
College Degree Required. But Why? - caffeinewriter
http://www.inc.com/suzanne-lucas/college-degree-required-but-why.html
======
MakeUsersWant
Perhaps student debt feels good for employers because desperate graduates will
accept any kind of treatment?

Please correct me if I'm beside the mark.

~~~
wyclif
Actually, I think you might have something there. Key quote from the NYT:

“College graduates are just more career-oriented,” said Adam Slipakoff, the
firm’s managing partner. “Going to college means they are making a real
commitment to their futures."

From the comments: "This "degree inflation" seems like a new system of debt
peonage. The individual borrows a fortune simply to get the "credentials" for
a low-paying job and spends the rest of his life trying to pay off his student
loans. That's almost a guarantee that the citizen will not get politically
active or in any way threaten the status quo."

A workforce that is deeply in debt to non-dischargeable loans is a workforce
that has limited options, is more docile, and more easily manipulated.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/business/college-degree-
re...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/business/college-degree-required-by-
increasing-number-of-
companies.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&pagewanted=all&adxnnlx=1361628641-UtIqcfoeoIFUVg0wLFg49g&);

~~~
mseebach
No, he's not "on to something" because a random commenter on a NYT article
shares the same conspiracy theory.

~~~
mosselman
Thanks for pointing this out.

This is the reason why I would hire educated (Academic education that is)
people over people who are more practical. When you have had an academic
education you also (should) learn to think critically about your sources, the
way you reason and alternative strategies.

The main difference I have noticed around me between people of applied
sciences degrees and academic degrees (a difference that contrasted much more
in my country) is that the former will accept any source; Wikipedia, any
newspaper, some guy's blog, a comment on some thread from a conspiracy
theorist. The latter, the academic, will (should) only use proper sources i.e.
academic research or, in the case of less important things (like HN), at least
some form of respectable medium.

When reading up on important subjects, something that isn't researched and
then published through reputable scientific journals, simply does not exist.
Otherwise we'd waste time discussing whether we went to the moon, etc.

~~~
Swizec
In other words, here's a link to a peer reviewed journal article about farting
on airplanes: <http://journal.nzma.org.nz/journal/abstract.php?id=5532>

Or when a reputable mathematical journal accepted a nonsense paper generated
by Mathgen: [http://boingboing.net/2012/10/19/math-journal-accepts-
comput...](http://boingboing.net/2012/10/19/math-journal-accepts-
computer.html)

Don't get me wrong, I have certainly noticed becoming more critical of sources
in the 5 years of going through an academic university (despite not quite
finishing), but even scientific papers can often be proven silly by just a
quick look at some common sense.

Also, wikipedia is a magnificent source on most topics. Very good
overview/introductory material and a way to look for "proper" sources.

