No Degree Required

[MSimon]

http://www.singularity2050.com/2014/07/ ... -2015.html

Google, always leading the way, no longer mandates college degrees as a requirement, and has recently disclosed that about 14% of its employees do not have them. If a few other technology companies follow suit, then the workforce will soon have a pool of people working at very desirable employers, who managed to attain their position without the time and expense of college. If employers in less dynamic sectors still have resistance to this concept, they will find it harder to ignore the growing number of resumes from people who happen to be alumni of Google, despite not having the required degree. As change happens on the margins, it will only take a small percentage of the workforce to be hired by prestigious employers.

The Disruption Begins at the Top : Since this disruption is technological and almost entirely about software, perhaps the disruption has to originate where the people most directly responsible for the disruption exist.

[Tom Ligon]

This is not new. Here's an article listing some of the CEOs of top companies who never got a sheepskin:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/pf_article_107141.html

You've heard of many of these people.

Historically, many of our greatest movers and shakers in industry had no college. I'll start with Dr. Ben Franklin. His degrees were honorary ... his formal schooling was minimal. I'm fascinated with Oliver Evans, arguably the father of modern industrial engineering, pioneer in high pressure steam engines, and the inventor of compression cycle refrigeration. All that by 1805. Evans learned the 3 R's on a rudimentary level, was apprenticed to a wheelwright, and thereafter was self-taught. He took full advantage of two of Franklin's creations, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the American Philosophical Society (Franklin's Leather Apron Society all grown up). Westinghouse dropped out of college. Edison never attended.

The idea that you need college, and more recently an advanced degree, for most professional positions is a very recent one. It seems to have more to do with sloppy hiring practices than it does with actual benefit.

The cost of higher education has exploded with this apparent role as a prerequisite for all positions above janitor and short order cook. Even car mechanics now have degrees. We now have a younger generation saddled with enormous debt, and the cost/benefit of this is getting murkier by the day, especially when you look at the people who have created some of our most spectacularly successful businesses.

[Diogenes]

The cost of higher education has exploded with this apparent role as a prerequisite for all positions above janitor and short order cook. Even car mechanics now have degrees. We now have a younger generation saddled with enormous debt, and the cost/benefit of this is getting murkier by the day, especially when you look at the people who have created some of our most spectacularly successful businesses.

"Higher education" has become nothing but a Jobs program for useless Liberal academics who cannot survive in the real world. As with everything else involving these folk, the costs associated always go up.


I have long advocated the Defunding of these leftest institution in any manner possible. Texas' effort to create the $10,000.00 degree program is an example of progress in this area. The Khan academy is another. I believe that education should be "Democratized" so that anyone with the desire can access the material, and learn to do the work for themselves if they are able.


The current system favors the rich, to which you would think the Liberals would object but for the fact that they happen to be the beneficiaries of the existing system.


Power to the People!

[kunkmiester]

Part of it is declining public education standards. Decades ago a high school diploma was equivalent to a more recent general education associate's degree. You didn't need much more to have a lot of the skills needed to get started in an entry level position. Education has degraded to the point where you have to get the associate's to have the skills needed to start a job, math, composition, etc. and sometimes even a bachelor's won't have as much of it as you might think. The degree shows dedication and exposure to the skills no longer taught in high school.

There are new venues for education though, which mean that all that education can be gotten without formal training. I'm actually doubting that I'll get a bachelor's, the two associate's I'm pursuing, plus a few other classes, will be plenty.

[ladajo]

The early days of Higher Education in america was focused on producing priests. Education was teaching a liberal arts program in culture and history as well as language. Depending on the school, it was flavored with the religious doctrine of the founding and funding organization (normally a community).
Bonus points to who can name the first secular school off the top of their heads.

The teaching of science and engineering in higher education really did not take off until the 20th century. And the big push came from the government in regard to national security circa World War II, with another big plus up for the cold war.

Folks don't normally realize that Higher Ed. in the U.S. really did not become what we tend to think of it as what it is until almost the 1970s.

The fact that companies are not looking at degrees is a misnomer. They are. They are more looking at Associates level for a number of reasons, some given above. In fact, coming out of school these days, it is easier, and probably higher paying for an Assoc. degree than a Bachelor's for entry level. The difference is in lifetime cap and earnings. Associate's max out much earlier and lower than Bachelor's. Another reason employers look towards the community college realm is really two-fold; the death of vocational-techincal schools and the partnerships they held with area business. These is now accomplished by community colleges with two-year programs.
Companies are also now on a "we don't like online only degree mills" trend. They want specific skill sets and proven trained problem solvers.
Another point to consider is that the military has also moved away from the detailed and intensive technical training vocational programs that they ran for decades. An electronics technician of today is not what they were twenty years or more ago. These services are either module toss or contracted support. And employers are facing an aging technical workforce with no training.
Another dynamic for companies has become more of a concern, and that is legal liability. Letting someone mess with equipment or design brings inherent liability. And the companies are facing more and more legal and insurance based requirements to demonstrate adequately trained, educated and certified employees or face being taken to the cleaners by a customer or government regulator when things to work right and thiss imparts damages to someone.

