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Why Do Employers Require College Degrees That Aren't Necessary? (thestreet.com)
Slashdot reader pefisher writes:
A lot of us on Slashdot have noticed that potential employers advertise for things they don't need. To the point that sometimes they even ask for things that don't exist. Like asking for ten years of experience in a technology that has only just been introduced. It's frustrating because it makes you wonder "what's this employers real game?"
Do they just want to say they advertised for the position, or are they really so immensely stupid, so disconnected from their own needs, that they think they are actually asking for something they can have...? Here is a Harvard Study that addresses one particular angle of this. It doesn't answer any questions, but it does prove that you aren't crazy. And it quantifies the craziness.
The study's author calls it "degree inflation," and after studying 26 million job postings concluded that employers are now less willing to actually train new people on the job, possibly to save money. "Many companies have fallen into a lazy way of thinking about this," the study's author tells The Street, saying companies are "[looking for] somebody who is just job-ready to just show up." The irony is that college graduates will ultimately be paid a higher salary -- even though for many jobs, the study found that a college degree yields zero improvement in actual performance.
The Street reports that "In a market where companies increasingly rely on computerized systems to cull out early-round applicants, that has led firms to often consider a bachelor's degree indicative of someone who can socialize, run a meeting and generally work well with others." One company tells them that "we removed the requirement to have a computer science degree, and we removed the requirement to have experience in development computer programming. And when we removed those things we found that the pool of potential really good team members drastically expanded."
Do they just want to say they advertised for the position, or are they really so immensely stupid, so disconnected from their own needs, that they think they are actually asking for something they can have...? Here is a Harvard Study that addresses one particular angle of this. It doesn't answer any questions, but it does prove that you aren't crazy. And it quantifies the craziness.
The study's author calls it "degree inflation," and after studying 26 million job postings concluded that employers are now less willing to actually train new people on the job, possibly to save money. "Many companies have fallen into a lazy way of thinking about this," the study's author tells The Street, saying companies are "[looking for] somebody who is just job-ready to just show up." The irony is that college graduates will ultimately be paid a higher salary -- even though for many jobs, the study found that a college degree yields zero improvement in actual performance.
The Street reports that "In a market where companies increasingly rely on computerized systems to cull out early-round applicants, that has led firms to often consider a bachelor's degree indicative of someone who can socialize, run a meeting and generally work well with others." One company tells them that "we removed the requirement to have a computer science degree, and we removed the requirement to have experience in development computer programming. And when we removed those things we found that the pool of potential really good team members drastically expanded."
One reason is to filter out some of the applicants, because you have too many. Might as well filter out the ones that don't have a degree first; they might know less than the other ones, and they definitely have demonstrated less willingness to jump through hoops.
Another potential reason is to disqualify applicants because you want to hire a H1B.
Another reason is that the HR employees want to protect the value of their bullshit degrees.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
A 1971 supreme court case named Griggs vs Duke Power found that if an employer engaged in their own employee or applicant skills testing, and that testing was found to result in racial discrimination, then the empoloyer was guilty of racial discrimination even though that was not their intent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
Griggs is the basis of credentials inflation in the US.
As a result of Griggs, most companies began halting their own applicant testing entirely, and simply began to require more and more education--assuming that this would still weed out the ineffective applicants.
Wish I had some mod points. I really hate that college degrees in the US are often viewed solely some kind of career prep/vocational training. Higher education does have to be geared towards some specific job; it can be an end in itself, and it has its own intrinsic value.
tech schools are better then college for ready to work skills. To bad they got roped in to the college system and got an bad rap.
"Having a degree" proves nothing in specific, but statistically speaking, it may (vaguely) indicate a few things in general. You'd sure as heck better not depend on those vague indications, though.
What requiring a degree (and various other tickmarks unrelated to actual skill and capacity) does, though, is frees businesses to (a) pretend they can't find viable candidates capable of the work, and (b) consequent to a, allows them fish in pools of skill that are much less expensive without alerting the stockholders.
And of course, all of this facilitates and amplifies various other types of discrimination: age, health, arrest and conviction records, social media participation, political leanings, gender, religious outlook, etc.
The current tech job market is truly a hellhole. I'm really glad I no longer outright depend on it, and I feel intensely sympathetic with those skilled and capable candidates who are trying to crack the corporate wall.
