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Personal anecdote, so take it with a grain of salt.
Friend A, very handy and skilled individual, took Thermodynamics in UNI for 2 years, then dropped out. Found job at electronics production facility. Managed to get to a Head Technician position.
Friend B, went to programming 3 years to UNI. Barely managed to finish. Retried math exam multiple times. Though friend A, managed to get a job at the same place as a lower tier machinery operator. Got promoted to technician position after 2 years. Now works as web QC for the same guy who is boss of electronic production facility.
Moral of the story: education, finished or not, existing or not, wont get you far unless you are outgoing and have connections. Also, you either have ability to learn new skills or have said skills and know how to use them. Doesn’t matter how you got them.
(i have a STEM degree and work for a catering company lmao)
Either will land you a job lol
Neither *
Sadly some jobs are not available without the paper. That credentialism for ya
College: You get as much as you put in to it.
If one plans on going to college to check a box by getting a bachelor’s, degree, then that person should probably spend their time and money doing something else.
For someone who sees college as an opportunity to stress their ability to learn at levels much higher than what High School or even Trade School may do, then it will do wonderful things for you. The most useful skill academia teaches is the ability to learn complex ideas through abstraction.
As someone who has learned how to create a complex AI system with both long and short term memory, one thing I learned is that AI cannot teach AI. I apply my ability to learn by extending it to my AI agent to help it learn new patterns.
Apprenticeships can be the best of both worlds, but again they need to have the checks in place.
The carrot thing isn’t totally untrue, but it’s a bit more complex. If you’re skilled in a trade, you probably have more of a chance of not being financially uprooted than someone with a white collar degree whose job will be AI’d in the next 5 years. That said, to make decent money in a trade, it helps a lot to have a degree from a trade school.
If you want a job as a radiology tech, what hospital is giving them out with no degree?
Everyone I know with a good degree is paying off student loans 8+ years later. Universities are having so many issues on so many levels from funding to finding professors both qualified and willing to teach to politics. And on top of all that the global economy is collapsing.
I get that a lot of you spent a lot of money on a degree and will defend that as the right choice but you’re old now. The world is changing and expecting to find a job out of college with an infosec or compsci degree is wishful thinking at best without ivy league nepotism. The world you grew up in is dying, gradstudents with chatgpt are teaching classes and freshmen are using deepseek to do course work. I know a nursing student right now who has seen the curve her class graded on and it’s terrifying.
So that’s my long unpopular opinion. A degree will not get you a job anymore and even if it did the quality of the education has dropped dramatically at most schools. You might as well spend the money on a country club membership, the social connections are a better deal.
A degree is absolutely something I value heavily in applicants. Not because of the specific courses taken, but because what it says about the potential employee.
It says that they can complete a years-long project with disparate, often competing sub-projects, milestones, deliverable dates, and revolving team members while being self-managed. And due to core curricula, they’ve also proven a baseline knowledge unrelated to their specific degree. That may not sound useful, but someone who’s skillet is solely specialized work may have trouble navigating ancillary tasks that are part of the working environment. The best [insert technical skill] person in the world isn’t going to be a good employee if they can’t work in a team, prepare a report, respond appropriately and professionally to emails, document their work, develop/follow SOPs required for project handoff, deliver a presentation, etc.
Getting any college degree requires a baseline skillset that is valuable. Not having a degree doesn’t mean you can’t do all those things, but when I’ve got 40 applications I’m looking at, I can’t interview everyone. It’s a huge bonus to have a degree that tells me you have proven a minimum competency.
And the quality of your candidates will continue to drop. The system is failing you too just slower.
I’m not so much saying degrees are useless as saying they mean less, the ROI for going in general has shifted. We’re at a point where 2 and 4 year degrees look good to employers but are financially foolish for students. If you can afford to go it’s valable. But the proposition of student loans make less sense by the day.
Degrees don’t tell us everything we need to know about a candidate, but they tell us a hell of a lot more than not having a degree does. Candidates are unknowns, and candidates without degrees moreso. If I’m combing through 40 applications then a degreed person is way more likely to get an interview, all else being equal.
The best [insert technical skill] person in the world isn’t going to be a good employee if they can’t work in a team, prepare a report, respond appropriately and professionally to emails, document their work, develop/follow SOPs required for project handoff, deliver a presentation, etc.
Degrees don’t require most of those things.
I’m someone who has multiple degrees including a clinical doctorate (think similar to optometrist, pharmacist etc). I think that the things you just listed (except maybe working in a group) were less developed or tested in my degree programs than they have been in my hobby spaces. I really wish it were possible for me to submit the afghan that took me two years to complete over my associates degree.
Did your afghan have strict, inflexible timelines for deliverables? Because college courses do. Did completion of your afghan require you to work on simultaneous unrelated sub-projects with shared milestone dates? Because that’s what a college semester is.
