Controversial opinion The point of college is NOT to prepare students to be “work ready” if that makes sense. The point of college is to give you the critical thinking skills necessary to be able to learn, grow, and make decisions on your own as an adult professional. Whatever technical knowledge carries over to your job is just a bonus.
he forgor
Submitted 1 day ago by ultrahamster64@lemmy.world to [deleted]
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Comments
Gorilladrums@lemmy.world 1 day ago
glitchdx@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Gradeschool is supposed to do that. That’s 12-14 years of a person’s life. If you’re not ready to be an adult by highschool graduation, then the system failed you.
(oh look at the system failing over and over and over again)
Rekorse@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I think the Amish finish school at 13 or so.
chunes@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Laudable goal, but whatever they’re doing isn’t working based on some of the graduates I’ve known.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Also having attended college and actually successfully passed its knowledge tests and graduated proves that you have both the discipline and mental capability for certain jobs.
I’m in software development and have been part of the process of hiring people and from the point of view of an employer, for a candidate to an entry level position that college diploma is an indicator that the person in question has the knowledge and capabilities to do that kind of job.
Mind you, in my area fortunatelly there are other ways to indicate that - for example, having participated in Open Source projects or, even better, having your own Open Source project with actual users that you’ve had to support (which in my view can put somebody above somebody else who merelly has a college diploma) - though that’s generally only for smaller companies since large ones will have HR filter candidates before the ever reach the actual domain experts and HR can’t judge skill like that and instead will go for “big formal stamp of approval” shit.
That said, the college diploma stops being important after junior level, unless it’s one from a handful of very prestigious institutions and even then it won’t work on domain experts, only non-expert manager types.
nroth@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
They don’t seem to teach much critical thinking these days beyond a few elite institutions. The focus at the state schools I went to was churning out as many engineering grads as efficiently as possible.
Limerance@piefed.social 21 hours ago
The qualification is social proof, that you’re from at least middle class background. Meaning you have a little manners and know social codes.
yabbadabaddon@lemmy.zip 19 hours ago
You spelled a lifelong experience of bending forward without complaining wrong.
Limerance@piefed.social 19 hours ago
Valid. Employers want people they hire to do as they are told.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
Meaning you have a little manners and know social codes.
College Dorms, famous for their strict social codes and etiquette.
this_1_is_mine@lemmy.ml 18 hours ago
Who keeps spunking in the sink you gross fucks?
I really like the foreign exchange students who have no idea on what supposed to be a local social Norm…
Like you’re not supposed to attempt to try and flush an entire rotisserie chicken carcass. Yes I said flush. As in toilet.
chiliedogg@lemmy.world 1 day ago
College degrees demonstrate you can complete a long-term project with disparate, often competing priorities while meeting deadlines and milestones.
Darkaga@lemmy.world 1 day ago
10 years ago I had a senior director at a large fortune 50 corporation tell me that because of the dire state of US education, the only way to ensure a candidate could read, write, and do basic math was if they went to college. As someone who now does lots of corporate hiring, it’s only gotten worse. It’s especially bad in technical fields where about half the CS grads I interview can’t even answer basic questions like “What’s an IDE?”
fluffykittycat@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
Oh my God, I’m a CS Dropout who now works as a janitor yet I’m more qualified than half the people applying for your job.
vrek@programming.dev 1 day ago
An ide is obviously an “intentional dog emoji”. You see someone showing their cat pictures and you tell them this is a dog environment.
BTW yes I know it’s an integrated development environment which means basically a text editor, compiler, linker, debugger and in many cases linter. I’m also unemployed and looking for a job so…
arrow74@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
I’d say the majority of the population can do that, mostly it’s a class filter. Need money to go to school or massive debt.
Crackhappy@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
I quit college to start my own successful outsourced IT business but HR doesn’t give a shit.
Agent641@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The “Qualification” is to be shackled to college debt so that you’re a more compliant worker, unwilling to risk your income by asserting your rights and seeking a livable wage.
If you’re debt free, your liable to grovel a whole lot less for the honour of being able to work there and might instead just quit.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Access to entry level positions is pretty fucked up in this because whilst experts will recognized expertise, for anything but smaller companies candidates get filtered out by HR and those people have no fucking clue what expertise outside their domain looks like, so they use proxies for it such as “stamp of approval from higher education institution” so in big companies the candidates without such stamps of approval (or a pre-existing insider contact) never actually get to be evaluated by the domain experts who can recognize that expertise.
That said, if a candidate don’t have at least some domain expertise (so, neither formal study nor having done anything in that area in their free time), sorry but somebody who has actually had the discipline to attend a learning institution and enough capability and domain knowledge to actually passed their exams and graduated is way more likely to be at least decent at it (no guarantee, but the odds are much better) than a random person who never did either. It’s only fair that if you haven’t invested in learning it in some way or other (not necessarily college) you’re not going be seen at the same level as somebody who has actually invested in learning that domain.
It’s only naturally that some kind of expertise validation system for candidates emerges for any kind of domain were some level of expertise is required and as things stand now in most such domains at the entry level that’s colleges (which, IMHO, are better than cronyism-heavy “know somebody who knows somebody” systems), though in many domains something lighter and cheaper (some kind of cheaper test-only option) would probably be better (or, alternativelly, do as it’s done in civilized countries and have higher education be Public, so cheaper or even free).
takeda@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
It’s funny, but a good college isn’t as much about teaching knowledge but about teaching how to think, so ironically this might still make some sense.
