginable" in a job posting, get HR away from technical types (let the technical staff eval those resumes), and stop looking at being over 40-50 as "too old for the job".
When I took my first comp sci course back in 1981 (which was Fortran 66/77), we had to do at least 30-35 programming assignments, had a quiz every other week, 4 exams (including a mid-term and final), and a final project (write the parser for an airline reservation system program). We started with about 60 students in my class, had about 10-15 left by the end of the semester (since you had to learn the mainframe, OS, editor, compiler/linker, and the language itself)...
I doubt a comp sci student today in their first class required for a CS major does a third or half as many assignments...SIGH
What I realy love are I.T folk with degree after degree, a dictionary of b..shite letters on their business cards who reckon they can admin anything but who don't even have a clue how to do the simplest thing with real hardware and have to call someone they wouldn't usually bother to spit on if the fuse blows or the drive fails in their OWN machines..
Their as useful when the shit hits the fan as a heart surgeon who knows nothing about anaesthesia.
Hardware monkeys usualy know enough about software to get systems back up and running,one way or another.
Many software folk cannot even find the on/off switch without help..
I know which I would prefer to employ.
Me,I always thought interviews are designed to find wether you can do the job,not which college you went to or what qualifications you claim to have..
In summary, I started with computers when I was 15 (1995), writing progs for AOL (warez, punters and phishing) then dropped out of high school at 17. Finished my GED at 18 and went directly to work from there. Got my first exposure to linux in 1999 and just stayed with it as my key skill. In 2002, I wasted my time getting comptia certifications (absolutely worthless in my opinion) before contracting at a large web host doing data center engineering work. By 2005, started a full time linux system administrator position for a large travel company. I was capped around 80k yearly until 2013, got my first six figure offer. Starting in 2013, went to every hacking conference I could and competed in CTF's. In 2016, I went to work for a large public company as a senior security analyst without any certifications and now make 150k yearly plus bonuses.
I've always said college was a waste of time for many professions and after working in the IT industry for almost 20 years, I stand by my beliefs.
So they are finding more ways to cut up tech jobs and get low skilled or low educated people on payroll to help drive down their costs. Reminds me of the training at ITT which was a sham I hear. To the educated and highly trained/skilled out there, this sounds like a big problem. Outsourcing wasn't enough I guess.
Doctors and lawyers did a good job of putting up hurdles to keep their ranks lean, so more pay and power to them. Tech is a different beast. For one Tech workers tend to like to share info and encourage equality in many ways. Tech companies are the richest on the planet, and take advantage of all of these things to drive pay down.
Now that outsourcing to other countries is becoming less viable, they are finding ways to reduce pay to tech workers in the US it sounds like.
My suggestion? Don't stand for it. Don't hire low skilled people if they aren't good enough for the job. Don't buy from companies that outsource everything and have absolutely abysmal support. Don't work long hours for bad pay. I'm sure other suggestions exist, and I am all ears.
In the world of IT, only really serious programming jobs really require a degree. There are good reasons for that. When I say programming, I am not referring to the current coding fad. There is a gulf of difference between a programmer and coder. As far as the rest of IT goes, from tech support to misc. server administration and everything in between, the majority of people I have encountered (including myself) have nothing even close to college or trade school completion under their belts. These are the best techs. Some time ago, I was hired to join a small team for a massive Active Directory migration after one large company purchased another large company. I had little experience with AD going in, but my overall level of expertise, which was put to the test during the interview, was enough. By the time it was all said and done I was leading the team and had written the formal documentation for the project. That's just one example. Most of the people I have met who are excelling in various IT roles either have no college degree or otherwise openly regret that they took that path at all. Good employers know that if they want the best people, this is how it goes. The best education for rising through the IT ranks is to simply do just that. Most of the people I know with IT related degrees are shuffled straight in management, where they then rely on the real IT staff to fix a problem that they typically blindly caused themselves.
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An AA from a State CC will transfer to a 4-year State U in the same State. That is what they are designed to do.
The Univ won't give you a B.S. with their name on it unless you take a full 2 years from their school, but it is 2 and not 4.
Private schools on the other hand...
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
"and he had studied information technology at a community college"
I never finished college (money problems)....
But I'm self taught and now I earn big money solving the most complex system and network traffic issues... highest level support for 3 companies running now (25 + in IT and systems)
But if I tried to apply to a job today with any large company that uses online forms that collect your info for those government stats, I would never get an interview because I don't check the box for 'Bacherlors degree'. Thus I never make it through the SQL query from HR to pull applicants for any position. Yet I know 100 times more than any 'paper mcse or ccne'
Just in time for me to reach retirement age in about 5 years...
I agree, back in our day kids actually stayed off of lawns too. Now it seems like I'm outside almost every day yelling at kids to get off of my lawn!
So, we're back to the 1950s! Most people have skills for something: The biggest issue being employers demand more problem-solving skills when only a fraction of the job market can offer that. Worse, the "more training" policy most governments espouse, doesn't fix that shortage. Modern unemployment comes down to 2 issues; over-supply of workers, or under-experience (according to the employer), particularly for older workers who demand a higher wage.
University was about learning leadership, foundational knowledge, problem-solving skills for a particular school of thought. Then Greek and Latin were scrapped, removing the leadership base. It wasn't all bad, students learnt more foundational knowledge, allowing them to move across industries. The job market responded by demanding skills and experience. I was told about 25 years, the job market means you walk into a professional job and you do that until you retire. It's not exactly true, since businesses think it's cheaper to promote internally but still most employees hired to do XYZ, just finished doing XYZ down the road, for ten years: The job market for every industry became very incestuous.
