Talk about destroying the "Brand".
"...Employers routinely report that college grads lack basic skills they look for in new hires. (See here, here, and here, for example). In fact, less than 10 percent of employers think colleges do a good job of preparing students for the working world. (Study cited here.)
A lack of useful skills is only part of the problem. Grads are saddled with debt, often taught absurd ideas from professors disconnected from the real world, and encouraged to see themselves as victims. Add to that binge-drinking and increasingly draconian policies around health and politically correct speech, and campuses have become a place to pick up bad habits and bad ideas."
A few years ago, I talked to a business owner who turned down a candidate I passed along because he had a Master’s degree. He told me, “He seems smart and has some skill, but he’s been in school too long. It will take me too much time to get those habits out of him. Plus, I’ve found people with advanced degrees tend to be entitled and assume they’re worth more than they are.”Source
Credential factories
ReplyDeleteThe signal transmitted by the credentials changed.
DeleteBack when 20% of high school graduates also graduated from college, it differentiated you from the herd in a good way.
Now that everybody is stuffed into the college-track channel, it means less than nothing.
Yes and no. The STEM courses require maturity and discipline and my heart goes out to those kids because they are trying to build lives for themselves and they deserve far better treatment than that.
ReplyDeleteAs for the liberal arts flunkies - theirs are the courses that should be red flags for potential employers. But then again, Corporate America is largely a collective Animal Farm... so the universities are filling a need for them. Those bloated blue haired she-twinks gotta go somewhere I suppose...
Seems like it started downhill about five minutes after the government got into the college loan business.
ReplyDelete"Plus, I’ve found people with advanced degrees tend to be entitled and assume they’re worth more than they are.”
ReplyDeleteYes, well I can only speak of Canadian industry. I'm older, around Glen's age here, and have worked in R&D all my career, industry and academia. A real problem are managers who drink the company Kool Aid and genuinely believe they are doing advanced work when what they are really doing doesn't amount to anything more than just software development and solving a problem means you just sit and try things out in code. They don't read the research literature. They don't even have the mathematical or technical background to begin. And they are usually the first in a meeting to posture about how we have to be "practical" or "we can't get stuck on analysis paralysis."
I worked at Bell Northern Research, later Nortel Networks (yeah, them. Sorry about your shares) for a decade and watched the company degenerate from a real innovative engineering company to, well, you know how it ended up. They would hire people straight out of Ph.D. programs, entice them with what leading edge work they would be doing, and then stick them in a DSP (digital signal processing) development group so they could learn to be "real radio engineers." So you had a constant turn over of people going 'eff that and then be off to our competitors. Or accept university professorships.
At the time space-time codes (out of Bell Labs) and turbo codes (refined at ETH in Zurich) were revolutionizing data over cellular. And it was a sh*t show at Nortel. Project managers whose background was DSP S/W development rushing to get something implemented, anything, with no understanding. Engineering out the window because there was no time because they never made the time. The engineers who actually did understand the theory and practical implications for performance and implementation pushed aside because they were "too theoretical." Well, it was a joy watching that company burn in the few years to come.
So as far as people with advanced degrees being entitled and assuming they're worth more than they are, you really should make sure you are competent enough to actually utilize them. Because if you hire one but don't know how to use them because their expertise is too advanced for you and you won't take the time to learn, and so you stick them coding databases or something because that's your expertise, then the problem is you. And in the year before that person leaves you wasted maybe a couple of hundred thousand of the companies money because "math is hard." I've seen this happen over and over at companies here.
Anyway, that's Canada. We're pretty limited for opportunities here and we have a lot of very smart capable people reduced to coding for a living because that's all there is. It's different in the States which is why there is such a brain drain.
I am not sure we are that different. Humans are humans wherever you go.
DeleteMy last boss (proud owner of an MBA from the same university as the Plant Manager) was incapable of understanding that vehicles could be sorted by codes on the "build manifest" and that populations could be segregated into at-risk vehicles and good-to-ship vehicles based on computer sorts of those manifests.
Consequently, he stopped shipment and filled the yard when we could have shipped the good ones and retained the suspect for more inspection.
He just didn't have the time to sit still and hear the explanation that the build manifest is what told the assembler to put the unit with the shiny knob into the vehicle or the unit with the matte knob in.
He preferred to send somebody out, into the rainy night with a flashlight to inspect for shininess of the knob.
We had conflict.
Worked at a place that would NEVER hire a Ph.D for that exact reason.
ReplyDeleteI was thinking about this very subject whilst I was driving home from work this evening. What got me started on this topic was the fact that both on the way to work and on the way home from work there was a person at an intersection soliciting donations. (In the past it was referred to as begging.) This in spite of the fact that there are 'help wanted' signs virtually everywhere around here. It got me to thinking about what employers are probably looking for in prospective employees these days.
ReplyDeleteThings have changed. Whereas in the past a felony on one's record made it very difficult to obtain employment, today I think that it is not the barrier that it once was. So my completely unscientific conclusions were the following, in order of importance to the employer :
1) Dependability. Meaning the employee will actually show up every day that he/she is scheduled, and will also show up on time.
2) The prospective employee will not be on drugs or drunk while he/she is working. (For the employer, this is HUGE from a liability standpoint.)
3) Not be a thief. That is, the prospective employee is perceived by the employer as basically honest, and thus not likely to steal from the employer or the customers.
That's it. Show up, be on time, don't be high on drugs or alcohol while working, and don't steal while working.
And yet, we still have the 'help wanted' signs everywhere.
Think it was DC that made it illegal for employers to ask about criminal record when filling jobs. Seriously.
DeleteEmployers posting jobs require applicants to have a degree and if you don't you application goes into the round file. Employers also routinely say getting a degree shows you have the ability to start a long term project and the drive to finish said project, while showing..... or words to that effect.
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ReplyDeleteYeah, I don't give the MBA a shot. They have been coached to expect a higher salary than productivity yields for the first 5 years in my particular business. It's the University prompting them for the sake of the status of the University. I used to hold dear the thought Brian expressed. It is offset by the school turning out little Marxists.
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