This is such nonsense. Most jobs don't care what degree you have as long as you have a degree, and with an English degree you can apply for 90% of jobs. You could graduate and go on to be anything from an advertising executive, to a soldier. Most jobs don't care - it's technology that's unusual.
However, that's different than saying you can get hired as an English major vs saying these companies hire for English majors.
Engineering and CS are majors that companies specifically target, in large numbers for hiring. "Related" majors like Math, Physics, other sciences, may also get recruited in the same batch.
Although English is sometimes specified as a specifically targeted major for a job, this is considerably less common.
In your industry.
[0] https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21646220-it-dep...
Other jobs are pickier.
My company offered an internship to someone who was 17. At Digital Ocean one of the interns was 16.
Tech moves quick and the less outside responsibilities you have the more time you can commit to building and learning.
Turns out when companies are making money, they want to hire engineers to build new stuff. When they are losing money, they want to hire engineers to automate.
There were certainly some lucky breaks involved. I like to think of it as I'm lucky the doors opened, it wasn't luck that had me searching for open doors and walking through them when I found them.
As far as I know, people could get by with a high school degree in the 1970s: there was no significant wage difference between a high school graduate and a college graduate, and both faced similar rates of unemployment. Nowadays employers take for granted that candidates must have some form of qualification, even for positions that don't seem to require it. Has the quality of education fallen and the grades been inflated to such a point where degrees are no longer reliable signals of productivity?
And why should companies have their HR departments thoroughly vet candidates when they can rely on the college admissions process to do it for them?
Free vetting AND loyal slave... uh... I mean... employees! Who could say no to that!?
I would much rather hire someone who didn't finish college but has had five years of progressive responsibility in the right area, than someone who had just finished a four or five year degree course but had never worked.
I think you can tease out three possible factors influencing the situation here:
- more people graduating, more supply, means that even entry-level jobs are flooded with college graduates - entry-level jobs in decline, either due to automation or companies just not interested in providing apprenticeships - student loans shifting the power dynamics between employer/employee; you're more pressed to get a job, any job, so you're more likely to take up positions where you're overqualified and underpaid
These scenarios all form positive feedback loops to each other; with more high-skilled worker supply in the market, companies can grow their non-entry level jobs while automating the low-level ones; this reduction in entry jobs means that the desperate college students compete more fiercely with high school students, raising the bar for entry level jobs; the raised bar for entry level jobs forces more high school students to go into college rather than start work, which saddles them with student debt, feeding into the cycle.
I've noticed that many social situations tend to end up in such vicious, entangled circles. My dad used to call these the "downward spiral of failure" and the "upward spiral of success", and I really don't know how you transition from one to the other without a monumental effort or some kind of miracle breakthrough.
Also, your crosswise comparison between an experienced candidate without a degree and an inexperienced candidate with a degree only tells me that you put more weight into experience than having a degree. It really doesn't tell me much about whether a degree is a good signal, but only that it's worse than experience. Now, if you had told me that you don't consider whether a candidate has a degree at all then I'd be able to infer that they are terrible signals and carry no information at all.
You've got a space of time in a person's life between, presumably, graduating high school and sending you a resume. What did they do with that time?
Merely having a degree doesn't say much.
Merely not having a degree doesn't say much.
Having an honors BS in CS from CMU, MIT, Stanford, or a bunch of other schools implies academic competence and exposure to a certain range of ideas. But I don't know that they can be productive outside of that environment.
Having an ordinary BS in a STEM subject from a random college that I've never heard of means even less to me. But is it zero? No.
Holding down a job for those four years is a signal, too, and it needs evaluation. What kind of job? While living at home? Did anything progress during that time? Is it relevant to what we're trying to hire for?
A proxy for an IQ test?
I live in LA and, surprise surprise, there are a lot of writers, artists, and other folks who want to work in Liberal Arts oriented industries. Most of my Liberal Arts degree equipped friends are in sales while dabbling in their art on the side. A few of them sell a book or script every 3-5 years. The rest of them went back to school for a Law Degree or an unrelated Masters degree.
Which isn't to say that the issue is unsolvable. But it still needs solving. I don't think anyone has paid much attention to it.
