With a collage degree, you might even be able to get a job at Apple.
Posted on 09/09/2014 8:51:56 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
You’ve heard of grade inflation? Welcome to the world of degree inflation.
A new report finds that employers are increasingly requiring a bachelor’s degree for positions that didn’t used to require baccalaureate education. A college degree, in other words, is becoming the new high school diploma: the minimum credential required to get even the most basic, entry-level job.
The report is from Burning Glass, a labor market analytics company that mines millions of online job postings. The company found that a wide range of jobs — in management, administration, sales and other fields — are undergoing “upcredentialing,” or degree inflation. As examples, just 25 percent of people employed as insurance clerks have a BA, but twice that percentage of insurance-clerk job ads require one. Among executive secretaries and executive assistants, 19 percent of job-holders have degrees, but 65 percent of job postings mandate them.
What’s going on?
The most benevolent explanation is that technology has changed the nature and responsibilities of many jobs....
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Many of the B.S. degrees are also gifts to the pupils who in mass refuse to prepare and hence benefit from mass grade inflation.
Especially for “-studies” majors, where you get an “A” if you can put a condom on a cucumber.
After all, why should they be penalized just because they're a black HS grad who reads at the second grade level and some privileged white HS grad reads at the seventh grade level? You should just dumb down the stuff they have to read so they can handle it.
Now, if you require a college degree, odds are everyone applies will at least read at the ninth grade level.
My last “real” job as a staffer at a temp agency within a client’s factory, they were going to pay me about $12/hr. but once they noticed the degree I was raised up to $30/hr. I’m not kidding.
They had to dumb down all academics so a certain segment of society wouldn’t look so very sub standard.
A collage degree acts as an additional filter to weed out unwanted applicants. It helps the company avoid being accused of some type of discrimination. The powerful education lobby is all for it as it means a constant flow of money.
Unfortunately, today a collage degree is no guarantee of good grammar.
It used to be that a HS graduate could read, write effectively and think at least somewhat critically. That has become increasingly rare, thus the requirement for a bachelor’s degree. Even then the employer better test that applicant thoroughly for the skills and abilities required on the job.
Having done some hiring that required employees’ having analytical and communication skills, I relied more on determining the applicant’s intellectual capabilities than how many years spent in the classroom.
I absolutely agree.
My old `70s HS education has proven to be far superior to most college's current four year degree.
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Suddenly this is news? I think most intelligent people figured this out quite some time ago.
Article: In plenty of jobs — such as I.T. help-desk positions — there is little to no difference in skill requirements between job ads requiring a degree and those that do not.....
Reply: I do Help Desk Work. I have no college degree. I saved $50,000 or more not going to college.
Article: If you couldn’t be bothered to get a degree in this day and age, you must be lazy, unreliable or dumb.
Reply: I am smart not to go into massive debt.
Unless you are going to be an engineer or doctor or shudder a lawyer just what does college do for you? Is it the partying? The easy college girls? Spring Break?
Most jobs require you to show up and learn from the old timer who was hired a few months earlier then you.
With a collage degree, you might even be able to get a job at Apple.
For some I have met it it seems to be more like a fifth grade education.
They can’t do simple calculations without a calculator, they are barely literate, they cannot speak intelligibly, they have no idea of American history and they couldn’t find most continents or countries on a map with the names printed on it.
Being that most colleges today are nothing more than leftist indoctrination centers that teach absolute squat and the fact that just about every problem we face in this coutry is the direct cause of an Ivy league graduate, maybe its time companies start focusing on a persons actual talent and knowledge other than relying on a piece of paper.
Go over to the airport, and note who runs the various car rental agencies. In the 1980s...it was a 50-year old guy, high school grad. Today? It’s a mid-twenties individual, with a college degree. We actually turned chief of each agency into a significant position, but basically the same pay schedule, yet this was all done by high school grad’s in previous years.
That plus a semester of calligraphy at Reed.
Or having anything more than a 2nd grade education. Look at Sheila Jackson Lee. Graduate of the University of Virginia and Yale and she thinks the constitution is 400 years old and we sent a man to Mars. Mars I can excuse as OK maybe she isn’t into science, but the constitution? The woman has a LAW degree from Yale!
lol
There is much more to this story that is not being told. Looking at just the IT development arena:
The technology boom of the 1980s and 1990s, and the averted Y2K disaster, created jobs faster than academia could create qualified applicants, especially in Business, Information Systems, Computer Science, and related technologies. These jobs required, and really needed, those BS degrees for them to be performed at profession levels.
Far too many job-seekers took advantage of the hiring boom by getting a couple of semesters of coding classes, and never continued their education. Companies with IT departments got stacked with coders who could code, code, code, but could never wrap their little heads around the business needs for the coding, and who could never grasp the need for the other phases of the project process.
Once employed, these people could have continued their education toward being fully qualified, but far too many chose not to. Yet they stayed on the job, and advanced solely on coding skills that should have been recognized as only one tenth of the necessary qualifications.
These badly hacked-together software systems are costly to maintain and upgrade. When they need to be replaced, the people needed for the work need to understand both the business behind the software system, and they need to understand the project process. The very experienced coders just want to code. Like the jack-leg carpenter whose only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. They just want to hammer out code, and they are angry that their ignorance of the other 90% part of their job has caught up with them.
To aggravate the problem, over the years many of these coders have moved into IT management, still without any of the requisite knowledge for either the development positions, and definitely not sufficient for the management positions. They can't hire the qualified Americans with STEM degrees (half of whom are underemployed, working outside their fields) because their own glaring defects might get exposed. They can, however, hire qualified Indian H1Bs, who are very happy to fill the positions for a while, and will not make any noise.
Here is one solution.
First, recognize the problem. If we are outsourcing the development of a major system because we don't have the "talent" to do the job, it isn't just the "talent" that is at fault. Managers kept promoting their "talent" who possessed 10% of the needed skills for their jobs. The "talent" had the income needed to continue working toward their BS degrees, but they had absolutely no incentive to do so.
Second, recognize the solution. Encourage existing job-holders and managers to finish their educations. Incentivize the return to school with tuition reimbursement programs. A company can use a tuition reimbursement program to guide the educational choices of the reimbursed employee through a field of study that is beneficial to both the company and the employees.
Third, let attrition serve its purpose. Those who are too close to retirement to consider returning to school can wind down their careers maintaining the systems that are being replaced.
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