College Degree Required. But Why?

Perhaps student debt feels good for employers because desperate graduates will accept any kind of treatment?

Please correct me if I'm beside the mark.

Q: "But Why?" A: "Because they can."

As long as I can get someone with a degree for the same price as someone without it - Why on earth would I choose the one that might be as good as the one with the degree?

There are many qualities an educated person has. Not limited to responsibility, commitment, knowledge and discipline. These are key to even graduating.

I'm not saying these qualities are impossible to find in someone without a degree. I'm saying they are guaranteed in a educated person. So again: Why on earth would I choose the one that might be as good as the one with the degree?

A whole bunch of the comments mention that employers who are insisting on college degrees as a hiring criterion are basically attempting to use the degree requirement as a proxy for a requirement that would be more plainly illegal under current United States law. That's regrettable on two levels: degree requirements are demonstrably, by replicated research, poor criteria for hiring for almost any kind of job, and if the company is trying to find a work-around to practice illegal discrimination, the company should be just as liable for the degree requirement as for other illegal requirements. There is a research base on what hiring procedures work best (short answer: work-sample tests and general mental ability, a.k.a. IQ, tests) for finding good workers for most kinds of jobs. No hiring procedure is perfect, as all hiring procedures produce false positives (applicants who are hired even though they end up being lousy workers) and false negatives (applicants who don't get hired, even though they end up being great workers for some other employer). But if you want to be scientific about hiring and improve your odds of getting a good worker, you had better build work-sample tests into your hiring procedures.

In the United States, IQ-type tests were held by the Supreme Court to be illegal (UNLESS specifically validated for the job in question) under the federal equal employment opportunity statute in a case that found that IQ tests have a disparate impact on applicants from some "race" groups. The facts on the ground are changing (the "race" gap in IQ scores is not nearly as large as it used to be, and appears still to be closing) and that rationale, properly thought through, would apply equally well to show that other hiring criteria might be just as illegal. Possessing a college degree is a much stronger signal of family wealth than of job-applicant intelligence, really,

http://www.jkcf.org/news-knowledge/media-coverage/no-child-l...

but many companies these days insist on college degrees from applicants for jobs for which a college degree is no preparation at all. That just tends to turn many lower-tier colleges into expensive diploma mills.

See

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227923

for the most recent posting of my full-length FAQ on company hiring procedures, written specially for HN discussions.

College Degrees are required for many jobs they shouldn't be required for because if employers...

1. Perform criminal background checks. 2. Perform their own aptitude tests.

They could be liable for disparate impact racial discrimination suits.

The article looses a lot by being so vague about which jobs could easily have been held by high school grads that instead requires college degrees.

One reason I could think of is that as college education become more readily available for still more people, deciding not to go (gut feeling, isn't it really more often a decision not to go, rather than to go?) is a progressively more meaningful filter.

I'm sure a similar shift happened as high school became ubiquitous - then high school became a requirement for some jobs that were previously held by those with no high school.

This is generally a good thing, it's an artifact of society as a whole becoming better educated. The main problem with college is that it hasn't really caught up to it's new status as "general" education, rather than "elite" education. That said (I'm not american so not intimately familiar with the system), isn't it entirely possible to get a decent education (although with little "elite" signalling value, it would "tick the box" for college degree on the types of jobs the article refers to) from a state or community college and not have a lifetime of debt to deal with afterward?

Given two equally capable candidates, the one with the degree is better. That's the idea. It's not true of course. Being over qualified can be just as bad as being under qualified. Labor is the most expensive part of a business. A qualification mismatch will result in a high turn over rate. Depending on your business, that could be costly. That's why you can be, e.g. too smart to be a police officer. You'll get bored and leave.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=95836

If we were talking about footballers, a candidate with a college degree is likely to be seen as having a higher ceiling.

Companies often prefer candidates with college degrees because their career ceiling is likely to be higher - e.g. a receptionist with a college degree is more likely suited for advancement to management or sales than one without. Partially this is educational - he is closer to an MBA - partially it is socio-economic - he may have a more similar background to existing management and customers.

In addition as a practical matter, adding a college degree requirement allows the hiring manager to disqualify potential candidates faster and uses an objective standard to do so. The perceived value of making one's job easier should never be discounted.

Intelligence is a good indicator of potential job performance when screening candidates, a degree is positively correlated to intelligence and it is illegal in some countries/states to test for intelligence, so it can be used to sort out applicants on that basis.