If you are selling a product to a government or a big enterprise, it helps to have a lot of people with impressive credentials in your staff.
As a hypothetical, let's say that most jobs require a degree. Let's say that you use 50% of the stuff in your English Major throughout most of your career; you've eaten a 50% inefficiency on your college investment(essentially doubling the "price/skills" of your degree), you've lost time that you could have invested in obtaining those skills. Further, you are pressured into demanding a higher salary because of your college investment, which isn't matched by the skills you've received; so either your employer carries the burden of your inefficient education, or you do.
This is usually decided by the power dynamic between the two, and if you're a broke college student desperate for a job, you don't have much bargaining power, so you're shouldering all the burden. The worst part is, there's no way for you to fix this - there's no 2-year program that is 100% aimed towards your career goal, and there's no entry-level job for you to start at 0%(you're probably already starting at the entry-level even with your 50% degree). So you're stuck making this investment whether you want to or not.
One way to look at university is insurance - you're learning all these extra things as an insurance that you'll have a baseline of skills if you change your career. The issue is, not everyone can afford such an expensive insurance, but most people are forced to take it under our hypothetical.
Bryan Caplan has a book coming out soon on the signalling model of education here's notes from a course he teaches http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/e496.html
Then why do they require a degree at all? What specific skills will a degreed applicant have that a high school grad won't?
For one thing, the "skill" of (probably) not being from that stratum of society that doesn't get their kids through university. Asking for degrees is a subtle way to perpetrate socio-economic discrimination. (In some cases, it has to be a degree from the right set of schools, not just anywhere.) It's so easy! You don't have to look at race, or what neighborhood someone grew up in. Just this: do they have a degree or not. Saves time and protects from litigation: it's brilliant!
Getting a degree demonstrates some measure of discipline and work, and the delaying of gratification for the sake of a longer term goal that is several years away, while completing various tasks, jumping through hoops and so on. It's like a job. You have to attend to certain things on time, like showing up for exams, and meet deadlines (term papers, etc).
If you have a degree, you probably pulled an "all nighter" or two to submit something on time or prepare for an exam, and that's just the sort of dedication that employers crave.
I.e. one enrolls in a privately-owned, for-profit universities if they have the money, but don't want to work their arse off to get a degree, or don't have good enough grades from the secondary education to qualify for public unis.
Just as requiring a high-school diploma is a filter for the general education requirements that apply to a diploma, requiring a bachelor's degree in any field is a filter for the level of general education that comes with that, not the domain-specific skills of a degree.
And it's an imperfect filter, but its job isn't to be perfect, it's too reduce the absolute quantity of bad applications that need to be reviewed.
Skills which, as an aside, don't always have as high a priority with the "more practical" degrees whose use for a certain job is more obvious.
TBH I am far more likely to hire an English major with demonstrated technical skills than a technical person with a purely technical education.
Learning the technical skills to live up to the expectations of an entry level software or coding job is just not that hard for a decently smart person. I want to see evidence that you can think more broadly too rather than just checking the boxes.
Additionally hearsay is one of the worst kinds of evidence, scientifically speaking.
I wish there was more development into standardized testing... People pretend profs are altruistic and stop acting like people when they become profs.
My best classes were the ones where the professors and I came from wildly different places. There are bad profs, but in my experience it is pretty uncommon for professors to actually want to see you regurgitating their ideas. Moreover, most of my grading was done by TA's anyway so it's not even like the prof's take was relevant since the TA's have their own agendas.
More often the fact is that, undergraduates (and many graduate level students) suck at properly arguing their point. It’s not their fault really, they’re just less experienced at building a case, operating under a time and space constraint, and less knowledgable about the topic than the person grading them.
And when you’re being contrarian (going against your professor’s thinking) you’re likely to suck even more than usual because your professor hasn’t spoon fed you an acceptable conclusion, a cogent argument leading up to it, and first principles that they agree with to build an argument from.
>People pretend profs are altruistic and stop acting like people when they become profs.
Who exactly do you think would be designing (and thereby imputing their biases into) these standardized tests?
