In today’s “labor market”, a college diploma doesn’t mean much. Everybody has one. Employers are looking for people who are willing to work. IMHO.
Don't fall into the trap of blaming America's 53% unemployment rate among youth on the victims of the failed policies of this government.
I wonder how many of the unemployed and underemployed grads have degrees in science, engineering, technology or math.
I always thought if I lost my job I’d go back to college for nursing.
Screw that. If I go back to college, I will try to study something engineering-related.
When my generation graduated from college with a B.A. or a B.S., almost all of us ended up working in so-called bad jobs. It was expected! You built up your skills on those jobs. These kids want to enter as CEO and it ain’t happening.
1 in 2 college graduates shouldn’t have wasted their time in college... let the great and painful correction begin.
Tell that to the newly minted petroleum engineering graduates who are pulling down $100k per year.
Not if your degree is in EE/CS, which most Americans don’t pursue....
>In today’s “labor market”, a college diploma doesn’t mean much. Everybody has one.
No kidding. I’ve been looking for programming jobs (I have a Bachelor’s in Computer Science) and during a couple of interviews I’ve been asked questions like “what is the general structure of an if-statement.” IMO, this is pretty insulting to anyone who has put in the work to get a 4-year degree in the field.
I’m told that’s because there are applying people who don’t know — which is surprising in itself with the posted requirements of the job.
If I were “in charge” of the hiring of the candidate, I’d make sure there was a “training reimbursement clause” (and another guaranteeing the legitimacy of the diploma). Then, in the case of fraud/misrepresentation such that an employee who didn’t know such a thing (as the if-statement) the company would fire and sue the candidate (fraud) and sue the issuing-school as well (further fraud).
Yes, more work for lawyers; but in the end degrees would QUICKLY come to have some value. (Consider how schools would react to being sued for incompetence on part of their graduates.)
>Employers are looking for people who are willing to work. IMHO.
This is true; but there seems to be a sort of lemming effect in my field. The sort of thing that allows PHP to be used in commercial projects*** because a) everyone else does it, and b) it’s “quicker”* and “easier”**.
So, I’m not sure it boils down to just being willing to work. (Unless that willingness to work includes the sacrifice of a commitment to providing an excellent product.)
* It’s ‘quicker’ because it allows a coder to go in and start making immediately visible changes.
** It’s ‘easier’ because cause it does a lot of “magic” type-casting and the like; a bad thing, I think, because it discourages thinking about the actual problem at hand.
*** This leads to why it’s a bad idea in a commercial product: there are a lot of hidden ‘gotchas’ which turn the production from problem-solving to correcting for the language. For example, let’s say you want to do something with the cent portion of a payment; the string ‘08’ is converted into the number 0; because the magic-typecast errors out (it thinks that an integer starting w/ zero is in octal; meaning digits of 0..7) and returns a 0 (indicating an error). The whole language is like that.