> For the most part, the only jobs that hire for English and other liberal-arts degrees are universities and schools
This is such nonsense. Most jobs don't care what degree you have as long as you have a degree, and with an English degree you can apply for 90% of jobs. You could graduate and go on to be anything from an advertising executive, to a soldier. Most jobs don't care - it's technology that's unusual.
That's largely true for an undergrad degree. For a graduate degree, and a PhD in particular, there aren't a lot of alternative employment options. I've been told that having a PhD in those fields makes you less employable for positions in general (because why are you applying for this job, and it is uncomfortable to hire an older person with a PhD for an entry-level position).
An unqualified 30 year old going for a grad position will face the same age bias regardless of whether there was a phd in their past or just 6 years of working in ski chalets.
I don't think it's nonsense - I don't entirely agree, but I would agree with a milder version of the statement. I do know an English majors who is a director at at a top tech company, so I would agree that many companies will hire English majors.
However, that's different than saying you can get hired as an English major vs saying these companies hire for English majors.
Engineering and CS are majors that companies specifically target, in large numbers for hiring. "Related" majors like Math, Physics, other sciences, may also get recruited in the same batch.
Although English is sometimes specified as a specifically targeted major for a job, this is considerably less common.
If having that English degree makes the job more attainable than not having a degree, then in a way they do hire for English majors (even if not specifically, but by way of the class-instance relationship).
Lots of companies outside the tech industry still have to recruit CS and other tech majors. The demand for specifically English majors outside tech doesn't come close to balancing things out.
Industries where writing and reading comprehension arein demand, such as advertising, journalism, marketing, film, diplomacy, public relations, publishing, technical writing, law, and many more ...
For those fields, wouldn't one be significantly better of with a degree in advertising, journalism, marketing, film/media, policy (local/foreign), print/media, engineering, law?
That kind of education doesn't teach you to reason, to understand the world, and to think critically (except about a narrow subject). I'd much rather hire a liberal arts major - the vocational stuff can be learned later.
You can be a soldier without ant college education (and qualify for a direct path to Officer Candidate School with a two-year degree or equivalent credits, IIRC), so giving “soldier” as on option with 4-year English degree is literally suggesting that it is worth the same as no college education at all.
Meh, if you're passionate about technology as a kid and end up building lots of useful things I don't see why you can't get internships which will inevitably lead you to higher paying jobs.
My company offered an internship to someone who was 17. At Digital Ocean one of the interns was 16.
Tech moves quick and the less outside responsibilities you have the more time you can commit to building and learning.
I started full time in 2008 when the recession was bad. I don't know if 2008 was a long time ago or not.
Turns out when companies are making money, they want to hire engineers to build new stuff. When they are losing money, they want to hire engineers to automate.
There were certainly some lucky breaks involved. I like to think of it as I'm lucky the doors opened, it wasn't luck that had me searching for open doors and walking through them when I found them.
I think it's still largely true. In some sense it can be harder, especially if you don't plan to go through some form of web dev path or mobile development path, but on the other hand there are more opportunities now to quickly build up your knowledge and experience and showcase it. Open source projects don't care, and the coding bootcamp craze can be a substitute to a full degree while still offering pretty good odds at job placement. There are several contracting agencies out there as well that will help you out, if you're good those can lead to full time. Once you get your foot in the door and work in a tech role for over a year (or bootstrap your own tech startup for a year), or sometimes being an intern is enough), just about every place after that will look past not having a degree.
You should try applying for CSO at Equifax. There is soon going to be an opening available for that role and it looks like you have the necessary qualifications.
You know, that's a problem too. I mean, I take that 90% of jobs aren't specialized positions. Once you need a college degree for a position that only requires general skills, or in which the employee can do just fine on-the-job training and experience, then what are those years in college for exactly?
As far as I know, people could get by with a high school degree in the 1970s: there was no significant wage difference between a high school graduate and a college graduate, and both faced similar rates of unemployment. Nowadays employers take for granted that candidates must have some form of qualification, even for positions that don't seem to require it. Has the quality of education fallen and the grades been inflated to such a point where degrees are no longer reliable signals of productivity?
I would much rather hire someone who didn't finish college but has had five years of progressive responsibility in the right area, than someone who had just finished a four or five year degree course but had never worked.
But does the progressive responsibility ladder exist for a high school graduate? Can they start their career in a job, even at an internship level?
I think you can tease out three possible factors influencing the situation here:
- more people graduating, more supply, means that even entry-level jobs are flooded with college graduates
- entry-level jobs in decline, either due to automation or companies just not interested in providing apprenticeships
- student loans shifting the power dynamics between employer/employee; you're more pressed to get a job, any job, so you're more likely to take up positions where you're overqualified and underpaid
These scenarios all form positive feedback loops to each other; with more high-skilled worker supply in the market, companies can grow their non-entry level jobs while automating the low-level ones; this reduction in entry jobs means that the desperate college students compete more fiercely with high school students, raising the bar for entry level jobs; the raised bar for entry level jobs forces more high school students to go into college rather than start work, which saddles them with student debt, feeding into the cycle.
