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?
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.