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Personally I think the issue is that we have come to accept and perpetuate the idea that college education is the main path to a high paying, well respected car

Personally I think the issue is that we have come to accept and perpetuate the idea that college education is the main path to a high paying, well respected career. Higher education has essentially become a gateway to salaried jobs. IMHO post-high school education should refactor to become more like a trade school system. 95% of the educational programs offered in university have little or nothing to do with real world job duties. For the few excepts (medicine, engineering, etc), the curriculum's are essentially split into theoretical knowledge and practical experience already (med school/residencies, lectures/internships, etc). I think that all colleges should become job training programs. Model it after already existing trade school programs where you spend two years split between real job experience and class room learning. This would give employers access to lower-cost labor in exchange for real-world experience. Is online self-education delusion? Yes and no. A completely self taught education will never be held up to the same esteem as a 4 year degree. It's a bad filter, and I question any company who hires based on degree/no degree alone, but it's the filter that we've been trained as a society to use. The quality of online education can be the same if not better than standard university. The difference rests on the education seekers ability to learn. Online self-education is delusional in the fact that it is not a quicker/easier track to employment. But that's a symptom of a broken educational and workforce system, and not of online-education.

mixmastamyk 9y ago
From experience, most of the coveted companies locally throw resumes without a four year degree in the trash as the first step of the hiring funnel.
- whatyoucantsay 9y ago
  From experience, most of them would have discarded their own founders' CVs.
- trcollinson 9y ago
  Sure but does this have anything to do with a strict educational requirement or a practical requirement to somehow reduce the candidate pool? I have put out public job requests and had literally thousands of applicants. I have at times picked a lot of arbitrary methods for reducing the candidate pool to something useful.
  - mixmastamyk 9y ago
    They’d probably prefer to think the first, but the second is more likely given all the folks under employed these days.
- dsacco 9y ago
  Which companies are the coveted ones? Off the top of my head, Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon happily hire people without degrees. Bloomberg and Goldman Sachs also do it. The lucrative private companies I can honestly think of that really won’t consider it are usually small and discreet, not well known and widely pursued. You still need to pass the interview hazing, and structurally you won’t be “inducted” the same way new graduates are. But if you have prior experience most of these companies will take a look. Even recruiters contact people without degrees. In particular, back when Laszlo Bock was in charge of recruiting at Google he’d routinely say they hired non-graduates because none of their interviewing metrics appeared to have a strong correlation with employee success.
  - mixmastamyk 9y ago
    The companies you mention may in theory, but when a hundred resumes (coveted co/pos) show up guess who's go in the trash first? (With a friend on the inside it is different.) In LA, it's JPL, SpaceX, Hulu, etc. I've applied at all these for jobs with twenty years experience and my resume doesn't last an hour in their system. Even had a previous job in aerospace at Rockwell.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
In general I agree with your post, except the part about all colleges becoming job training programs. I think there is value in an environment that exists purely for academics, it just isn't what the vast majority of people look to education for.
- protonimitate 9y ago
  Agreed - I should have clarified that I believe a purely academic environment is necessary, but should (ideally) be a non-profit venture. Continuous education should be encouraged, but we need to decouple the idea that a 4 year degree == career skills. I am curious - do countries with free or very cheap higher education see as big of a divide between those with 4 year degrees and those without?
ccajas 9y ago
Ironically without an appropriate degree it can be harder to work your way into an average government contractor than a big tech company. In particular, I could see agencies like NASA strictly requiring an accredited degree as I know a lot several government contractors to do. I have a desire to someday work in space exploration, and have to make sure of knowing JPL & NASA's requirements ahead of time. I have a Arts degree. I spoke with someone with prior experience at NASA. From what he told me, I would say their SWEs have backgrounds "diverse, but still very same". They come from many degrees, but they're all STEM degrees. Assuming they don't have strict degree requirements, I could lay out a job path that goes from local web shop (I'm mostly a web developer) to local web & app shop. At this point I get to add Java to my resume for Android. Even though Android is going away from Java it will be years before it stops being used. After 1-2 years of java experience I'll likely be more applicable for a lot of good software engineering jobs and on fairly equal footing with someone with a 4-year degree. I might still have that barrier of entry with JPL, but I'll cross that bridge when I get there. Now let's go to the other option, getting a more appropriate degree. I would like a second 4 year degree, perhaps in ECE or CS to complement my Art degree. A lot of people also want to get another degree, but that's easier said than done since some options become harder and some become easier when you are in your mid 30's like me I have no SO and no kids, so potentially I can be very mobile, but the lack of a job offsets that. How do you set aside years of time for another full degree, with a small support network, and prevent myself from living on the streets? I don't have any friends or family that I know of that'll let me life rent-free for years. I also have to consider if I have to return to the life of working a humbling service job. I'm not in my early 20's anymore so I can't be as flexible and open with part-time jobs and living arrangements.

