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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 theory I've heard (I don't know if it's true or not) is that employers require degrees to avoid sexual discrimination lawsuits.
For example, let's say a company has 20% of its employees male, the rest female. They are open to a discrimination lawsuit prima facie. But if they only hire people with a X degree, they can say, "only 19% of people with degree X are male, we are doing better than average!"
As more people with degree X arrive on the scene, the requirement becomes harder and harder to avoid.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
As soon as you stop looking at only the gorgeous ones, you'll enjoy many amazing sex encounters with the ones you previously ignored.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Because it filters out idiots.
Yes, there are plenty of smart people with no degree and plenty of idiots with degrees, but the mix is more in their favor with a degree, though it's getting to be less of an advantage now that most people have one.
Because it costs them time & money to interview people, simple filters that make their job easier are widely used, even if there's some opportunity cost of overlooking people who are good but who don't pass the filters.
They make up for that anyhow by using employee recommendations. If someone is willing to vouch for a person, they can often skip some of the requirements as long as they have some evidence of being good at the job.
People with degrees start life later, and often times with a lot of debt. They are organized in the most traditional sense, and will probably be buying a home a few years after graduation. This debt load makes mobility hard, and the chances that the person is living paycheck-to-paycheck are a lot higher. However, unlike someone with less earning power living paycheck-to-paycheck, the person with the degree will have a higher chance of having more to lose. You want the employee that needs you, not the one that will just wander off and say fuck-all when they're pissed at you the employer; they don't have anything, much less anything to lose, so why put up with you? The college grad has a credit score, mortgage, car, and family to protect.
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It's an example you can do something without giving up and that's it. They teach you almost nothing useful for most of college. Required basic classes and electives make up the majority of your schooling. Anything below masters is just a slightly better High School Diploma.
If you have two applications with no work experience, then I would go with the one with a degree as a baseline filter. But if both have several years of experience then I don't think it matters as much, and if you reject the non-degree candidate in the prescreening phase you might be missing out on a great programmer with a nontraditional background (and in tech not having a formal degree isn't all that uncommon anyways, compared to most STEM fields)
More like demonstrated ability to be born into money.
I don't know what the solution is. One reasonable proposal is to require taxpayer subsidized student loans to be combined with an internship or apprenticeship to match up students with employers and ensure they are learning something useful.
Here's another proposal. Let's have the students either have to pay for their own educations, like in working through college, or have to apply for a loan through a private bank. If you pay for your own education up front then no one cares if you study transgender dance theory because that's your money. If someone has to go to a bank and they see an application for a loan to major in transgender dance theory then chances are the bank will refuse the loan. If someone shows up with an even slightly higher than average SAT or ACT score, good grades in high school, and wants to go to college to be a registered nurse then that person is quite likely to get a loan.
Government subsidy just artificially raised the prices and reduces choices. I remember this with the switch to digital television. The government said they'd pay UP TO $50 for a device that received digital TV and had a few other requirements. Guess what happened? Every device was priced at exactly $50. I wanted a device that did something the government would not subsidize so I had little for choices. I could choose the crippled government subsidized solution or a very expensive feature filled device for many times more money. There wasn't a $100 middle of the road digital TV converter device, only the $50 crippled devices or $300 whiz bang devices.
Why is it that an engineering degree costs as much as a degree in transgender dance theory? Because the student doesn't pay for it, the government does. If the student had to pay for it then perhaps the student might give more thought in the value of the degree. If a private bank had to put a risk factor on each degree on every student loan they they'd be handing out loans for things like engineering, nursing, law, business, and so forth but not transgender dance theory. They'd also set standards on who got the loan. The government really only cares if a person has been accepted to a college, not if the degree has any value or the school is any good. Mostly they do this just so they know who gets the check and for how much.
A private bank would also put a market based check on the amount of the loan. They might give a $15,000 loan for studying dance. For someone that wants to be a surgeon, and they have demonstrated ability, the bank is quite likely to give a $250,000 loan. Oh, and the dance school loan would probably have a 15% interest rate and the medical school loan a 5% interest rate.
Oh, and the bank might also get in the business of finding people work if it meant getting paid back on the loan. What incentive does the government have in finding people work? I mean they don't want people destitute but really all they want is people that won't cause trouble. The government doesn't much care if they get you a job, put you in prison, or get you on welfare. It's not their money so some government bureaucrat will "find you a job" just so they can be rid of you and move on. They won't care if you like the job, if it matches your degree, or even if the job pays better than minimum wage. It's not their money.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Your view is really the same view as the Enlightenment. It's only been around hundreds of years and most of Western civilization was founded on it, but that doesn't stop conservatives from rejecting the Enlightenment and wishing for the golden age of artisans, serfs, nobles, etc.: (might be behind a pay wall)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
And this is how science dies in America.
I think there's a lot of truth to this. The local newspaper is prone to running the occasional feature article with essays written by school children in the 1900-1930 era. The ones they run are often written by 7-8th graders and read like they were written by adult college graduates -- language, sentence structure, composition, even the ideas expressed are mature and sophisticated.
I cannot imagine a contemporary student of high school writing these essays, let alone junior high school kids.
I can't decide if its the curriculum, the instruction, the kids, the parents, or some kind of emergent aspect of our culture that's made our kids so less capable than they used to be. I'm kind of inclined to a get off my lawn argument about TV and technology making people distracted and less capable in general literacy, but I think there's room for a sound criticism of our crass, commercial cultural content, too.
Partly, it's that back then not all kids stayed in school through 8th grade. Only the academically promising ones did.