College for all - right?

[Tom]

Originally Posted by katiesue

Ahh but you do have a degree on your resume.

Actually, I don't. I don't include it on my resume.

[Morrigoon]

9 years, if you count my "financial hiatus" during which I worked in the airline industry.

[katiesue]

Originally Posted by LSPoorEeyorick

I'm very glad you were able to. But there's a weird level of income where one is too wealthy to merit any financial aid, but one's public university tuition is a total drain on the parents' income. (I paid what I could, including the ONE loan I was eligible for, but it hardly made a dent on my University of Michigan tuition bill.)

But you know what? It had the best theater directing program in the country, so I was lucky it was in-state.

I was in this position as well. Mostly because my flipin Mother would not quit claiming me on her income taxes. Anyway I didn't qualify for anything so I had to work to pay for it all.

[€uroMeinke]

Originally Posted by LSPoorEeyorick

Not everyone can afford that these days

I don't know - I just went into an obscene amount of debt getting a degree in something that I knew wouldn't land me a job outside academia - I mean, what are they going to do reposes my education if I can't pay the loans?

[€uroMeinke]

Originally Posted by Kevy Baby

That's another interesting question: how long did your "4-year degree" take to get? Mine was 4.75 years and that included Summer School three years.

3.5 thanks to AP credit and a couple UCI classes I took while in High School

[3894]

Originally Posted by €uroMeinke

I don't know - I just went into an obscene amount of debt getting a degree

This year, both Pomona and Stanford went automatically tuition-free if your parents make less than $100,000. (I think that was the figure.)

On the other hand, the very cool Antioch went out of business. It's touch economic times, even in higher ed.

[€uroMeinke]

Thinking of degree requirement and looking at the corporate monolith I work for it seems JDs are the thing to get if you ever hope to break into the executive ranks, I think over half of our execs have them. PhDs on the other hand, seem to fill very specialized niches, most of which are rather fickle in their funding, so that those positions vanish quickly in restructuring. Masters, usually come in the form of MBA, and if you have something else, usually and MBA is still what's desired. But most of the MBAs I know acquired their degree while working - sort of an adjunct corporate training program.

Project Management certification seems to be the rage at the moment, but I've witnessed several conflicts in which the certified project manager (whose certification is required) takes a project to task for not following the appropriate pre-project work. They usually get replaced by someone who "can get the job done" - often not a certified project manager.

[Alex]

In the field in which I work (a combination of banking/finance and IT) pretty much everybody has a degree but almost nobody has a degree that had anything (directly) to do with their job. The exception are the PhDs who are pigeonholed in very specific jobs and aren't likely to advance corporately (such as the ethnographer who runs our user experience design group)

But there are people who don't even have a degree. They just generally started lower in the company (or discipline) and had to work their way up.
Eventually, experience and demonstration of skill trumps degree.

My current job technically has a requirement for a BS, preferably in Computer Science. I don't have that. Fortunately, the HR department here is flexible enough that when I sent in my resume (cold) they saw my years of experience as adequate. Obviously, flexibility will vary a lot from company to company and even from HR screener to screener.

I think the ever widening call for a degree of some sort (any sort) is a byproduct of the death of company loyalty and growth in employer mobility. You can debate who killed it (and, personally, I'm glad its dead) but in an age when lifetime employment is more than norm than the exception it makes sense to bring people on in more of an apprenticeship model. But in a world where the first job is just that (a first job with many more to follow t different companies) companies ask themselves why they should put the effort into training and education just so that their competitor will get the benefit when that employee moves on to better money.

So, once you get into that mindset you start looking for proxies. Some evidence of a work ethic, ability, and determination. A college degree is not a perfect proxy by any degree but it is an easy one. And not entirely inappropriate either as a starting point.

[sleepyjeff]

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0508/dreher.php3