mixmastamyk 9y ago

From experience, most of the coveted companies locally throw resumes without a four year degree in the trash as the first step of the hiring funnel.

whatyoucantsay 9y ago
From experience, most of them would have discarded their own founders' CVs.
trcollinson 9y ago
Sure but does this have anything to do with a strict educational requirement or a practical requirement to somehow reduce the candidate pool? I have put out public job requests and had literally thousands of applicants. I have at times picked a lot of arbitrary methods for reducing the candidate pool to something useful.
- mixmastamyk 9y ago
  They’d probably prefer to think the first, but the second is more likely given all the folks under employed these days.
dsacco 9y ago
Which companies are the coveted ones? Off the top of my head, Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon happily hire people without degrees. Bloomberg and Goldman Sachs also do it. The lucrative private companies I can honestly think of that really won’t consider it are usually small and discreet, not well known and widely pursued. You still need to pass the interview hazing, and structurally you won’t be “inducted” the same way new graduates are. But if you have prior experience most of these companies will take a look. Even recruiters contact people without degrees. In particular, back when Laszlo Bock was in charge of recruiting at Google he’d routinely say they hired non-graduates because none of their interviewing metrics appeared to have a strong correlation with employee success.
- mixmastamyk 9y ago
  The companies you mention may in theory, but when a hundred resumes (coveted co/pos) show up guess who's go in the trash first? (With a friend on the inside it is different.) In LA, it's JPL, SpaceX, Hulu, etc. I've applied at all these for jobs with twenty years experience and my resume doesn't last an hour in their system. Even had a previous job in aerospace at Rockwell.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago

In general I agree with your post, except the part about all colleges becoming job training programs. I think there is value in an environment that exists purely for academics, it just isn't what the vast majority of people look to education for.

protonimitate 9y ago
Agreed - I should have clarified that I believe a purely academic environment is necessary, but should (ideally) be a non-profit venture. Continuous education should be encouraged, but we need to decouple the idea that a 4 year degree == career skills. I am curious - do countries with free or very cheap higher education see as big of a divide between those with 4 year degrees and those without?

ccajas 9y ago

Ironically without an appropriate degree it can be harder to work your way into an average government contractor than a big tech company. In particular, I could see agencies like NASA strictly requiring an accredited degree as I know a lot several government contractors to do. I have a desire to someday work in space exploration, and have to make sure of knowing JPL & NASA's requirements ahead of time. I have a Arts degree. I spoke with someone with prior experience at NASA. From what he told me, I would say their SWEs have backgrounds "diverse, but still very same". They come from many degrees, but they're all STEM degrees. Assuming they don't have strict degree requirements, I could lay out a job path that goes from local web shop (I'm mostly a web developer) to local web & app shop. At this point I get to add Java to my resume for Android. Even though Android is going away from Java it will be years before it stops being used. After 1-2 years of java experience I'll likely be more applicable for a lot of good software engineering jobs and on fairly equal footing with someone with a 4-year degree. I might still have that barrier of entry with JPL, but I'll cross that bridge when I get there. Now let's go to the other option, getting a more appropriate degree. I would like a second 4 year degree, perhaps in ECE or CS to complement my Art degree. A lot of people also want to get another degree, but that's easier said than done since some options become harder and some become easier when you are in your mid 30's like me I have no SO and no kids, so potentially I can be very mobile, but the lack of a job offsets that. How do you set aside years of time for another full degree, with a small support network, and prevent myself from living on the streets? I don't have any friends or family that I know of that'll let me life rent-free for years. I also have to consider if I have to return to the life of working a humbling service job. I'm not in my early 20's anymore so I can't be as flexible and open with part-time jobs and living arrangements.