Though if employer is saying “forgot what you learned in college” probably will follow with something illegal.
AlfalFaFail@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
Agreed. I think a lot of the people talking about how they are self taught are working in tech and software and they were hire twenty years ago or more. (Can’t wait till someone sounds off about how they got hired nine years ago).
Most other technical jobs are in far more mature fields. College may expose you to ideal situations that overconstrain your ability to get the job done in a corporate setting, but it still exposed you to a set of problems you don’t have access to otherwise. Mainly because these industries are in communication with the deans of these colleges and giving them feedback on what they need to see more of.
EtherWhack@lemmy.world 1 day ago
(Can’t wait till someone sounds off about how they got hired nine years ago).
I mean I did become a ATE tech at a solar ESU startup 4 years ago.
(That is after 9 years as an mfg eng tech at a server CM and just living in the SF Bay area with countless tech jobs of all levels)
fluffykittycat@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
The fact that college degrees are required for jobs that hey we’re all completely distorts hiring and the entire education system. College can’t possibly be anything other than a means to an end as long as that’s the case. No one’s going to go into tens of thousands of dollars of debt they can’t discharge and bankruptcy to learn how to think
fluffykittycat@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
The whole system’s bullshit
TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
You need the basic technical knowledge, but most of it won’t apply in the working world. People cut corners just enough that they won’t get into trouble. Although, depending where you are, open and flagrant corruption is normal.
LillyPip@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Fun fact: I had a career in which I was in charge of hiring other people to fill the expanding roles in my department, and was tasked with hiring ‘more of myself’, but I was not allowed to even co wider people with my own qualifications.
I was mostly self-taught, and was only allowed to consider people with at least bachelor’s degrees in a field that didn’t even really exist yet.
You can probably guess how that went.
vrek@programming.dev 1 day ago
There was a viral post from Twitter or linkedin years ago of someone posting saying they wanted to hire someone with “10 years of experience using ruby”, a person replied, was told they didn’t meet the requirements, they said something like “look at my profile” …if you looked at the person’s profile they were the creator of ruby, they literally wrote the language. The language was only 7 years old.
I don’t even remember if it was ruby but the story is basically the same. Impossible requirements written by people who don’t even know what they need.
LillyPip@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Well, this shows that the people in charge have no idea what they’re running, and are not adding any value. We’ve been brainwashed (by them being our eyeballs and brains) to think they do.
They do not.
I cannot stress this enough:
THEY DO NOT.
Hasherm0n@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Pretty sure that was dhh, the creator of rails being told he didn’t have enough experience in rails. I tried to find it, I found references to it, but the original was in Twitter.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Friend of mine applied for a job where they asked for at least 5 years of experience with Angular version x.y.z (can’t remember the exact version). The friend responded that he had 10 years of experience with versions x-3 to x+1.
The HR person doing the hiring asked back “But do you have 5 years of experience with the exact version x.y.z?” to which he answered “Version x.y.z has only been out for 3 years so it’s impossible to have 5 years of experience with it.” HR wrote back saying that he was rejected because he didn’t have 5 years of experience of experience with that exact version.
Gork@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
Well if he did literally develop the web, that would indeed make him the web developer.
Lemmyoutofhere@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
So, how long ago did you leave?
LillyPip@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
15 years ago. Unfortunately not of my own volition (I became I bece unable to work due to disability).
how_we_burned@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
I had a similar problem. Writing JDs for new roles I had to fill I was constantly getting them knocked back by HR.
Finally HR called me and explained that for what the job entitled we couldn’t possibly pay the market price for it.
I was like but that’s the job. Shit I thought I had made the JDs pretty succinct and austere already.
Nup apparently we’d be paying upward for $100k for a job the guys in team were only getting $60k.
As you can imagine we got a lot of applications but 90% weren’t even close to what we needed.
Same.
I personally don’t like hiring uni graduates. Their utterly lost and difficult to motivate. And almost always what they learned in university does not help whatsoever in the role. Especially dev roles.
I’d much rather find people who can look at the work
thesystemisdown@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The execs think they’re hiring someone to churn out code, and some people are better at that, like everything else. They don’t understand that they need someone that can figure out what code needs to be written, and why, and that they need someone that gets what the difference is and that there’s always someone that writes better code.
LillyPip@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Sorry, but this is kinda separate:
&
This is literally what labour unions are for?
LillyPip@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Thanks. It sounds like our backgrounds are similar.
That’s awful. It feels really bad when you feel you’re standing in the way of people getting jobs. When you would normally feel like you might be a leftist, this sort of point can be easily exploited to make you feel bad, right?
I don’t even want to address the rest of your points until we go over this one because it feels so important.
fluffykittycat@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
I went to college to learn to code and barely did
LemmyKnowsBest@lemmy.world 1 day ago
So how did it turn out? You ended up hiring nobody?
LillyPip@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
No, I ended up hiring under qualified people who had skills on paper but had no talent for the job, because I had to look at candidates who had ‘book’ qualifications in adjacent fields but not passion of qualifications that actually meant anything.