I am also still of the firm opinion that wikipedia gets more peer review than
the average peer reviewed paper.

~~~
mosselman
There is a difference between silly and trustworthiness of course. But yes,
not all academia is good or even worth while, but still is more (potentially)
useful than some blog. This does not mean that it can't be true what someone
is saying, but there is no reason to trust it.

As for Wikipedia; yes I a agree. Wikipedia is great, I have donated several
times to the organisation. That does not mean however that it is academically
useful beyond the point of exploring a subject on a very high level. For day
to day things there is nothing that can beat it. Apart from Stack Overflow for
us programmers that is.

The trustworthiness of opinions comes into play again with the last thing you
say. It is like with Homeopathic medicine, as soon as it is scientifically
proven to be true/working, it becomes 'real' medicine. Also, even if it were
true, does 'more' peer review mean 'better' peer review. Also, with some
subjects I would think that 'peer' is somewhat far fetched; conspiracy
theorists are not the peers of astronomers.

------
a1a
Q: "But Why?" A: "Because they can."

As long as I can get someone with a degree for the same price as someone
without it - Why on earth would I choose the one that _might_ be as good as
the one with the degree?

There are many qualities an educated person has. Not limited to
responsibility, commitment, knowledge and discipline. These are key to even
graduating.

I'm not saying these qualities are impossible to find in someone without a
degree. I'm saying they are guaranteed in a educated person. So again: Why on
earth would I choose the one that _might_ be as good as the one with the
degree?

------
tokenadult
A whole bunch of the comments mention that employers who are insisting on
college degrees as a hiring criterion are basically attempting to use the
degree requirement as a proxy for a requirement that would be more plainly
illegal under current United States law. That's regrettable on two levels:
degree requirements are demonstrably, by replicated research, poor criteria
for hiring for almost any kind of job, and if the company is trying to find a
work-around to practice illegal discrimination, the company should be just as
liable for the degree requirement as for other illegal requirements. There is
a research base on what hiring procedures work best (short answer: work-sample
tests and general mental ability, a.k.a. IQ, tests) for finding good workers
for most kinds of jobs. No hiring procedure is perfect, as all hiring
procedures produce false positives (applicants who are hired even though they
end up being lousy workers) and false negatives (applicants who don't get
hired, even though they end up being great workers for some other employer).
But if you want to be scientific about hiring and improve your odds of getting
a good worker, you had better build work-sample tests into your hiring
procedures.

In the United States, IQ-type tests were held by the Supreme Court to be
illegal (UNLESS specifically validated for the job in question) under the
federal equal employment opportunity statute in a case that found that IQ
tests have a disparate impact on applicants from some "race" groups. The facts
on the ground are changing (the "race" gap in IQ scores is not nearly as large
as it used to be, and appears still to be closing) and that rationale,
properly thought through, would apply equally well to show that other hiring
criteria might be just as illegal. Possessing a college degree is a much
stronger signal of family wealth than of job-applicant intelligence, really,

[http://www.jkcf.org/news-knowledge/media-coverage/no-
child-l...](http://www.jkcf.org/news-knowledge/media-coverage/no-child-left-
behind/)

but many companies these days insist on college degrees from applicants for
jobs for which a college degree is no preparation at all. That just tends to
turn many lower-tier colleges into expensive diploma mills.

See

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227923>

for the most recent posting of my full-length FAQ on company hiring
procedures, written specially for HN discussions.

------
hugh4life
College Degrees are required for many jobs they shouldn't be required for
because if employers...

1\. Perform criminal background checks. 2\. Perform their own aptitude tests.

They could be liable for disparate impact racial discrimination suits.

~~~
hermannj314
I had to google "Disparate Impact" which I discovered means " _not
discriminatory at its face, but in its application_ " (paraphrasing wikipedia)

So if a college education is just a proxy for those other indicators, wouldn't
college also have the same disparate impact? If it didn't, then it wouldn't be
a good proxy. I might be missing something key here.

Can you elaborate a little?

~~~
opinali
A college degree is considered an independent, standardized proof of aptitude;
unlike a test performed by a recruiter which could possibly be a masquerade to
exclude people of some race or gender etc. Even
<http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=72> is not a strong argument--for
one thing it's not the employer's fault that our society is still unequal.

A college degree is not evidence of no criminal record, only a very good
positive signal (as the % of felons with a college degree is very small, I
suppose). Claiming that an employer requires a degree as a proxy for criminal
background check would get you nowhere in a discrimination lawsuit, unless you
have solid evidence (recordings, documents, confession).

------
mseebach
The article looses a lot by being so vague about which jobs could easily have
been held by high school grads that instead requires college degrees.

One reason I could think of is that as college education become more readily
available for still more people, deciding not to go (gut feeling, isn't it
really more often a decision _not_ to go, rather than to go?) is a
progressively more meaningful filter.

I'm sure a similar shift happened as high school became ubiquitous - then high
school became a requirement for some jobs that were previously held by those
with no high school.

This is generally a good thing, it's an artifact of society as a whole
becoming better educated. The main problem with college is that it hasn't
really caught up to it's new status as "general" education, rather than
"elite" education. That said (I'm not american so not intimately familiar with
the system), isn't it entirely possible to get a decent education (although
with little "elite" signalling value, it would "tick the box" for college
degree on the types of jobs the article refers to) from a state or community
college and _not_ have a lifetime of debt to deal with afterward?

