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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."
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.
Sig: I stole this sig.
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.