Business, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Credentialed, Not Educated

27 Comments

Employers have finally caught wise to the academic scam:

Employers, because they realize that many college graduates aren’t really educated, now routinely quiz job seekers on what they majored in and what courses they took, a practice virtually unknown a generation ago. Good luck if you majored in gender studies, communications, art history, pop culture, or (really) the history of dancing in Montana in the 1850s.

They themselves got scammed by con artists like Barack Obama, who told them that they had to get a degree, even if they have to go into unaffordable debt undischargable in a bankruptcy, while not bothering to tell them that what they get a degree in matters out in the real world.

[Update a while later]

“This is a terrible social policy. It is deeply destructive.”

Unfortunately, that’s been true of many, if not most of our social policies over the past eighty years, and particularly over the past twenty. And we’re starting to reap the whirlwind.

27 thoughts on “Credentialed, Not Educated”

  2. No, no — they’re just “racing to the top.”

    And at the top is a mop.

    And a bucket.

    Get to it.

    1. Sigh. Apparently something went wrong with the link I tried to insert in my previous comment. OK, I will try it again. I referred people to U.S. pushes for more scientists, but the jobs aren’t there. That article appeared in the Washington Post on Sunday, July 8 on the front page.

      Engineers putting down liberal arts studies says much more about engineers than it does about liberal arts studies. Yes, there are some real problems in liberal arts. There are also huge ones in science and engineering. FWIW, scientists and engineers can be too rigid and narrow. Think Jimmy Carter, for example. I’ll bet most people on this blog like the actor Ronald Reagan much better than Jimmy.

      1. No one put down liberal arts studies. “Ethnic studies” is not liberal arts. It is illiberal arts. And there’s nothing wrong with studying literature. Just don’t expect it easy to find a lucrative job with that degree.

        1. Rand, I also think narrowly educated people (think some sort of ethnic studies, for example) need their minds broadened as well.

          The point of that Post article is that scientists — some with the supposedly professional Ph.D. — are having trouble finding work. The same can be said for many in other STEM fields. It’s not just people who studied something like the Grateful Dead in San Francisco circa 1967-1969 and think they are well educated. Why, yes, I did go to some Grateful Dead concerts in San Francisco during that period.

  4. I had a Division Officer in the Navy who had a degree in Botany. He was the Electrical Officer. I served on a Destroyer Tender, and one of the Repair Division Officers had a degree in Dance.

    The joke was, in both instances, they joined the Navy because no one else was hiring. I’m guessing businesses are getting smart again?

    My son, who’s done construction management when we still had a construction industry, and I have talked repeatedly at businesses that are not using this bad economy to build THE best office, crew, kitchen staff, loading dock, etc. that could be had. He’s talking more labor and trades jobs, but the same thing applies to anyone with a degree or advanced degree too.

    If I owned a business, a F/T business with F/T employees, I might not be expanding right now, but I’d be hiring and weeding out people who don’t work or work well or who think I owe THEM. And when the economy turns around I’d have very grateful crew of people and we’d eat backside out of all my competitors.

    Who will still have all the same non-working jerks they’ve had all along.

    1. What the military does is a part of the scam. Their are ways to becoming an US military officer without a college degree, but first obtaining a degree is the typical route. I knew a lot of guys in ROTC that took whatever degree was the easiest just to check the box. They knew the military would later provide them the training necessary to perform their eventual job function.

      1. Leland,
        I worked for two guys who were ‘mustangs’ [prior enlisted] who went to school on the Navy’s dime. Unlike those officers above, they were required to take something the NAV could use. Unfortunately, they both forgot where they had come from and as such not two of my better bosses.

        The botanist and the dancer were not ROTC types in college, by their own admittance. The botanist joined the Navy because he wanted to work into some kind of DARPA / DoD research job after his first few Navy jobs. I don’t think that was his original plan, but that’s what he was pushing for.

    2. To go along with what you mentioned, Der Schtumpy, we recently added FT, benefits-eligible jobs to our group in the past 6 months, for the first time in over 20 years. All applicants were limited to internal-only, and we were hiring for a total of 17 positions: 2 shift supervisors and 15 full-time employees. Eighteen people applied, only 13 were actually offered (and accepted) positions.