~~~
mkr-hn
I went to a state-run community college on Georgia's HOPE scholarship. I went
in to learn network administration, but it ended up patching all the holes
left by a K-12 system that was broken long before immigration in the '90s
stretched it to the breaking point.

It's popular to joke about how easy it is to get a college education in this
state, but I don't think Georgia's $400+ billion GDP amid the century-long
economic turmoil of this region is a coincidence. PINES[1] probably helps, but
I think Georgia's focus on getting everyone into some sort of college is key.

[1] <http://www.georgialibraries.org/public/pines.php>

------
snarfy
Given two equally capable candidates, the one with the degree is better.
That's the idea. It's not true of course. Being over qualified can be just as
bad as being under qualified. Labor is the most expensive part of a business.
A qualification mismatch will result in a high turn over rate. Depending on
your business, that could be costly. That's why you can be, e.g. too smart to
be a police officer. You'll get bored and leave.

<http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=95836>

~~~
Thrymr
> Given two equally capable candidates, the one with the degree is better.

This doesn't have to be "true" to be useful. A positive correlation is a
valuable tool as well.

~~~
LogicX
Unfortunately I presume research could be done on (bonus if someone knows of
and can reference) the measure of a qualified candidate decreasing as more
candidates enter the 'have a degree' pool. It may have previously been a
stronger correlation, but I'd imagine that correlation is weakening, and if
current trends continue of colleges accepting lower and lower qualified
candidates, and the lines blurring between different colleges and the level of
graduates they're pumping out -- it will eventually be meaningless, as they'll
hand degrees to anyone who will pay (or more likely indebt themselves).

------
brudgers
If we were talking about footballers, a candidate with a college degree is
likely to be seen as having a higher ceiling.

Companies often prefer candidates with college degrees because their career
ceiling is likely to be higher - e.g. a receptionist with a college degree is
more likely suited for advancement to management or sales than one without.
Partially this is educational - he is closer to an MBA - partially it is
socio-economic - he may have a more similar background to existing management
and customers.

In addition as a practical matter, adding a college degree requirement allows
the hiring manager to disqualify potential candidates faster and uses an
objective standard to do so. The perceived value of making one's job easier
should never be discounted.

------
djt
Intelligence is a good indicator of potential job performance when screening
candidates, a degree is positively correlated to intelligence and it is
illegal in some countries/states to test for intelligence, so it can be used
to sort out applicants on that basis.

------
agnsaft
I former client of mine said that employees with and without college degrees
would perform equally at his company, but the big difference was the ability
to adapt to changes (e.g. changes in technology or changes in assigned
responsibility). Once there was a big enough shift in the assigned activities
for some reason, the people with college degrees was able to quickly adapt,
while the others were lagging behind.

From my point of view, that makes sense. Isn't the primary goal of a college
education to learn the ability to learn?

------
pshin45
I've always been surprised how little disruption there has been in the field
of corporate hiring.

As other people have mentioned, many employers use a college degree as a rough
proxy for intelligence and/or work ethic, but how good is it really? Can't we
do better?

"Moneyball" (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moneyball>) is a great book about
the statistical revolution that took place in major league baseball, and shows
us how advanced analytics enabled one team to go beyond rough proxies and
subjective judgments to successfully sign players who were highly productive
but undervalued by other teams.

Assuming sports is just a simplified version of real life, why hasn't a
similar data-driven revolution happened yet in business hiring? Or does the
status quo work "well enough"?

