Education

In an article about various governments and companies reducing the emphasis or requirement to have a college degree to get a job, an interesting discussion occurred. You can probably guess how the conversation went, with some people saying that a college degree is pointless and others that it makes you a better person. They're probably both right to some extent and yet also both wrong.

The key that I always try to point out is that you need both education and experience to find that perfect career job. Just a degree, depending on what it is in, may not be enough to to teach skills to do certain jobs. But just job experience without the education likewise leaves a person lacking. there are definitely places where the knowledge and skills learned in the process of a degree are absolutely necessary to being able to do the job.

I learned a ton in the year I worked in between my bachelor's and master's degrees. I came back to graduate classes with people who I had been in my undergrad with and felt like I had a leg up on them as they had still been in school, while I had gone out and programmed a router myself or customized production software or QA tested developers' code. Others were memorizing the definition differences between a switch and a router or reading about the different kinds of testing, but I had done those things.

Back to the comments, as one person claimed more or less that they were upset that employers might move the goal posts now, after they had taken all this time and money to get educated if it was no longer going to be required. It almost came across like people owed them something. This came across in what was by far my favorite comment.

You get to decide what you place value on in life. You don't get to decide how others will value your efforts.

This is so true. All we can do is decide what is important to us and do that thing. If we meet others who don't think what we did was important, then that is probably a good sign that it wouldn't have been a good working relationship anyway. That said, I still believe even if a college degree is moved off of the absolutely gotta have it filter list, it is still a good thing and can still be a differentiating factor. Qualified candidates may no longer be completely removed from consideration for some jobs, but educational attainment can still be what tips the scales in favor of one candidate or the other.

A good example of this is in the Business Communication class I teach, as we do research into starting businesses in various countries around the world. I was talking with a group looking to sell ice cream in Argentina. I mentioned how their ice cream is a little different than it is in some other places, due to something that happened back in the 1940s. It takes them awhile to eventually connect the dots back to hundreds of thousands of Italians who moved to Argentina after World War II. Understanding history and its influence on current cultural landscapes is vital, even if one has to go back 80 years to make those connections.