But in any event, a point lost on anyone who has not completed a Higher Education program is that it is not merely a core track major, but the Liberal Arts component that make it what it is. Plenty of folks get hired for jobs outside the degree they hold, because of work history and demostrated abilities. However, at a minimum, the company hiring will pay more for a degree holder based on several tenants, the most important of which is that by holding a real degree they have been tested to show follow through and problem solving as well as a base level of maturity. As for Simon, I feel sad for him. If not for his pathological anti-social behavioral issues, he would have completed a degree long ago, and probably grown to be a well respected and well compensated name in science and/or engineering. Instead he has become an angry old man that still hates "the man" for not taking him seriously and giving him his due on only his terms. The fact that he survived the Navy Nuclear program (granted as a one tour wonder), is probably the only reason that he was able to do anything with his life beyond a cardboard box on the side of the road. But the fact that he stayed with the program for only one tour also indicates his inability to conform or accept that he is not the only person on the planet that can think. The navy reactor operator and nuclear community has seen many like him unfortunately. Most get it, some, like Simon, don't. Really bright minds wasted in my opinion. He could have done so much more.
Meh.

[Tom Ligon]

Browsing LinkedIn the other day, I saw a post from Ohio University for an online MS in Electrical Engineering. My personal association with them is with their avionics group, which merges aviation and electronics, so I made a comment to the effect.

The next comment came from a fellow with a PhD in EE, and a CEO. He sniffed that he could not find OU listed among any of the top EE schools, and so would never hire someone with a degree from them. And furthermore, he said he'd never hire anyone with an online degree.

This says he uses institutional prestige as a shortcut for selecting quality employees. And by rejecting online degrees, he's slammed the door on people who have a degree or experience in one field and have chosen to cross-pollinate, to pick up an EE degree to add to their existing expertise, while continuing to hold their existing job. The main reason for online degrees is to allow a hard-working person to continue their education while still working.

Shortcuts to hiring people based on what they can do, substituting where they attended school, strikes me as a formula for failure.

While at Virginia Tech, I hung around the chemistry department a lot, never mind that was not my degree field. I did undergraduate research in chemistry, giving me my first exposure to minicomputers. They had a strong electronics group, which revolutionized, among other things, gas chromatography. My undergrad research in time-of-flight mass spectrometers set me up perfectly to appreciate the Farnsworth Fusor, and I thought up nearly the same device back then (a health physics prof told me it would never work, and I let it drop). I've since been a strong advocate of people combining multiple fields to synthesize a new field.

[choff]

Didn't Farnsworth invent television with the conviction it would revolutionize education, it would seem the degree factories kept it shut out from anything except entertainment and propaganda.

[Tom Ligon]

Didn't Farnsworth invent television with the conviction it would revolutionize education, it would seem the degree factories kept it shut out from anything except entertainment and propaganda.

I've been skimming his biography. I don't remember that detail, but don't doubt it. I think he did not see the entertainment angle.

He invented television while still in high school. If I have my facts straight, he did get some college later (BYU) but I don't think he ever got a degree. That didn't stop him from discussing physics with Einstein.

[paperburn1]

A small but growing number universities are starting to realize that unless they start offering a cheaper alternative they are going price themself out of business. Right now do the availability of educational materials on YouTube University, several online universities and other Internet driven devices, major-league universities are starting to realize in order to remain competitive they are too going to have to offer a cheaper alternative than the mainstream educational system. You can see this by the fact that several Ivy League institutions now offer their class curriculum online for free. MIT is a prime example of this. You can take any course you want from them for free and once you feel that you have it mastered you can challenge the course and receive credits for the course by paying a reduced fee. There are also accredited universities online where you can receive a BS for under $8000 that includes instructors materials and proctoring. Unfortunately I feel this new trend is going to be the cause and a another economic depression for education is our last real industry in the United States but that's another topic, for another time, for another set of discussions.

[palladin9479]

To be honest most of Western higher education institutes are just progressive voter factories. Their job is to produce people who will vote in favor of the ideology of the universities alumni while also being able to hold a job. With the development of the welfare state that last part is no longer a requirement, and it shows. Most graduates aren't in STEM fields and instead are liberal arts degrees that are less useful then toilet paper.

I do believe a technical school / certification / work study system would be far more beneficial. After / during HS a student would chose / qualify a field to study in and afterwards would study / work under a certified professional. Think the old tradesmen guild system but applied to modern trades.

