How Often Is a Degree a Negative
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I can't really complain. I went to the local state university. It wasn't great, it won't get me a job in Dallas or LA, but I'm ok with that. I graduated with less than $15k in debt, Got a decent job, and I am able to pay for a house, a car or two, and a family. I wouldn't have been able to get where I am with out it. I could have gone to a much better school, and moved around the country, but it just wasn't in the cards for me at the time. It may be in the future, but I will have enough built up experience by then so I'm not as worried about it.
My only regret was spending three semesters at the for profit DeVry. It was easily 60% of my education cost, and I didn't get my moneys worth at all.
For me, Small town, small school, big fish in a tiny pond is where I want to be for now. I can live vicariously through Scott Miller's travels.
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How Often Is a Degree a Negative? Never.
The real question is: "Is it a positive?"
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I was talking about this topic to a friend who's a manager of a dev team at West Corporation. HR won't allow him to hire anyone without a degree. While I do believe that his team itself is a good place to work, it's definitely sounding like the company as a whole isn't.
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@Aaron-Studer said:
How Often Is a Degree a Negative? Never.
The real question is: "Is it a positive?"
Why never? The article and a lot of our experiences are that it can quite often be a dramatic negative.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Aaron-Studer said:
How Often Is a Degree a Negative? Never.
The real question is: "Is it a positive?"
Why never? The article and a lot of our experiences are that it can quite often be a dramatic negative.
Well never because you can choose to leave it off your resume as you have.
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@Dashrender said:
Well never because you can choose to leave it off your resume as you have.
True. Then it just becomes "do we ignore the cost in time and money and ignore the resume gaps that it creates and other negatives of learning bad habits, etc."
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If we don't consider something that we leave off of a resume as a negative, does that they mean that nothing can be a negative since we can just never mention it?
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Why did you choose to get a degree?
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And so that when I explained why college was bad and not working that people wouldn't use the lame excuse that I couldn't know because I didn't attend. I know, as a hiring manager, that anyone who thinks college means they are smart are way, way below the minimum standard that I would want to hire. College itself was worthless, but knowing for certain that it is worthless is valuable.
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I don't have a degree, and it hasn't hindered my IT career at all. In fact, I believe I would be worse off if I did have a degree. However, that isn't true for everyone. The "colleges" mentioned in the article that was posted are a complete joke. The smallest about of research would show that. It's difficult to compare Everest College with a state college. Degrees from bigger state colleges are seen as valuable most of the time.
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Depends on the "bigger state college" and where you are. UT is a big deal in Texas but a joke everywhere else.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Depends on the "bigger state college" and where you are. UT is a big deal in Texas but a joke everywhere else.
Yeah, I could see that. I suppose it doesn't matter as much once you get at least 5 years experience.
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But they are useful as a hiring manager as I don't speculate about college, I actually went, and I know when someone brags about having a degree that their bar for success is so low that they are immediately disqualified.
This seems really limiting. There's so many variables here that making a blanket statement like this is shooting yourself in the foot. What about the kids who are forced to go to college by their parents? Want about dumbshits that learned better after they got older? What about people who may actually agree with your (in whole or part) and include it on their resume because that's just how it's done?
But to get back on topic, I never went to a U, and just went to a vocational school (now defunct). Does it help me now? No. Did it help me get my first job in IT? Yes. I also wasn't 10's of thousands of dollars in debt so I'd say the program worked.
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@Martin9700 said:
This seems really limiting. There's so many variables here that making a blanket statement like this is shooting yourself in the foot. What about the kids who are forced to go to college by their parents? Want about dumbshits that learned better after they got older? What about people who may actually agree with your (in whole or part) and include it on their resume because that's just how it's done?
None of those people need brag about it. Lots of people go to college. Present it as what it is, but pretending it is hard or means you are special just means you are not. Nothing about a parent forcing a kid to go to college (which, by the way, can't really happen in the US, but I understand the point) means that the kids has to pretend that it was hard when in an interview.
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Someone in an interview can easily say "I chose to go to college because it made my parents happy. I learned some things while there, it wasn't all bad." and do great in an interview.
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@Martin9700 said:
Did it help me get my first job in IT? Yes. I also wasn't 10's of thousands of dollars in debt so I'd say the program worked.
Personally I would defined "worked" only if it was able to get you into your first job sooner than an alternative approach. What if you had been teaching yourself and job hunting during the time you were in college.... could you have gotten a job sooner that way? People who go to college them get a job always say that the job helped them to get that first job, and sometimes surely that is true. But they rarely consider the cost of lost opportunity and wonder if they had not gone to college if that would have helped them to get a different first job sooner.
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For example, I worked in hotel management, long ago. Lots of people I knew went to college for hospitality management. When they graduate, universally they would all get jobs in hotels and say "my degree helped me to land this job." But lots of us who didn't go to college also got those jobs, two years earlier than those people and had us in the positions of being the hiring managers hiring them into the positions we had done two years earlier.
To them, college "got them the job." To us, college held them back two years and cost them a fortune.
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@scottalanmiller said:
To them, college "got them the job." To us, college held them back two years and cost them a fortune.
And in most cases the reality is probably somewhere in between.
I didn't do a degree in computers and yet my degree still got me jobs early in my career (you'd probably argue I'm mistaken on that, but hay ho). I think a lot depends on which University you went to. In the UK, rightly or wrongly, going to Oxford or Cambridge opens a lot of doors, followed by other Russell Group Universities, one of which I went to. I imagine it's similar in the US with Ivy League graduates.
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I've Have an AAS degree that along with my knowledge (I usually end up talking for 2-3 hours with people at interviews) Can get me in the door. I probably wouldn't without out it. I still have about $7,200 in debt from it for both tuition & books. I didn't get any tuition assistance for college as the college counted per parent income when I had went rather than household income and my mom made more than most individual people but, being a single parent made much much less than the average family income (And they don't let you not count your parents income until your 26 even if you live on your own).
I have had not having a degree be a negative once. I got told the hiring manager would hire me for a job however the pay would be much less and he would only let me plug in keyboards and mice because he was looking for "higher level employees" for his help desk techs. and wanted me to get a bachelors within 2 years of higher and a Masters within 4 (no tuition assistance). I told them no thanks.