I only do this because I like teaching, so this is not my main source of income. I am not in the verge of homelessness because I do programming for a living. But the problem is still the same: Universities are charging astronomical tuitions and then paying a laughable part of them to teachers.
It does not make any sense, and IMO that explains in part why University education is losing its value: you get overworked and unmotivated teachers as a student, so you may better learn your stuff online.
IMO, this is what adjuncting excels at: supplementing your full time instructors with professionals spending most of their time in the workforce. This more or less happens in CS, but service departments like Math or English end up replacing the majority of their instructors with adjuncts working at 2-3 colleges.
Sadly, this trend does make sense and is easy to diagnose. Instructor salaries have stagnated despite increased student tuition because states have, for the past few decades consistently cut higher education funding. I was laid off from a self-funded university unit amid a very real concern that the state's failure to raise taxes to pay for pensions would ultimately impact the university's funding, and while this was not the immediate cause for the unit's layoffs, it was absolutely a factor in whether to cover the unit's budget shortfall.
I think you entirely missed what the comment said. The statement wasn't about there being anything "wrong" with getting an English degree. It was that there aren't enough jobs for English PhDs and comparably too many students getting them, hence driving the salary down:
>> The fact that the article features an English professor is unsurprising. This is a supply-side problem--liberal arts degrees are in relatively low demand, but institutions continue to graduate students at unsustainable levels
In the last decade, universities have shifted teaching responsibilities from full-time, tenure track positions to part-time adjunct positions. Today, half of all teaching positions are part-time and include no benefits. Adjuncts are paid an average of $2,987 per semester-long course[3]. That's less than $1000 a month. If you've ever taught a college class before and realize how much preparation it actually takes, an ostensibly "part-time" position easily demands 40-60 hours of work a week.
In some fields, over-supply is helping drive this trend[4]. We produce more History PhDs than there are jobs to fill. This weakens the bargaining power that academics have on the market. But this does not absolve universities from their role in the immiseration of academics – after all, they continue to accept more PhD candidates with full knowledge that most of them will never find gainful employment in their field. This is not surprising given the fact that departments now rely on _graduate students_ to teach one-fifth of their course loads[5].
The "casualization" of post-secondary teaching is also a disservice to students, many of whom don't realize that the bulk of their instruction is now done by overworked, underpaid adjuncts who don't have the time or incentive to do their best work.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/posts... [2] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_101.20.a... [3] http://www.chronicle.com/article/Adjunct-Project-Shows-Wide/... [4] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/01/11/grad [5] https://www.aaup.org/issues/contingency/background-facts
I think that some fault lies with unrealistic expectations. Every liberal arts graduate student knows that there are only enough positions for 1 in 10 of their cohort, but each firmly believes that they will be in that 10%. Worse, many who are talented enough to actually be in that 10% self-sabotage by being unwilling to move to locations they perceive as less than desirable.
I once had a professor try to convince me to go for a bio phd. I objected that there's only one TT position for every 20 graduates. His response was that it's just about hard work - look at him, for example!
He didn't get my point; I didn't get the phd.
Same for other "liberal-arts" degrees.
Because that would be like saying "hey, there is a big white elephant in the room!" to the room's occupants, when there is indeed precisely such a beast in that room.
Such as proclamation is rather more befitting of, say, the Economics faculty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education
Humanities students do indeed go on to earn less, but the differences are much more slight than stereotypes would have you think. They also narrow as people progress in their careers:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/10/05/new-data-what...
There are indeed too many PhDs minted in the humanities, but I'd say this also applies to pretty much every field other than, perhaps, CS. Times are pretty tight for bench and social sciences as well.
It's a demand-side problem. Most higher education is funded by state and federal government, and they have been cutting funding dramatically, reducing demand for skilled academics.
It doesn't have to be that way. The U.S. could fund higher education at the levels it used to, and fund reasonable incomes for the higher ed workforce. To create a less educated population than the prior generation is to go backward.
For the most part, the only jobs that hire for English and other liberal-arts degrees are universities and schools. Even so, we're graduating people at rates comparable with STEM fields. With so much supply, the price of the work is driven far down.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cta.asp