With most people aspiring to a university qualification, it's not a selling point anymore. In fact, most people get a job, then get a qualification, since a degree is required for a promotion, not a foot in the door. Worse, a degree-first job-seeker isn't allowed to start at support position, the seeker is overqualified and employers don't want an employee with a known risk of leaving: The employer doesn't want the responsibility of keeping the employee interested in his job and his boss.
The only problem (not the posters problem - recruiters problem) is thinking they should be for everyone.
I know an electrical engineer who got there via a trade and apprenticeship route. It's a difficult and time consuming way to do it but perfectly valid. I'm writing that despite the bias on the issue I've gained by working at a University for a few years some time back.
Don't worry, we're fixing the cost problem by raising the cost of housing. College degrees should start to seem borderline affordable again after that.
At this rate students will have to enter into voluntary servitude just to get by. The colleges will start hoovering up the students to add to internship camps for research. Gigantic IP mills will reign over the land generating ideas from a captive undergrad audience. Owning a home will become more "dream" than "American dream" as everyone fights to pay off their brain investment into a system that has no jobs. Once they install the suicide nets around MIT we'll know we've reached Nirvana.
Alternatively once we realize that colleges have crossed the line from sage-investment to clap-trap-fad we'll all stop buying into them. They've probably already crossed that line and they're running on fashion trends and legacy borrowed time. Destabilizing the old guard takes time when they run at generational frequencies. It's just a shame we had to destroy such a prestigious heritage in the name of the mighty dollar. $$$ > Intellect.
Colleges provide breath of knowledge. You don't learn just one simple skill, you learn a broad range of things. That is necessary for the modern job, where you don't know year from year what you'll be doing. Education is useful, it is not a luxury only useful for elites, it is useful for everyone.
College is getting expensive now, and the economy is in the crapper for many years now, so people are trying to find shortcuts. I can understand that, but it does hurt career prospects to skip it. It also hurts career advancement! As in, are you going to be in the entry level job for the next 30 years, or do you want to go beyond that? Sure, you may start out as a plumber, but later on you may want your own plumbing business, and you'll succeed at that better with more skills, more experience, and a broader base of knowledge (accounting, marketing, interpersonal skills, etc).
There is not a single college course I took in 5 years that was useless. I could have gotten by without some but maybe not as successful in the career and may not as interesting in life outside of work.
Maybe think of college as a gym for the brain. Sure you can skip the gym, and many people do, but you're better off with it.
The problem is that Colleges are not for everyone.
Employers prove otherwise.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Every time disruptive technology arrives (mini computers, relational database, client/server, personal computer, Internet, etc.), employers end up hiring non-degree candidates because it takes a few years before anyone can graduate with any meaningful exposure to the latest technology. During these disruptive times, experience is mandatory but a degree is optional.
This time, the problem is student debt. Employers have to reconsider the value of hiring people with massive debt, who need to make enough to repay their student loans. One workaround is to hire H1-b applicants with heavily subsidized degrees from their home country. For better or worse, employers decided that a degree from an Indian university was just as good as a degree from an American university -- at 5% of the cost.
But H1-b doesn't solve the entire problem. In theory, expensive American grads can read, write, and speak college-level English, whereas the average H1-b would not pass a high school English test. The language barrier imposes limits on where it makes sense to use the H1-b option.
If American grads are too expensive and foreign grads lack English proficiency, one option is to reconsider the degree requirement and hire based on skill and experience instead. At that point, an American with high school English proficiency is an upgrade over the H1-b option. It's not a new concept; the tech industry has been quietly waiving degree requirements sporadically since the 1960's.
Ohh gees give it a rest. The US government is owned and controlled by US corproations. Private industry is running the country, pretending the government is at fault is stupidly crazy. A hand full of corporations created this chaos by buying and owning corrupt politicians, basically the majority of Republicans and Democrats. Blamming the puppets is stupid, what ever major corporations touches turns to shit as they play pillage the planet to feed their isane psychopathic egos.
You can start talking about your government, once the people control it, then you bitching will actually mean something. Right now corporations are purposefully fucking up every bureaucracy possible to steal as much as possible from the treasury and the rot starts at the top with the US Fed, corrupt as hell.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
As long as the government provides loans and there are other ways to get the money besides directly from the student, colleges will continue to live in an unrealistic bubble. They are pretty much as bad as doctors - 'If you pay for this, it's $100. If we file it with insurance, it's $1000'.
A security analyst for $45,000. Yea, my company strongly endorses that as well.
Why the fuck should we pay $90,000+ for a security analyst. We can hire no-other-opportunity suckers instead. We get cheap labor and they think it's great! Shit, we can hire two for the price of one. We win, twice!
Most job postings are put out by the HR staff. The HR staff is almost always a group of college graduates themselves with varying degrees so they tack on the college requirement. I've been in this situation where I put together a job request and specifically stated I wanted experience and didn't care about a degree and HR changed the posting and only passed along candidates that had degrees, many of which had no actual work experience but by god they had a masters degree. I'm glad I moved on from that job.
I might agree with your assessment if all of the required classes had any value in the career field I was trying to get into. Too many of the required classes, particularly in the first two years of a four year program, seem to be required solely to keep some class rooms filled.
Yeah, just look at our military budget!
10**10 likes
the college loan "fix" was part of obamacare to hide the costs of healthcare
the government tried to fix things by having a debt test for completed degrees - if the debt is too high stop the program - but then places like medical schools no longer qualified for student loans. so they "fixed" things by having different rules for non-profits. now some good trade schools are being forced to close their doors while you still might be able to get a student loan to study astrology.
the problem is how much should you protect someone from themselves while letting others be innovative?
government programs generally kill the good stuff under the banner of being fair - and the general need to have a fixed policy no matter how stupid. fairness is a myth you tell successful people when you take away their toys.