While we're at it, I guess we could also pose the question of how favorably
(or not) YC's own application process compares to that of most colleges and
corporations.

~~~
michaelochurch
I like this idea, but I don't think you can Moneyball corporate hiring very
easily.

Professional athleticism is a direct meritocracy. If you hire better players,
you win more games and make more money, and you see the effects immediately.
In the corporate arena, there's no direct feedback and the meritocracy, to the
degree that it exists, is much murkier. It takes years before you learn that
you've hired an incompetent executive and, by that time, the damage is done.

For a concrete example: the owner of a baseball team would almost never put
his 300-pound, incapable cousin on the team as a personal favor. It would ruin
the performance of the team and destroy his business. Yet VC-funded startups
are frequently pressured to hire the VC's underachieving friends into
executive roles. The people who are in authority to allocate executive
positions have learned that there's more personal benefit in treating these
positions as favors to be traded than by filling them with the most qualified
people, so they choose the former (and always will).

With Moneyball, we're talking about direct-production roles where performance
is visible and it matters. The problem with executive hiring is that those are
value-capturing roles that occasionally involve production.

------
akurilin
Some people claim college is the new HS, a new baseline that everybody is
reaching. Why shouldn't hiring managers work with that baseline?

~~~
seanp2k2
Because it marginalizes anyone who doesn't want / cannot afford to take on
about $100k in debt?

~~~
eropple
I think that's pretty grossly unfair. I graduated from undergrad from a good--
not great, but good--state school with $17K in debt. My scholarships paid for
about $9K. My parents and I (summer jobs, Google Summer of Code, etc.) chipped
in about $26K.

No, you're not going to Stanford on that, but you can still go to a good
school with a respectable reputation for teaching, if not research.

~~~
michaelgrafl
Question from a European: what's the cheapest way to get a college degree in
the US? In Austria you pay 363.36 Euros per semester, plus a ÖH-fee of 15
Euros. Some federal states pay the 363.36 Euros for you. If you're not from
the European Union, you pay twice as much, if I remember correctly.

I know there's a thing called community college. Does it cost money? Is a
degree from one of those worth so much less than one from
MIT/Stanford/Harvard/Yale/Caltech/etc?

~~~
rscale
Community colleges cost money, but they cost less money. In my county in
Pennsylvania, the community college charges $7,140/yr for tuition and fees.
Unfortunately, they issue 2-year Associates degrees that have relatively
little market value. To earn a Bachelors degree, the student needs two more
years at another university. My local state university, Penn State, is
charging $17,824/yr.

Add in the cost of books, and the total cost of a "budget" college education
in Pennsylvania is roughly $55,0000.

As a counterpoint, a private engineering school like Drexel University (also
in Pennsylvania) currently costs $51,405/yr, plus books, for a five year
program, for a total in the $250-275,000 neighborhood.

~~~
eropple
My degree program was something like $14K a year, in that ballpark. I don't
remember, because at UMaine at least, nobody pays sticker price. Pretty much
anyone with a pulse and a not-horrible high school transcript will get at
least a few thousand dollars chopped off the per-year price; I think the
_total_ cost of my four years at a state university, including room and board,
was under $60K.

(Also, many private institutions, namely the ones with pretty nice endowments,
have gone the route of covering most, if not all, of their students' tuition
expenses.)

------
speeder
I deeply regret having a degree, it only set back my life by 5 years and made
me have crazy debts that mean almost half of my income ( I am avoiding taxes
to not die of hunger or default debts, taxes are usually around 35% of income
here... )

------
jister
why not?

~~~
seanp2k2
Not everyone needs to go to college.

I stopped going to community college after my first year; I had the choice
between signing up for another semester or working full-time at a new job that
I just received an offer for. It was a small hosting company that paid enough
for me to live comfortably with my barista girlfriend. It also allowed me to
move out of my parents' house, which was kind of a big deal when I was 19.

Now I'm 24 and I've since moved out to silicon valley (when I was 23). I now
have 6 years in this industry (plus another 5 or so doing odd IT jobs here and
there before I got a "real" job). I'm very happy that I didn't stay back in
Michigan to finish college. I have many friends who are just now graduating
(and a few still in school) with tons of debt and not many good jobs to hope
for.

One of my friends actually hitch-hiked out to San Francisco. She's currently
in her last semester of a well-known design school and she can't find any
work.

I get offers all the time to interview at Fortune 500s for positions like
"senior dev/ops", "cloud architect", etc. I currently work at a Fortune top
1000 company, and I was previously a linux sysadmin at an INC 5000 company.

I regret nothing and I don't see how college could have possibly made my
situation any better. I wouldn't describe myself as a "go getter" or
particularly motivated; I simply rejected the notion that college is necessary
and found employers who were willing to look at my skills rather than pieces
of paper which anyone with enough cash can now attain.