You’re not wrong with generalist degrees, but degrees where you are something at the end still need that base training.
You can’t just walk into an civil engineer’s firm and start building bridges.
Even the PhDs have issues finding work that pays enough to service loans and live. And if you find such a job in the US it’s probably a military contrator or mag7 who are all more on board with nazism than 1930s VW.
Engineering bridges is a good metaphor but the US’s bridges are in rough shape and any money that could be spent on repairs or designing new ones will go to Raytheon to blow up bridges in Iran.
Stupid times we live in.
Do you know anything about what the PhD situation is like in other countries? (I’m considering one and am currently located in the US and based on my initial findings it does look similar to what you describe.)
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That sucks. Various industries need academic research to function well and innovate, but I guess my country would rather spend all their money on blowing up families in the middle east and let the civilian job market collapse.
My partner has a master’s in a STEM field and has been working full time since they graduated.
After 10+ years of payment on the IDR plan, they owe just slightly more than what they initially took out!
College for the vast majority of people (Millenials at least) was a scam built on lies, exploitative lending, and fear of social stigma. We aren’t just due loan forgiveness, we’re due compensation for long term damages in the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars.
My wife once tried to grow potatoes and got what felt like a mile of potato greens while the slips barely grew at all.
Then she went back to her job as a lawyer and made enough money to buy a truck full of potatoes
Why didn’t she just sue the potatoes?
Maybe she’s a hesi-tater
Better than a master-tater.
She did. Took them for all they were worth
Havings skills and a degree are not necessarily mutually exclusive. In my experience the degree was the gateway to gaining skills, not the method of doing so.
I think the degree is really more like evidence that you can get things done on your own. Parental involvement in the day to day is near zero for most people getting a degree. They also learn valuable social skills. But a degree isn’t the only way to get that. So it shouldn’t be a requirement. Yet attempting to determine if someone without a degree has that is costly and time consuming. Companies just want to take the easy path.
Also, I’d push back against the subtext that work experience gives skills. Plenty of people work a job for 10 years without having the adjacent job skills to be able to progress in that career or jump to another.
Critical thinking skills are the most important thing, and it’s possible to get a 4-year degree without actually picking them up or strengthening your skill sets in that area. But it’s also possible to work for 5 years without developing critical thinking skills, either.
In the end, no matter what you do with your time, only a small percentage of your effort is going into improving yourself. The people at work are trying to get stuff done for their employer, and the people at school are trying to get through the curriculum. It’s possible to do the work while the employer/school or even yourself cheats you out of the real long term benefits of actually learning during that time frame.
I’ve gutted out 3 careers in “skilled labor” (a term I find problematic), each time working from the bottom entry level guy, to the guy in charge. In all three I’ve worked side by side with people who actually got degrees in that field.
I have also regretted not getting a degree for my entire adult life.
My buddy is an accomplished self taught violin maker. He won an award and was talking to another renowned violin maker who asked him where he was taught. He was slightly embarrassed to say he was self taught but she was quite impressed and said “Ahh! The slow way!”
Holy shit, that’s probably the job I would expect for there to be the fewest self-taught people. It’s such an unbelievably precise job, your friend must be unbelievably skilled.
It’s never too late to get one. I had classes with a 90 year old woman who was getting hers.
My dad got an art degree by taking one course per semester for years. He loved it. Got his degree last year. Retires this year.
Did she have an extra $90k lying around, or are her children going to be paying off that debt?
Community college is insanely affordable where I live, like $600/semester for a full class load before financial aid. Lots of textbook free classes too that use open source books. And colleges have financial aid offices with people whose only job is to figure out what aid you qualify for.
There’s a lot of help to go back to college, you just need to ask for it.
That’s not how estates work.
Experience matters a lot in practice, but having a degree gives you opportunity to learn fundamentals and to have a broader knowledge base in general. Met a few people without formal education with insane knowledge and skills but absolutely helpless outside of their area of expertise.
Meh, I got my bachelor’s, worked, and then got my graduate degree, and still had to work my way up from nothing as well.
I see degrees as a way of improving your cap on the position you can hold.
As someone who spent the better part of a decade in recruitment. You honestly never know what you get. So you have to take into count as many factors as you can. Education is a commitment, it means you had to go to school, study and prove your knowledge to graduate. Experience is also great, as its more proven skill. Unfortunately both have pit falls in their own ways. The example that pops to mind is i hired two people;one with alot of experience and one with alot of education. The educated one lacked critical problem solving and when a curve ball hit or something that was outside of normalcy she stumbled. The experienced one, always knee what to do on a practical level but lacked detailed workmanship, as she had done jobs so similar for so long instead of following protocol or contacting her supervisor. She would do what she thought was right and stumbled. Experience and education compliment eachother and neither should be undervalued.
