Is the value of college overemphasized?

Due to the high number and poor quality of college graduates, a college degree today is worth about the same as a high school diploma in 1975. Too much supply and not enough demand.

As a hiring manager in the private business world, I would say yes.

Though I assume there are other valuable areas of concentation, if you did not concentrate in one of the following areas below, at least for an entry level position, your resume will not make it out of HR in my organization.

Engineering

Accounting

Finance

Marketing

Math

Foreign language is also a valuable major.

I’m not sure this is the right question.

When I was graduating from high school the question was this: Are you going straight to work or are you going to college first? And that was a valid question because at that time you could actually get a livable job out of high school.

I believe the reason most kids go to college nowadays is because they believe a college degree is a mandatory step in getting a good-paying job. The thought is that, all other things being equal, the applicant without the college degree won’t be selected for the job.

That said, college is all too often over priced. One practical question is this: In today’s world, since you’re going to be unemployed anyway, why burden yourself with all that debt?

At the same time it’s sometimes reported that employers can’t get enough people with the right skills. So here is another practical question: How can we bring back on-the-job training or apprentice-type education?

First, and most obviously, just making the decision to enter college indicates a higher level of motivation than deciding not to. (Yes, that is an over-generalization. But a frequent one.)

Second, a basic level of literacy (i.e. the ability to write a coherent sentence and to create a document, of any length, that successfully communicates) used to be signaled by a high school diploma. But by 1980 (give or take 5 years), businesses found that was no longer the case in many cases. On the other hand, someone with a college degree would very likely have that basic level. They might have other desirable characteristics, but that was irrelevant for many positions which posted “college degree required”.

Logical thinking, analytic thinking, etc. are all nice to haves. But without the ability to communicate they are not worth much. And while a college degree may not signal whether someone has those abilities, filtering on having one at least gives a smaller pool for the interviewer to look thru for them.

A 4 year university degree is an increasingly common commodity. The ability to speak clearly, dress nice, and give a 20 minutes power-point presentation using the latest business jargon doesn’t impress anyone anymore. Actual technical skills (cf CA-Oxonian) and experience, on the other hand, are vanishingly rare. Rich world workforces who have headed into business and commerce degrees for 20 years, relying on the cream of the crop from China and India to fill the gaps in the technical professional fields. The best grads from China and India are staying home, now. Emerging economy grads from second rank schools who look like they have a professional degree are often not worth the time it takes to explain to them what they are supposed to know and do. The fact of the matter is, you just can’t hire a high quality engineer or technician these days. I see this as a long term problem, as high quality engineers need to go through high quality schools, the capacity and number of which cannot be quickly increased. And those engineers and technicians only really become useful after working 3-5 years under an experienced high quality engineer. Enough bright Americans have not been going into these professions for a generation, heading for Wall Street instead, or into the ranks of management and sales where their skills are not needed but the pay has been higher. Skilled professionals will be a scarce and increasingly expensive commodity for a long time to come, and the problem won’t begin to be fixed until pay scales adjust.

I am a chemical engineer. Any chemical engineer with 3 years of experience who is willing to move can get a high paying job in America today. The recruiters are begging for candidates for their positions. My company has had an opening for a process engineer for over 2 years that we have been unable to fill.

Chemical engineering is just about the hardest undergraduate degree that you can take. The current mentality regarding universities is that what is valuable is where you go, not what you learn. So ambitious young scholars and their parents put an enormous effort into high high school grades, SAT prep, and extracurricular box ticking so that they can apply to Harvard and the like. Once there, the accepted wisdom is that riches will flow to graduates who are well-connected. Actually working hard at university is not associated with future success, so undergraduates generally take a leisurely course schedule and work hard on their social life. After all, if who you know is what matters, you should try to get to know a lot of people (especially the right people). If you take chemical engineering you will have to work hard and you will mostly meet other engineers (fun crowd, not well connected).

A society that values who you know, not what you know, generates few chemical engineers. The corrupting influence of Wall Street, high tuition private schools, the high-priced end of the legal profession and the medical profession, and the perception that these high end jobs only go to those who ‘work the system’, know the right people, attend the right school, all corrupt the process that generates high-skilled graduates. American students don’t take ‘hard’ courses, because they have learned (albeit this is only partially true) that the big money goes to the connected, not the highly skilled.

I am a stay at home mom who never made it beyond the secretarial pool in my 15 year working career. But, my Bachelor of Arts in Communication from the University of Minnesota is one of my most valuable possessions.

High school students and their parents need to understand that the higher price tag at a small private college does not give you a better education or an edge in the job search – unless your small private college is part of the Ivy League.

Young people entering the workforce also need to develop a thick skin and fight their way up the ladder. In my 15 year secretarial career that spanned four companies, I saw alot of ambitious people do some nasty things to get ahead. And they were successful.

Yes – especially right out of high school. the vast majority of high-school graduates know little or nothing about themselves – nor about what they really want or ought to be. But – I don’t know if we have an economic system that is designed to let them do anything else. I think that system is the problem. We don’t know how to grow employees “in-place”. We’ve become entirely adicted to the SEP ( somebody else’s problem”) model for our business and corporate operation. We’ve combined lack of organizational responsibility – and just in time-ed-ness in the worst possible delivery system for trained people. Often a wrong deicsion in 2009 – leads to a vacant dead-end career and massive debt in 2014.