~~~
jister
>> I regret nothing and I don't see how college could have possibly made my
situation any better.

Yes that was your situation then and that doesn't apply to others.

>> I simply rejected the notion that college is necessary and found employers
who were willing to look at my skills rather than pieces of paper which anyone
with enough cash can now attain.

Can you say the same to accountants, doctors, etc.?

------
michaelochurch
I'm going to chalk this up to future shock and humanity's increasing inability
to handle the now rapid rate of change. The economic role of college (before
that, an aristocratic pursuit) is something society invented to tolerate the
industrial rate of change, that fails at the current technological rate of
change.

Pre-industrial economies: you did what your same-sex parent did. A man whose
father was a carpenter became a carpenter. A woman whose mother worked the
fields would also work in the fields. The needs of the economy didn't change
very fast. Your childhood was spent planning to move into the role.

Industrial economy: society changes too fast for people to plan, in advance,
for a specific job. That job may not exist. Jobs that don't exist now will be
needed in 40 years. General education is required.

Technological economy: even faster rate of change. This is the DRY (Don't
Repeat Yourself) economy in which every contribution should, ideally, be
different. We still don't know what kind of educational process this type of
economy mandates. It's all too new for us.

General education grew up in the industrial economy, and its purpose was to
vouch that a person had sufficient intelligence to deserve specific mentoring
that could be done as-needed at a later time. You got the college degree to
_prove_ that if you were put into management training for 2-3 years, you would
learn enough to oversee a group of people doing industrial labor-- you didn't
need to be an expert in that type of labor, which may not have existed when
you got the degree. The college degree is insurance against economic change.
You don't need to know in advance what industries will be in high demand in 30
years (that's impossible). You have proof on paper that you are adaptable
enough that employers should invest in you.

The purpose of the college degree was to grant mobility by encouraging firms
to invest. You can point to the fact that you successfully completed a 4-year,
intellectually rigorous training process oriented toward general knowledge.
The employer sees this and realizes it won't be a loss to put you in the
2-year rotational program it uses to bring up executives.

Lifelong employment at large corporations almost never exists in this
technological economy, which leaves these concepts being a bit out-of-date.
The industrial-era purpose of the degree was to convince employers to invest
in you, and to learn general-purpose skills (management) that were unlikely to
become obsolete due to industrial or mechanical changes.

In the technological era, most firms just don't invest in their employees _at
all_ on the assumption that, if they do so, people will take that capital and
leave. In the industrial era, they "groomed" future leaders from within. In
the technological era, they call executive headhunters. You might find a
mentor by individually networking and building relationships, but the employer
isn't going to make this happen and, if you're not someone's protege after 2
years, it makes the most sense to move on. The idea of corporate "loyalty" is
gone on both sides and hopelessly anachronistic, and it won't come back any
time soon.

The result of this is that (a) the economic return of the college degree has
diminished to the point that it's becoming a terrible trade, but (b) people
(college graduates or not) are ill-equipped to compete on the new, more fluid
economy, and this lack of knowledge or capacity is causing people to cling to
old, industrial-era patterns (such as the college degree immediately after
high school) out of fear. The result is a system that's the worst of both
worlds. Employers don't trust college degrees enough for them to serve their
original purpose, so the positive validation of the degree is gone. What's now
in play is that not having a college degree is a negative validation. People
who didn't complete one are assumed, reflexively, to be lacking.

~~~
jk4930
Regarding corporate loyalty and "grooming" leaders from within: Continues to
be true in Germany. Especially at successful midsize enterprises ("hidden
champions"). Degrees (biz and STEM) are of value also.

This headhunting thing and loss of degree value is more of an Anglo-Saxon
issue.