The good news, I expect, will be that none of this will mean bupkis within a few decades, because I highly doubt there will be any jobs at all of this type remaining. Pervasive automation looks to be coming, and if/when it does, it's going to eat the need to be employed outright.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
While these are good skills the degree shouldn’t be a baseline for employment. Because too many people are wasting 4 years of their lives in education just so they can get a job. Many have these skills beforehand but knowing they need to work the system they get the degree to get the job.
College isn’t designed to be a job training center. They want to focus on learning and education.
A lot of good people are wasting time in college just for the degree and not for the enlightenment of learning.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
This would make a lot of sense in an era of declining educational standards at schools. It used to be that getting good grades at secondary school meant that you had put in a decent amount of work and commitment. However, now that it is no longer politically correct to fail school kids the qualification has become enormously devalued and it is no wonder that employees no longer rely on it. In fact, even universities are now beginning to question whether using high school marks to determine which admit students is reliable.
Here are the counter-arguments (from the employers point of view).
Why it is better to hire people WITHOUT a college degree.
1) You can pay them less. A lot LESS.
2) You get people that are more loyal. They know it's harder for them to get another job.
3) You get people that have experience working long, hard hours rather than staying out late and drinking, then doing a half -assed job to finish off projects at the last minute.
4) You get people that think getting into a ton of debt just to prove how smart they are sounds off to them.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Just no. Part of the solution is for the government to stop paying any part of any degree program that doesn't have high in field employment after graduation. That means kick those programs off public school campuses.
A generation of 'poetry majors' publicly starving in the streets will also help kids focus on getting value for their education dollars, borrowed or not.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
What jurisdiction is this?
In most places there can only be discrimination during the hiring process. Having a legacy of being male dominated, for example, isn't actionable. Who would bring the complaint? How could they justify the company firing people just to fix the numerical issue?
Around here the degree requirement is usually just to filter candidates. Companies can't be bothered to train or even evaluate candidates properly, so put that lazy filter on.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Universities are not supposed to be vocational training facilities. That's one of the reasons why it's inappropriate to use a degree as a job requirement. You are part of the problem.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Translation, there is no STEM shortage. We have so many we can afford to round file people without reading past the top of page 1.
highly-specific minority groups are so awesome
This is why. Most of those "nearly impossible" job "openings" are posted only because they are required to post them because they want to sponsor an employee for his greencard, and this required proof that they could not find a local to fill the position. So to avoid having to interview a lot of applicants, they make the job requirements so specific that only a few people would be a perfect match. Their immigrant employee being the best fit of course.
The overly defined job position ploy also works well if you want to promote your best buddy to a management position (I've seen this many times). Or it may protect you from the worst case scenario of having to hire a qualified negro that may be able to meet less peculiar job requirements. But the C-levels have set a policy to publicly post all jobs, so you make up a job description that no one can meet, or one that exactly meets the career path of your pal.
I have a degree and I have worked in IT for many years, both as a developer and someone that hires developers. As near as I can tell, a degree doesn't make one bit of difference. I have worked with smart people that had degrees and smart people that didn't. I have worked with people with advanced degrees that were as dumb as the day is long.
I think it is a mistake to assume that people that did not attend college or finish college are less intelligent than people who did. One of the big problems is identifying talent. The gatekeepers - HR - are largely unskilled in my experience and often unable to identify talent. Simply excluding people without degrees dumbs it down. It makes their job easier. Relying on software that scans resumes for key words just compounds the problem. This leads to people gaming the system and tailoring resumes to trick the software into thinking they are the better candidate. People that can't or won't play the game are left on the sidelines.
Higher education, particularly in some of the more prestigious schools, is little more than a giant country club. Some people are able to milk these sorts of relationships for their entire career. As the old saying goes, it's not what you know it's who you know. This holds true mainly in executive positions and less so in individual contributor positions. But there is a discrimination of sorts and a stigma attached to those without degrees.
I hire people all the time, and I promise you everyone at my company just wants to hire someone competent who can get shit done, and we have no interest whatsoever in indentured servants. We require a degree.
Every few months someone says, "Maybe we shouldn't require a degree." And then everyone else shrugs. Nobody actually cares if anyone has a degree if they write decent code, but nobody is sure it's a good idea to not require a degree, so nothing changes.
People at the bottom of the totem pole always seem to think upper management has a scheme or a grand plan. We don't. We just have very limited time and a lot of inertia.