I've noticed that many social situations tend to end up in such vicious, entangled circles. My dad used to call these the "downward spiral of failure" and the "upward spiral of success", and I really don't know how you transition from one to the other without a monumental effort or some kind of miracle breakthrough.
I didn't say they were. They aren't, that's the issue. A college degree overshoots the level of qualification necessary for a general skills job and comes short of the qualification necessary for a specialized position.
Also, your crosswise comparison between an experienced candidate without a degree and an inexperienced candidate with a degree only tells me that you put more weight into experience than having a degree. It really doesn't tell me much about whether a degree is a good signal, but only that it's worse than experience. Now, if you had told me that you don't consider whether a candidate has a degree at all then I'd be able to infer that they are terrible signals and carry no information at all.
I said what I meant: they're not reliable signals.
You've got a space of time in a person's life between, presumably, graduating high school and sending you a resume. What did they do with that time?
Merely having a degree doesn't say much.
Merely not having a degree doesn't say much.
Having an honors BS in CS from CMU, MIT, Stanford, or a bunch of other schools implies academic competence and exposure to a certain range of ideas. But I don't know that they can be productive outside of that environment.
Having an ordinary BS in a STEM subject from a random college that I've never heard of means even less to me. But is it zero? No.
Holding down a job for those four years is a signal, too, and it needs evaluation. What kind of job? While living at home? Did anything progress during that time? Is it relevant to what we're trying to hire for?
This is true for occupations like sales where the litmus test is professionalism and the ability to stick to goals. However, you will lock yourself out of occupations with degree requirements for credentialing and those with domain knowledge you gain through school like Chemistry.
I live in LA and, surprise surprise, there are a lot of writers, artists, and other folks who want to work in Liberal Arts oriented industries. Most of my Liberal Arts degree equipped friends are in sales while dabbling in their art on the side. A few of them sell a book or script every 3-5 years. The rest of them went back to school for a Law Degree or an unrelated Masters degree.
Why do employers keep putting so much value on something so worthless? There must be cheaper ways to demonstrate to employers you have something equivalent to whatever it is they think they're getting from any old 4 year degree.
Conceivably, a system of tests or certifications could be used as a reliable signal of competence. Just make a candidate go through a battery of exams. The issue is that firms most likely wouldn't have any interest in doing this and any independent organization doing this would be tempted to change into the business of selling certificates, which would make the certificates themselves worthless.
Which isn't to say that the issue is unsolvable. But it still needs solving. I don't think anyone has paid much attention to it.
It hasn't been proven that employers put so much value on a degree. Certainly a lot of people think that employers think that, but I've yet to see a real life hiring manager come out and say "I don't care how much experience you have, without a degree I won't consider you."
A bachelor's degree of any type demonstrates ("signals" in economic terms): communication skills, ability to follow instructions, sufficient persistence to finish a long-term project. Some colleges are way overpriced, but in general I doubt you're going to find a cheap way for prospective employees with no real work experience to demonstrate those qualities.
I think the issue is exactly that - the colleges are low efficiency, either overpriced or not a good match for the position you go to work as.
As a hypothetical, let's say that most jobs require a degree. Let's say that you use 50% of the stuff in your English Major throughout most of your career; you've eaten a 50% inefficiency on your college investment(essentially doubling the "price/skills" of your degree), you've lost time that you could have invested in obtaining those skills. Further, you are pressured into demanding a higher salary because of your college investment, which isn't matched by the skills you've received; so either your employer carries the burden of your inefficient education, or you do.
This is usually decided by the power dynamic between the two, and if you're a broke college student desperate for a job, you don't have much bargaining power, so you're shouldering all the burden. The worst part is, there's no way for you to fix this - there's no 2-year program that is 100% aimed towards your career goal, and there's no entry-level job for you to start at 0%(you're probably already starting at the entry-level even with your 50% degree). So you're stuck making this investment whether you want to or not.
One way to look at university is insurance - you're learning all these extra things as an insurance that you'll have a baseline of skills if you change your career. The issue is, not everyone can afford such an expensive insurance, but most people are forced to take it under our hypothetical.
I think in part, it's because "they" have a degree. There can be quite a bit of condescension from people who have degrees towards those who don't.. "I got a degree to get this job, you should have one too".
> What specific skills will a degreed applicant have that a high school grad won't?
For one thing, the "skill" of (probably) not being from that stratum of society that doesn't get their kids through university. Asking for degrees is a subtle way to perpetrate socio-economic discrimination. (In some cases, it has to be a degree from the right set of schools, not just anywhere.) It's so easy! You don't have to look at race, or what neighborhood someone grew up in. Just this: do they have a degree or not. Saves time and protects from litigation: it's brilliant!
Getting a degree demonstrates some measure of discipline and work, and the delaying of gratification for the sake of a longer term goal that is several years away, while completing various tasks, jumping through hoops and so on. It's like a job. You have to attend to certain things on time, like showing up for exams, and meet deadlines (term papers, etc).