I former client of mine said that employees with and without college degrees would perform equally at his company, but the big difference was the ability to adapt to changes (e.g. changes in technology or changes in assigned responsibility). Once there was a big enough shift in the assigned activities for some reason, the people with college degrees was able to quickly adapt, while the others were lagging behind.

From my point of view, that makes sense. Isn't the primary goal of a college education to learn the ability to learn?

I've always been surprised how little disruption there has been in the field of corporate hiring.

As other people have mentioned, many employers use a college degree as a rough proxy for intelligence and/or work ethic, but how good is it really? Can't we do better?

"Moneyball" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moneyball) is a great book about the statistical revolution that took place in major league baseball, and shows us how advanced analytics enabled one team to go beyond rough proxies and subjective judgments to successfully sign players who were highly productive but undervalued by other teams.

Assuming sports is just a simplified version of real life, why hasn't a similar data-driven revolution happened yet in business hiring? Or does the status quo work "well enough"?

While we're at it, I guess we could also pose the question of how favorably (or not) YC's own application process compares to that of most colleges and corporations.

Some people claim college is the new HS, a new baseline that everybody is reaching. Why shouldn't hiring managers work with that baseline?

I deeply regret having a degree, it only set back my life by 5 years and made me have crazy debts that mean almost half of my income ( I am avoiding taxes to not die of hunger or default debts, taxes are usually around 35% of income here... )

why not?

I'm going to chalk this up to future shock and humanity's increasing inability to handle the now rapid rate of change. The economic role of college (before that, an aristocratic pursuit) is something society invented to tolerate the industrial rate of change, that fails at the current technological rate of change.

Pre-industrial economies: you did what your same-sex parent did. A man whose father was a carpenter became a carpenter. A woman whose mother worked the fields would also work in the fields. The needs of the economy didn't change very fast. Your childhood was spent planning to move into the role.

Industrial economy: society changes too fast for people to plan, in advance, for a specific job. That job may not exist. Jobs that don't exist now will be needed in 40 years. General education is required.

Technological economy: even faster rate of change. This is the DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) economy in which every contribution should, ideally, be different. We still don't know what kind of educational process this type of economy mandates. It's all too new for us.

General education grew up in the industrial economy, and its purpose was to vouch that a person had sufficient intelligence to deserve specific mentoring that could be done as-needed at a later time. You got the college degree to prove that if you were put into management training for 2-3 years, you would learn enough to oversee a group of people doing industrial labor-- you didn't need to be an expert in that type of labor, which may not have existed when you got the degree. The college degree is insurance against economic change. You don't need to know in advance what industries will be in high demand in 30 years (that's impossible). You have proof on paper that you are adaptable enough that employers should invest in you.

The purpose of the college degree was to grant mobility by encouraging firms to invest. You can point to the fact that you successfully completed a 4-year, intellectually rigorous training process oriented toward general knowledge. The employer sees this and realizes it won't be a loss to put you in the 2-year rotational program it uses to bring up executives.

Lifelong employment at large corporations almost never exists in this technological economy, which leaves these concepts being a bit out-of-date. The industrial-era purpose of the degree was to convince employers to invest in you, and to learn general-purpose skills (management) that were unlikely to become obsolete due to industrial or mechanical changes.

In the technological era, most firms just don't invest in their employees at all on the assumption that, if they do so, people will take that capital and leave. In the industrial era, they "groomed" future leaders from within. In the technological era, they call executive headhunters. You might find a mentor by individually networking and building relationships, but the employer isn't going to make this happen and, if you're not someone's protege after 2 years, it makes the most sense to move on. The idea of corporate "loyalty" is gone on both sides and hopelessly anachronistic, and it won't come back any time soon.

The result of this is that (a) the economic return of the college degree has diminished to the point that it's becoming a terrible trade, but (b) people (college graduates or not) are ill-equipped to compete on the new, more fluid economy, and this lack of knowledge or capacity is causing people to cling to old, industrial-era patterns (such as the college degree immediately after high school) out of fear. The result is a system that's the worst of both worlds. Employers don't trust college degrees enough for them to serve their original purpose, so the positive validation of the degree is gone. What's now in play is that not having a college degree is a negative validation. People who didn't complete one are assumed, reflexively, to be lacking.