In the 80s college degrees meant a lot. Now everyone wants to dismiss your degree and they attempt to tell you how it doesn’t mean much. Everyone has a story about some dumbass at their company who has a Masters degree who can’t do the job they can while they only have a high school diploma or GED.
Frequently, you can’t get through the job hiring process without doing some assessment test.
For example:
Your co-worker Martin notices his paycheck is short so he steals some product to compensate for the shortage. He thinks his actions are justified.
Do you:
- Strongly Disagree
- Disagree
- Have no opinion
- Agree
- Strongly Agree
Those tests are worth more than four years of college? Try to refuse to do one and see if you can get the job. Write an email to HR and point out the degree on your resume and see how far you get. Employers are assigning more value to assessment tests than college degrees.
I believe the degradation of the college degree is a conspiracy that corporations have used to pay lower wages. And just like with taxes and politics they get the average worker to repeat their talking points so that now if you try to tell someone you have a degree you are immediately hit with all those “I know a guy with a Masters who is a dumbass…” anecdotes.
EDIT: Here’s another example:
Go get a bunch of I.T. certifications. Get your CompTIA A+, Network+, Security+ Get a Microsoft MCP or MCSA
And employers will still ask you to do an assessment test. Why?
Microsoft, Cisco, CompTIA, Apple etc. spend millions for dollars to build a curriculum for exams. How exactly is some BS online assessment test that HR bought from some vendor better?
And someone will say, “yeah, but some people are really good at memorization and taking tests so your certs don’t really prove…blah blah blah”
My response to that is well at least those are proctored. You have to show your ID as well. With HR’s nonsensical assessment tests you can have any of your friends complete them for you while sitting in your living room.
This is all by design. If you can invalidate the college degree and the I.T. certifications (or other industry certs) you can level the playing field and pay those with degrees/certs the same entry level wage as those without.
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Im not sure it really has to be a whole conspiracy; companies won’t pay someone a lot just because people think that that person ought to be paid a lot, they’ll pay someone as little as they can while still getting the people they need to fill the role. Having more people with a given degree can even drive the wage down for that position by itself if the number is above the number of available jobs in that field, so having people value those degrees less and become less likely to get them would ultimately serve to make them rarer and therefore drive required wages up. I think a simpler explanation for people being dismissive of college degrees is a combination of them being more common, and that those without one have a desire to not feel like someone that does have one is smarter than them in some way, and an easy way to avoid such feelings is to convince oneself that the degree is meaningless.
an easy way to avoid such feelings is to convince oneself that the degree is meaningless.
Yeah, I agree with you on that.
If you believe you are undervalued then you should do some of the following
- Search for an employer that pays you what you believe you are worth.
- Work to your payscale. If you have a master’s but are only getting paid the wage of a ged, only do the work of a ged.
- Request a raise inline with your expectations. With supporting evidence of why.
Back then not everyone have a college degree so those that do enjoy some competitive advantage. Now that almost everyone has a college degree, those competitive advantage disappear and the playing field has leveled.
“could”?
Lol
At least, from what I’ve read, a college degree is still valuable.
It’s not a “conspiracy” but rather it’s capitalism. Yes the employers have almost all the power. Without unions or laws to try to level out the power imbalance, the only solution is to keep getting new skills that will eventually make you valuable (as simply a college degree doesn’t cut it anymore). And yes it’s a race to the bottom.
Those tests are worth more than four years of college?
Yes a test to figure out if you can perform your job is significantly more valuable than a collage degree, this doesn’t mean that college has no value, mind you, it just means that knowing how to do the job and knowing that you fit in with the company culture is vastly more important.
Go get a bunch of I.T. certifications. Get your CompTIA A+, Network+, Security+ Get a Microsoft MCP or MCSA
Those certifications are useless, they look good on your resume because managers love showcasing their staff’s “certifications”, as many companies that don’t understand IT put value on the certifications more than anything else, but they don’t actually provide you any value in of themselves. Sure it might be interesting how many network switches you can daisy chain according to the standards, but it has no real value most of the time, if that’s information you need in your job it’s something you can just look up, HOWEVER, asking you random questions that pertain to the job during the interview IS a good way to understand if you’re a good candidate, and, often, the actual response doesn’t matter as much as your reasoning for getting to that response.
When an interviewer at google asks you how many pennys it would take to make a structure as tall as the empire state building, it doesn’t matter what the answer is, truly, even if you got the exact number of pennys, just saying the number would mean you don’t pass the interview, your answer would be worth less than an answer that gets it wrong by 75% but is well reasoned, what they care about is how you come up to the conclusion that you come up with, the solution is useless.