[ladajo]

I agree that change is warranted in Higher Ed.
I would also point out that change is afoot. Remote access and design a degree programs are and have been in progress for a few years now.
Where you see this most is with resident undergraduates that take program courses and supplement with electronic courses.
The true advantage to electronic is that it has a rewind button. This has popped up many times in studies, students typically do better with electronic versions mostly due to the ability to pause and supplement or stop and rewind when hitting rough patch at the moment or later on when they found that something they understood was not well understood in support of a follow-on topic. It is much harder to do this in a live classroom.
All that said, one of the complaints coming out of employers regarding online, is that it is more useful for certifications or specialized training vice education.
This is what is lost on folks like Simon. The fundamental difference between educating someone and training them. He has been trained, both via the navy and self motivated. He has not been educated.
Employers value education, especially live education because it teachs more than the core technical points of a topic. It teaches problem solving based on reason, it teaches human interactions and dynamics, self awareness and responsibility, teamwork, all things that employers say are lacking more and more in non or low level educated employees. This is why they are willing to hire someone at higher pay with a resident bachelor's in an alternate field, but with experience and ability in the field at hand over someone with just experience and ability. They do not trust that the no degree person has the depth of maturity and reason that a degreed person does.
There are no real shortcuts. When you consider that there are over 300 million people in the country and that you can only count non-degree super success stories on your fingers, that should be a clue.
Employers also look for graduates of highly selective schools because of their fundamental nature of being "highly selective". That means that on average they are enrolling and graduating top shelf students. It is no accident that highly selective schools have the highest retention and graduation rates.

I refer to an oft quoted axiom, "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch". Folks like Simon are looking for the free lunch. He also self denies the effort and commitment required of him to complete the navy nuclear power program, reactor operator qualification and also getting his submarine pin. If he had not played the game he so professes to abhor now, he would not have had anything to base his future (albiet relatively limited) professional life on.

[GIThruster]

The early days of Higher Education in america was focused on producing priests. Education was teaching a liberal arts program in culture and history as well as language. Depending on the school, it was flavored with the religious doctrine of the founding and funding organization (normally a community).
Bonus points to who can name the first secular school off the top of their heads.

Pretty sure you're talking about Harvard but they didn't train priests, as I believe it was in the reformed tradition and Presbyterians don't have priests; they have elders. IIRC, when Harvard went liberal the faithful pulled out and started Yale, and when it went liberal the faithful pulled out and started Princeton. When it went liberal the faithful pulled out and started Westminster, and it has not yet gone liberal but the signs are all there and it won't be too many more decades. All four of these schools however, began as seminaries.

Education is worth what you put into it. Deprecating it is silly, as it's impossible to learn some things without a good teacher and impossible to learn many more things as well, without a good teacher. OTOH, modern sensibilities have eschewed a liberal education for the last 2 decades now. People are satisfied with trade certifications and technical degrees where the students emerge from academics knowing nothing of world history, the arts, civilization, social science, etc. This is a very bad sign. I regularly run into way smart guys who are at the top of their fields, and who can't manage even very simple communications because their lives are so screwy, not just because they have ego issues but because there is no balance in their lives. MIT, Cal Tech, Oxford and Cambridge are all turning out people who can't communicate and work with others, so they work by and for themselves.

Some years ago, in an interview with George Lucas, Wired magazine records him pondering what staffing the then new digs at the Precidio was like. Lucas Arts had just put down cash for something like a 100 year lease and built what was then the world's largest computer network. Lucas was talking about hiring people and when asked, he responded basically "Oh no. We don't hire the best and the brightest. We're happy to get that when we can, but it's much more important that people realize they are part of a team effort, and have the emotional maturity to work with others. People who can't do that don't work for us long." And I think this is a common and growing problem. It's the result of the lack of balance that comes from brilliant kids skipping team sports as children to do math, and from technical degrees and programs where folks never take the 12 semester hours of Western Civ they should to get an academic degree. This is some of what makes progressivism popular for you surely don't get progs when kids study their history. I suspect the problem will continue to grow as time goes on.

[Tom Ligon]

One of Jefferson's complaints about the College of William and Mary was that they seemed intent on turning him into a priest. Jefferson was too independent-minded about religion to become an minister of the Church of England, and wound up as a closet Unitarian.

When he set up the University of Virginia, Jefferson intended the school to have no set degree programs. It was to be a very open system in which men (not women) came to study whatever they darned well pleased, until they got what they wanted. That was Jefferson's personal approach, and pretty much what the American Philosophical Society did.

[MSimon]

Employers value education, especially live education because it teachs more than the core technical points of a topic. It teaches problem solving based on reason, it teaches human interactions and dynamics, self awareness and responsibility, teamwork, all things that employers say are lacking more and more in non or low level educated employees.

Funny enough, the aerospace company I worked for valued me for all those things. And most of the important stuff can't be taught in schools. You don't learn team creation from books or school. You learn it from creating teams.

Fortunately for me my education was not low level. I just didn't get it in school.

I remember my bosses at the aerospace company coming to me and apologizing to the effect, "I'm sorry we don't have anything really leading edge high tech for you to do next but could you help us with..." I said yes and became the go to guy for projects in trouble in the test eqpt dept.

[ladajo]

And how long did you last at "the aerospace company" as a full time employee?