Apprenticeships - Employers Must Get Past Degree Snobbery

I'm of the opinion that a university degree is less about learning the subject matter, and more about teaching you how to learn. So a programmer who has not completed a degree may be a fantastic programmer, but one who has done a degree may have a few extra skills on top of simple programming skills.

I.e. Communications skills, analytical thinking, knowing where to look for solutions, how to ask the questions that improve your knowledge and the proven ability to see through a project etc...

Agree absolutely.

I'd long ago decided that even with the £3,000 per year fees (which Labour said they wouldn't do in their election manifesto, got an overall majority then did anyway - remember that Aaron Porter and others slamming the LibDems at the moment), the investment in a degree before a career in software just didn't seem to add up. Realistically a £25k debt against a 3 year delay in starting a career - you may well earn less for the first few years but by the time you've paid off that £25k, is the degree really going to be a differentiating factor?

With now £27k just on tuition, plus living expenses for three years, what's the point? Honestly, I learnt more that I use professionally at A level than in my degree, let alone what I've learnt professionally. Sad to say this but I would actively recommend against an 18 year old with an interest in working in IT studying at university, the way things are at the moment.

I think the idea of setting time aside in your youthful life where you invest in yourself and expand your horizons is a powerful one. It makes the world a more interesting place and pushes human achievement. To what extent a university helps for this might be debatable and will depend on the person and the university, but I wonder if an average person would earmark 4 years of their life to learning and improvement left completely to their own.

Patio11 said it best (re: "do I have to go to college??) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1182552

edit: just re-read your comment, and I realise you're not necessarily taking sides and merely speculating if the average person can get by without the investment into college. I agree so strongly I would upvote you twice.

I'm skeptical that this is going to happen on its own any time soon. While the legal frameworks are in place to prevent discrimination on sex/race/age/etc., I think we should put similar mechanisms in place for formal education. Especially when so many degrees are worthless as a measure of skill, so they've become irrelevant to the job at hand just like a person's race.

Make it so that employers can't ask for education, just like they can't ask for age, nor make a degree a job requirement. Of course when an applicant comes in for an interview, their race and relative age quickly becomes apparent, so it's not really a matter of information hiding as removing a more-and-more irrelevant filter. There's also nothing stopping an applicant from explicitly exposing their age/education/etc. on a resume or during the interview, and I'd still want to mention an MIT education if I had one. At the very least you would want to talk about school projects since you may not have any other experience, but that's up to the applicant. The question is "What things have you made? How did you do it?", not "Did you take a data structures course at an accredited university?" I'm not even sure it would create that much extra burden on HR departments since I hear they're already swamped with applicants matching degree requirements.

On the other hand, a free market approach may be to just leave it alone and let the tech companies that require CS degrees, or black people only, suffer to the companies that care about skill alone. I'm pretty okay with that too as a practical outcome. The question there becomes really philosophical and whether you want a big government to slim down in an inconsequential way or continue its historical path of trying to enforce certain moral directives on supposedly less enlightened people.

Downvoter(s): would appreciate a discussion on which idea(s) is/are most offensive to you. There's the additional filter of "this person made it through a 4 year program and may therefore be determined/have long-term goals/etc.", but really I don't find that a very compelling or useful filter for many jobs.