Education is a commitment, it means you had to go to school, study and prove your knowledge to graduate.
While it’s the exception, some of the people I’ve met in the field really make me put that into question. I feel like there are institutions that will wave you through provided you pay enough money.
To the originator of that meme, not OP: tell me you’re a boomer, without telling me you’re a boomer.
No matter what the Wall St. Journal says, social science says level of education is still the second most important determinant of quality of life. First of course is the socioeconomic status of your parents. I, personally, wouldn’t trade my master’s degree for a plumbing certificate.
I on the other hand wouldn’t trade my 7 years of software development experience for a master’s degree in the same field. I’d be unemployable in the current market.
Trick is not to do fucking nothing while you get that master’s…if you do? Then that’s on you. I did programing jobs while studying, it’s how i paid for my degree.
If you can’t get something going? Maybe the field isn’t going to work for you to begin with… there’s no silver bullet. Different fields will do different things, but if you do spend 7 years and you truly come out of uni with nothing? You failed or you got ripped off but equally failed to notice for 7 years.
Life is tough. too many go to uni before they’re ready.
I got work just fine by not working while studying (still working on said studies of course). Now the market is fucked and there’s not much I can do about it
Today that’s next to impossible. Comp Sci students are struggling to even find internships. I was listening to a podcast interviewing a student that applied to over 90 internships, only got 2 interviews, and no callbacks. It’s probably the worst time to try to get into tech right now.
The job market is tough these days and uni gives you little to no practical skills.
A lot of people don’t have the bandwidth to work full time AND study full time. That’s 80 hours a week… And most companies hiring entry levels want them to be at the office at the same time as lectures are happening.
If I’d started university instead of work when I did start work, I would probably be getting rejections to job applications at McDonald’s right now.
I don’t see the post as disagreeing with you.
The graphic alone is pointing out what you are saying. Skills alone doesn’t get noticed. So you need a degree to be seen, which gets you a job, which reduces stress, which makes you happy.
But it is sad that it is true. I favor getting a degree, not for the education, but for the 4 years of experience living on ones own and having to handle life that it gives most people. It is also often an important social education. But I don’t like the idea of excluding those who don’t have a degree just because they don’t.
Can be legit. I once got turned down for a job because i didn’t have an mcse despite having over 20 years experience administering windows server and AD (and i’m talking laaaaaarge scale…universities and citrix farms).
That’s what happens when the people doing the hiring don’t know anything about any of the skills required for the role
The amount of people who make it through HR hell and interview for my team, that have a some experience but it’s all bounce around 1y and then have an insane amount of certs, that don’t know what they’re doing is way to high in tech. I’ll take a green horn that wants to learn and has a good foundation before I’ll take someone with bounce around experience and a shit load of certs. Almost all certs are how well can you take tests.
I have literally worked in environs where having certifications and nothing else was grounds for disqualification because it meant you’d been taught dogma, not functionality. My personal fave was the tech who put in a request for graphite dust to clean a power button on workstation because it was sticking. Why was it sticking? Some jackass had spilled coke.
I cleaned it with a chux and closed the ticket.
I understand both sides here. I’m a technician who worked as an engineer in the past. Working on getting my degree. The plant’s electrical engineer wanted nothing to do with our 24VDC power supply problems. Isn’t that her JOB. Us three technicians have probably 100 years of experience, combined. We figured it out
Conflict on the model? Add a bit where the contractor is responsible for resolving issues and then draw the tray overlapping with the pipes AND the vents. On walkdown complain that its not built as drawn.
I had to do install drawings/instructions at my last job. The number of times I just wanted to put “install according to all local codes”. I’m looking at 15 year old architectural drawings, never seen the building, don’t know shit about where anything actually is. They’re big boys and will figure it out. I was in aerospace before that and was like we did less documentation. I hate MEP.
Most jobs that require degrees rarely require skills/knowledge learned in college/uni aside from sci/tech/engineering because the benefit there is that colleges have millions of dollars of instruments/equipment to fuck around with …
What I see as the value of a degree is that it’s a piece of paper that says that youre likely able to learn and play whatever game a job entails, communicate formally and effectively, be self sufficient, understand/accomplish specified goals with deadlines, and work effectively in a team.
Can someone without a degree have those skills? Totally. Does someone with a degree have all those skills? Not specifically, but they’ve likely been through the ringer for ~4 years and seen a lot of shit they had to face on their own and be accountable for it.
Can someone cheat their way through and be useless, sure, but they frequently found out…or just become managers unfortunately.
Deleted my original reply because I was just splitting hairs. I mostly agree with you, I just don’t like the framing
