
Your Credentials Are Holding You Back - saurabh
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/02/your_credentials_are_holding_y.html
======
SiVal
I think university credentials are holding all of society back. For a thousand
years, universities had little to do with making a living for most people in
society. They were for training academics, churchmen, and lawyers, and for the
scions of rich families to get to know each other. The majority of households
became able to support themselves by mechanisms other than going to college.

It is only in the last generation (VERY recently in the thousand year history
of the system) that universities have become almost the monopoly source of
employment qualification. How ironic is it that as economic activity
diversifies, qualification for entry narrows into a single queue?

One result of the university being the only door into the entire economy is
that people assume that the way to do the best in the economy is to do the
best in the university system. Get the most elite degree possible, and you'll
have your pick of elite careers.

But it doesn't work that way. The university and the economy are two different
worlds. People with PhDs in Etruscan history from Harvard are elite in the
university system, and for every ten of them, there will be one academic job
available. The other nine will have to leave the system and be no more
qualified than people with far more ordinary degrees to be of value in the
real economy.

But they'll think they deserve more because, after all, they were the winners
of the system that everyone has to go through to qualify for a job. What a
mess.

The sooner we can diversify the training and credentialing system to match the
diversified economy, the better.

~~~
redwood
Maybe another way of looking at it: most Americans now get the university
experience, something you note used to be reserved for social mixing of
wealthy families. In other words: the masses are now experiencing a quality of
life only the wealthy once had. Instead of seeing this a problem, I see it as
the tip of the iceberg.

What is the college lifestyle? It's essentially the dream: do what you want,
don't worry because everything is taken care of for the most part. It's like
socialism: the good and the bad. You don't have to work very hard and there's
little payoff for being the hardest worker. But at the same time, there's
plenty of experimentation, outside the box thinking: everything is questioned.

Many of us suggest that machines do more and more of the heavy lifting, as
humans are allowed to be the 'artists' (or whatever you want to call it) that
they want to be... We hear this a lot: that we're on this kind of a trend and
it'll continue until we need to make major political changes (a la
distribution of wealth and ownership of production) to ensure harmonious
society is possible. Well: I suggest that we're already part-way here. It's
just that most of us experience this for only 4 years...or roughly 8% of our
adult lives.

I suggest that this 8% will only grow and our societies will need to change,
politically, in order to let this happen.

There are the credential-obsessed individuals on college campuses, but they're
actually a small minority. Most are just living the life of freedom for a few
years before learning what work is like. Wouldn't you go back and live college
over again if you could now? awesome!

~~~
xyzzy123
Unfortunately the "dream" lifestyle you described runs at a significant
financial loss :(

It's a bit less idyllic if you have to try and break even.

------
davidroberts
I think people seriously over-estimate how much marginal happiness (if any)
that expensive graduate degree will bring. Many people seem to continue
studying out of inertia and through encouragement of academics who have a
vested interest in maintaining a large number of graduate students.

I'd suggest they take their undergraduate degree and go test the waters of
where they think they want to work. Spend a couple of years in the field, even
at a lower level, pay off a little of the debt they already have, and then if
they like the field, and want to continue in it, they'll have a much clearer
idea of the benefit/cost ratio of an advanced degree, and a better idea of
which school and program will give them the best value. And if they decide the
whole field is wrong for them, it's much easier to start afresh somewhere
else. Undergraduate degrees are much more transferable from field-to-field
than advanced degrees.

~~~
GuiA
I went through grad school once (PhD, dropped out, left with a MSc), am now
doing the startup thing, and intend to go back for a PhD because I do love
some things in research and academia (and I have some R&D-type ideas I'd like
to work full-time on which require me to be in an university setting).

What I suggest to friends asking me for advice re:grad school is to go to grad
school IF AND ONLY IF they get an assistantship of some sorts (those usually
come with a tuition waiver).

When I applied to grad schools, I didn't get in my top 2 programs of choice; I
did get in decent programs, but which wouldn't pay me (or not enough to cover
my various expenses). I ended up choosing a lesser program, but one that gave
me full tuition waiver + a teaching (and later, research) assistantship.

Grad school is a great experience, and I believe most people will get
something from it. But it's not worth getting in debt for it (even if it's
your top choice- you wouldn't pay Google/Apple/[insert your favorite company
here] to go work for them).

Now of course, this advice is easier to follow for the scientific fields; but
I have friends who got into liberal arts programs with full tuition waiver + a
decent assistantship. The bar is just much higher for these (as it should be).

~~~
eropple
_> What I suggest to friends asking me for advice re:grad school is to go to
grad school IF AND ONLY IF they get an assistantship of some sorts (those
usually come with a tuition waiver)._

I think this is key. Every professor I ever had said "if you have to pay for a
grad degree, don't go."

Which I would have, which is why I didn't!

------
hkmurakami
I personally think #2 (Rubber Stamp Syndrome) is the most problematic long-
term, since it doesn't have a readily-visible, actionable way to fix it (our
entire upbringing and society around us reinforces it).

I hoped that this HBR article would have addressed ways to resolve rubber
stamp syndrome. Alas, no.

