College May Not Be Worth It Anymore

- Don't include education - I'm asked about it. Every. Single. Time.

- Include the years I attended college - Asked why I didn't finish. Every. Single. Time.

- Include college in a misleading way - I did a summer extension program for 2 years while in high school at a similar college. I list both colleges, my start year, my end year, and what my degree track was. I do not claim that I have a degree, but nearly everyone assumes I do. I'm almost never asked about it.

Any time I am asked about it I'm honest to the degree they need ("I had to take a break from school due to family issues", which is true: my family had an issue with the number of "F"s I was getting).

I've actually had managers who found out after being hired who told me "if I had known that, I wouldn't have hired you"

Ultimately I think there are a lot of industries that a degree requirement is a good thing (I really want my doctor to actually have an MD), a lot of industries where certification is sufficient (I don't particularly think an LMFT needs to have a full degree), but the vast majority of industries shouldn't require it, and filtering for that is a cop-out.

I've been at Google for a number of years. Whether I had a degree was brought up during the recruiter conversations; nobody cared.

The downsides of the current trend are:

- pretentious web development job posts requiring master's degrees in CS "or related field" (as if physics prepares you for jQuery).

- debt-ridden, unfulfilled scientists relegated to the above

This is the heart of the issue, and I'm not sure you realized you stumbled upon it.

First, you acknowledge the only way to "fail out" is to "not care". This itself shows that college doesn't prove capability or learning or anything objective. It only shows that you have to do the right kind of little monkey-dance for your professors, so they'll be satisfied that you're subjugated, and then they'll pass you.

More to the point, college was designed to filter out "challenging" individuals (for several definitions of "challenging", most of which are irrelevant for modern work), not incompetent ones. [And small caveat: today, college mainly exists not really to filter, but just to put the nation's youth in indentured servitude].

Anyone who thinks you're filtering for competence when you look at degrees, look no further than this thread. You're filtering for someone who is mainstream and complacent; you're filtering for someone who won't question, let alone challenge, the groupthink.

Don't you think it's a big waste to require several years of time and several tens of thousands of dollars in debt just to determine whether or not your candidates are "too lazy to finish a degree"?

And as someone who's been blessed to enjoy a successful career (up to this point) without submitting to the subjugation of so-called "higher education", I can say that it's not really a good indicator of laziness.

Laziness is not caring that you zapped 4 years of your existence away at 15% efficiency so that when you apply for a desk job at BigCo, they won't say "Sorry, you're obviously qualified, but if we hire someone without a college degree, it will mess up our H1B sponsorships that were partially justified by requiring Americans with college degrees." It takes a lot more legwork to suss out the places that don't have a giant stake up their butt.

Self-teaching is hard, but very rewarding, and at the pace that software moves, you should be looking for skill in this as a fundamental quality.

It's hard to blame people for going to school these days, with the amount of social pressure around it, but if they seemed to enjoy being herded around too much, and certainly if they consider said herding as a necessary rite of passage before one can entrusted not to drop everything and go to Mexico, it's a big negative in my book.

If she goes in at 18 after high school, she can earn a degree in 2.5 years at night in the Air Force. After her first 4 years she can choose to get out, with a degree, zero debt, life and work experience. If she so chooses, she can opt to go to Officer Candidate School (13 weeks in Alabama) and emerge 3 months later effectively doubling her income, all the while not paying for medical, dental, housing. If she marries another officer and they do 20 years to retirement, she will be 39, young enough to start a second career and enjoy her AF retirement, second career retirement, and maybe, if she's blessed, SS. More kids should go military. I did, and I had my college paid for and I pay nothing down for houses, get my closing costs paid, no PMI, get treated a little better because of my veteran status. It's a great gig for kids.