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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."
I didn't RTFA, but I'm pretty sure this has been discussed at least nine million times in the last 20 years. The main reasons:
1. Demonstrated ability to stick with something for a while.
2. The average college grad is usually more literate than the average high school grad. Better chance that you'll get an employee that can do basic math, speak properly to customers, etc.
3. Employers will get many applicants for any given job, so this will at least filter out SOME people. And of those that apply for the job, #1 above applies.
Yes, it's lazy, but as long as you have more applicants than open positions, why not? (From the employer's point of view.)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
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.'"
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.
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.
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.
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.
4 year project? I need people to finish their stuff during a two week sprint!
love is just extroverted narcissism
"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.
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 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.
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.