      It was eye-opening to see how some of those interviewing for the positions acted as if they were entitled to the full-time gig, and how strongly or poorly some of the employees actually interviewed. Those who took the process seriously and took their time to answer thoughtfully ended up with FT jobs, the other 5 didn’t, either because of their poor interview or because of the handicap they received from the thickness of their employee issue file.

      With one or two exceptions, most of those who didn’t get FT acted childishly about it, to which my boss commented, “and they think that an attitude like that would earn them full time? That person obviously didn’t deserve it.”

      Fortunately, too, all but one or two of those who accepted the positions took it on with gratitude and a renewed sense of pride in their job (since they all got a raise out of the deal, besides the benefits), and we’re hoping that the remaining four positions will be filled externally by people equally grateful and committed to the job.

  5. There’s nothing wrong with getting a degree in science — it can be quite useful — as long as one has no expectations of actually being a scientist. A degree in ethnic studies or medieval Italian literature is mostly useless in the job market, unless you get one of the few jobs to teach such things.

        1. Finally, what I would say to my kid is “These majors are why double major programs are popular. Medieval Italian literature + organic chemistry sounds to me like the start of a good education.”

          1. Yes. But I wasn’t talking about double majors. Which major do you think is more likely to get someone a job?

            Do you really have to gainsay everything I write just for the sake of doing so, even when the attempt is pathetic?

          4. No pain, no gain. Seek disagreement.

            Have you tried Free Republic or something? Seems like you’d get maybe 100x the workout if that’s what you’re going for…

        1. Does it? I wonder what percentage of people majoring in medieval Italian literature go on to become lawyers or doctors or teachers (but not teachers of Italian literature)? More importantly, I wonder what percentage go on to be gainfully employed (in any job) such that a college degree helped them get the job?

          1. My guess would be not many, but the most likely one would be teacher, which doesn’t seem to require much actual knowledge. You apparently aren’t familiar with the typical undergraduate degrees for budding doctors and lawyers.

          2. Considering the time it takes to be a doctor or even a lawyer I would not spend time majoring in medieval Italian literature. If it is just an interest you have you can study that in your own spare time and not spend any money on tuition for it. Just go to the Project Gutenberg website and start reading. However the jobs in that area are next to none. Of course there is always a little something called connections. Carly Fiorina had a degree in Medieval history or something like that and managed to get a lot of management positions where she mismanaged things horribly but the positions were still successful at least for her.

          3. GZilla has a good point: there isn’t a bottomless resource of time or money for education. If you spend yours getting a degree in 14th Century Women Poets or Peace Studies, you’ve already taken a sort of time/money utilization test… and failed. Especially if you used education loans and now have no way to earn enough to pay back.

    2. I agree whole-heartedly, Rand.

      Science (and math) degrees allow the student/grad to go into many fields as they teach people how to think logically and solve problems. That type of critical thinking can be used in almost any field.

      1. “Science (and math) degrees allow the student/grad to go into many fields as they teach people how to think logically and solve problems.

        Not if they go into climate “science”.

      2. I’m not entirely convinced of that–it seems likely that the people who self-select for math and sciences are already the type of people who like to think logically and solve certain types of problems.

  6. I am all for developing credentials via standardize tests. In fact in the field of business such tests are already used by many schools to measure how well they are teaching basic business principles and skills so it wouldn’t be that large a step to adapt them to be part of a credential process.

    The CPA is a good model to start with, although I would eliminate any degree/course requirements and just open up such tests to anyone who wants to get a credential. That was how the field of law used to be before the ABA took over. And this would actually make teaching easier because instead spending large amounts of time documenting to accreditation agencies what you doing you could simply post the difference in pass rates between those who have received a degree at your school and those who did not, providing an objective measure of the value created by the degree.

    It would also create opportunities for entrepreneurs to develop focused coaching programs to teach the materials needed to get the credentials as in the IT field.

Comments are closed.