I am consistently disappointed by the (poor) quality of ideas presented in
"HBR Blog" articles. I stopped following the HBR twitter account after a few
weeks since all the links I was clicking were links to HBR Blogs and every
single one of them disappointed me.

~~~
Evbn
HBR, like many orgs, uses "blog" as its down label brand, like Gap uses Old
Navy and Intel uses Celeron.

------
ahoy
So the author's point is that debt is restrictive and stifling? And his advice
is to just "eliminate your debt load"?

Is this supposed to be satire?

~~~
graeme
People sometimes need to be told. Right now, countless college students with
$X0,000 of debt are considering law school and masters degrees without a clear
idea of how the added credential will improve their prospects.

I tend to think that almost all good advice is cliche for most and a
revelation for some. We all have different blind spots.

------
richo
As a developer (These days, DevOps engineer) without a uni degree I can tell
you absolutely that for better or for worse you're probably still better off
with a degree. Note that I'm saying this is how it should be, but just that to
say "your degree is holding you back is absurd".

You may choose to do stupid things to justify the money you spent at uni, but
in the last 24 months:

* I was unable to secure a badass job as a pen tester, due entirely to an upstream policy of not hiring people without degrees. I was told that an exception could be made, but I'd already been screwed around for 2 months by them and needed work.

* The process of working or moving over seas is diabolically complicated already, and made borderline impossible if you don't have a piece of paper to prove that you do what you do well.

My take on the article as that any barriers that a degree imposes are
psychological and self-imposed, whereas there are still realworld issues you
can't get past without one.

~~~
redwood
I'd be curious to hear your perspective as someone who didn't do college: do
you feel you missed out on anything (other than the credential piece)? For me
the experience was probably more valuable than the credential... at least in
terms of values that this article is espousing: 'finding myself' etc. My
degree was valuable in terms of money too...but for me the quality of life I
had in college became a real ideal, an almost idyllic vision of cooperative
living, good and bad, that has stayed with me. I'd never give up that
experience, not for the world. In fact my feeling is college is the beginning
of a trend whereby we're going to all start living lives of greater freedom
and less hand-to-mouth... that is if we can find a way to share in the plenty
that our times have created.

~~~
richo
Not really. Some odd stuff you don't think about like how to structure a
meeting or how to write a research paper.

Generally speaking, I spent the equivalent time a) gainfully employed and b)
writing fucktons of code. This certainly isn't general advice and I don't know
that I'd recommend doing this to other people, but for me specifically it
seems to have paid dividends.

------
avenger123
I would argue that debt holds most people back. It's easier to change jobs
when you don't have unnecessary debt. The only debt that I would consider
necessary is mortgage debt. Car loans, credit card debit, etc. are all things
that can be managed and eliminated.

~~~
Evbn
Mortgage debt, or more precisely, home ownership, locks you into expensive
maintenance on an asset that is expensive to get rid of. You can't just
downsize your house -- all the benefit gets soaked up in transaction fees.

~~~
yaddayadda
Agreed. While my student loans have constrained my options, my home ownership
has constrained my options by many more orders of magnitude. I hate my student
loans, but don't regret them. I hate AND regret my home ownership.

------
joallard
> First, eliminate your debt load.

Need money?

1\. Make money

Now here's my guide to happiness in life:

1\. Become happy.

Voilà. Problem solved. Enjoy.

~~~
nostrademons
The irony is that your guide to happiness in life is basically exactly how it
works. If you want to be happy, the solution is...become happy, and there's no
other trick to it.

It doesn't work so well for money because there're at least some external
constraints on wealth, but for happiness, it really is purely mental and your
"guide" will work perfectly well for most people. Well, the ones who're
willing to take enough of a leap to follow it.

~~~
joallard
For happiness, I agree, although often a significant lack of money will hinder
happiness and render unhappy.

------
moron4hire
It's amazing how few supposedly educated people understand the concept of sunk
costs. What's the best time to stop flushing money down the toilet? Do you
think we should continue longer because we have been doing it for so long, or
would it be better to stop now?

------
peterjancelis
So true. Grab a couple of beers with an ex-consultant when he's out of the
system, open up about your BS experiences first and before you know it you end
up spending all night sharing all the BS either of you had to go through.
Worked every time so far.

------
martinced
_"You're not the XXX, you're the product"_

Oh boy that one we're going to hear for a long time apparently :(

I know lots of people who paid $$$ for MBAs. And then they went on to make
more $$$ than they would have without their MBAs. In a matter of two to three
years they'd have make back what they paid their MBA.

How are they the "product" of the business school? To me they're the customer:
they paid $$$ for the opportunity to then get $$$$$.

But it's sooooo easy to try to knock people down by repeating that "you're the
product" mantra as if people were merchandise and the web is so full of people
who just love to try to diminish others that I'm pretty sure we'll keep
reading "you're the product" for a long time...

~~~
samatman
The motto is, "if you're not the customer, you're the product". This applies
to colleges and universities as much as anything else. The entire discourse is
muddled by the vast chasm between reputable MBAs and diploma mills.