If you have a degree, you probably pulled an "all nighter" or two to submit something on time or prepare for an exam, and that's just the sort of dedication that employers crave.
If you have a pool of applicants for a job, all with no relevant experience, it's an easy filter. You filter out all the people who haven't proven they can do something they agreed to do for 3/4 years.
If that's all it is, there's got to be a way to come up with something that lets someone prove they are willing to do something for 4 years, but only costs maybe $250 a year.
This is mostly a problem of the Anglo-Saxon world. In continental Europe, for the most part, at least AFAIK, publicly owned universities are harder to get in, harder to get a degree from, and valued much more in the job market. The upside is that the education is subsidized by the government to the point of being roughly that expensive.
I.e. one enrolls in a privately-owned, for-profit universities if they have the money, but don't want to work their arse off to get a degree, or don't have good enough grades from the secondary education to qualify for public unis.
While they area bit more expensive than that target, universities that focus on credentialing without doing much of the rest already exist (e.g., Western Governor's University).
Remember that lots of student debt isn't necessarily on tuition fees. I went to university for 4 years with "low" fees (started at €1750, ended at €2750, now €3000), but renting a room in that city will cost you 5-6 hundred euro a month, plus other "normal " living costs like eating, transport (another €120/month). All while you're probably not supposed to be working. My loan was purely to pay for accommodation for my time there.
> What specific skills will a degreed applicant have that a high school grad won't?
Just as requiring a high-school diploma is a filter for the general education requirements that apply to a diploma, requiring a bachelor's degree in any field is a filter for the level of general education that comes with that, not the domain-specific skills of a degree.
And it's an imperfect filter, but its job isn't to be perfect, it's too reduce the absolute quantity of bad applications that need to be reviewed.
Right, but now it's effectively become a positional good -- you get the education to indicate being in the nth percentile by general capability. Subsidizing further education then means that people have to get more education (with no additional human capital enhancement on the market) simply to signal being in the same percentile. And refusing the rigamarole just brands you as "different" with its own barriers to overcome.
I don't think they see it as about specific skills - rather about general skills and maturity. Also I think they value having a lot of people with deeper knowledge of a diverse range of subjects.
> Most jobs don't care - it's technology that's unusual.
TBH I am far more likely to hire an English major with demonstrated technical skills than a technical person with a purely technical education.
Learning the technical skills to live up to the expectations of an entry level software or coding job is just not that hard for a decently smart person. I want to see evidence that you can think more broadly too rather than just checking the boxes.
To be fair, I graduated from a good uni with honors, so not to say this out of spite, but in my experience this evidence you speak of--in non-technical courses--says more about whether the prof liked you and you stuck to affirming or regurgitating their ideas.
Additionally hearsay is one of the worst kinds of evidence, scientifically speaking.
I wish there was more development into standardized testing... People pretend profs are altruistic and stop acting like people when they become profs.
>says more about whether the prof liked you and you stuck to affirming or regurgitating their ideas.
My best classes were the ones where the professors and I came from wildly different places. There are bad profs, but in my experience it is pretty uncommon for professors to actually want to see you regurgitating their ideas. Moreover, most of my grading was done by TA's anyway so it's not even like the prof's take was relevant since the TA's have their own agendas.
More often the fact is that, undergraduates (and many graduate level students) suck at properly arguing their point. It’s not their fault really, they’re just less experienced at building a case, operating under a time and space constraint, and less knowledgable about the topic than the person grading them.
And when you’re being contrarian (going against your professor’s thinking) you’re likely to suck even more than usual because your professor hasn’t spoon fed you an acceptable conclusion, a cogent argument leading up to it, and first principles that they agree with to build an argument from.
>People pretend profs are altruistic and stop acting like people when they become profs.
Who exactly do you think would be designing (and thereby imputing their biases into) these standardized tests?
its not non-sense but it might be underspecified. the only jobs that care that you have, specifically, an English degree are jobs in academia. Corporate jobs will gladly hire an English major just because it's a degree they don't care that it's an English degree though.
From my viewpoint this stopped being the case in the UK around 20 years ago, not coincidentally around the exact same time that the numbers of graduates started rising considerably year on year. It's a simple case of supply and demand. If you went to a top uni, have contacts or are genuinely oustanding then great, you probably have the luxury of being able to walk into a decent job from nearly any degree, but if not you are competing with tens of thousands of other graduates for the remaining decent jobs. So how do you make yourself stand out? I'd suggest that a CV that shows no evidence of interest in the field before graduation is not a terribly good differentiator. Far better to have studied something related or at least have gained some work experience in the area rather than look like every other grad that's graduated and thought oh shit, must find a job, any job..
That is absolutely false. Since I have my computer science/math degree my linkedin inbox has been flooded with messages from recruiters. I can guarantee you that they are not looking for an English major.
This is such nonsense. Most jobs don't care what degree you have as long as you have a degree, and with an English degree you can apply for 90% of jobs. You could graduate and go on to be anything from an advertising executive, to a soldier. Most jobs don't care - it's technology that's unusual.