Comment by michaelt
20 days ago
> A college degree (especially from good old State U) serves first and foremost as a white-collar job permit.
Only so long as the college doesn't devalue the credential.
If I interview a few people with a CS degree from College A and I find they don't know the basics of programming - then the credential loses value; why would I bother interviewing people from such a college?
So colleges have to balance the needs of their stakeholders - employers/ graduates want the credential to be a sign of education; and current students who want good grades and less work.
The "implied terms of the transaction" have always been that current students have to learn enough that they're not devaluing the credential.
I have interviewed prospective employees who come in with no academic credentials all the way through to those who have completed degree programs at one of the top 50 universities. Regardless of university, students are individuals and shouldn’t be given more or less credit because of the name of the school they attended.
Full. Stop.
That said: plenty of big name research universities are housing folks who do little except study coding interviewing questions for FAANG and expect you to be impressed that they spent 9-18 months at one.
As an aside: I don’t care that someone is ex-Amazon; it’s their work that will impress me, not where they worked previously and were presumably let go because they couldn’t hack it.
Let’s not lump all students into groups simply because of the college they attended. I went to a regional university because they offered the biggest D1 athletic scholarship for early signing; not because I cared about anything other than free education. Similarly, my masters was free through my employer.
While I agree with you in practice, institution name (of their school, prior employer, ...) is, overall, a hard to escape filter when you're staring down the barrel of thousands of applications per open role.
There are other early-out filters you can use, but none of them are perfect in quickly reducing the application count to a tractable number for your HR/hiring managers/engineers to tackle.
I agree that the trend is not sustainable, but that's not the students' responsibility — they're just responding to incentives.
Either institutions maintain their standards or employers stop relying on the signaling value of the credential, and both are difficult coordination problems until the moment it becomes too late. I don't see a third option.
> or employers stop relying on the signaling value of the credential
Employers haven't recognized such signalling in my lifetime, if ever.
However, there are a sufficient number of professions (e.g. medicine) where it is legally required to attain accreditation through the college system to keep the aura of being job creators. The average teenager, with no life experience other than sitting in the classroom for the past 12 years of their life and playing soccer on the weekend, deciding what to do after high school doesn't know the difference.
To make matters more complex, said teenagers don't recognize that not all people are equal. They hear things like "high school dropouts make x% less than college graduates" and think that means they must go to college to not suffer the same fate, not realizing that the high school dropout cohort is dominated by those with disabilities and other life challenges that prevents them from earning more in industry. Surprising to many, handing a Harvard degree over on a silver platter to someone with severe autism will not cure what ails them.
So there is really no risk to the system. The incentives are by and large already based on misunderstandings with so much religion in place now to keep those misunderstanding alive and are otherwise driven by legal requirements that aren't apt to go away.
Besides, even if all that is destroyed, the primary reason one goes to college is still for the dating pool. Academic rigour remains necessary to keep the quality of potential partners up. Tinder and the like may have tried to encroach on that, but I suspect it has only made it more desirable to be on/near campus to increase the likelihood of a match. Users of those services aren't searching the world over to find "the one".