On the other hand, with the toughening of the job market, companies are selecting by degrees and pedigrees more than ever. The last company I worked for is currently doing this exactly, only looking at applications from people graduating from select universities.
So far it's working for them. As the job market gets worse, I think this trend of stronger emphasis on degrees and pedigrees will only get stronger.
Of course at the individual level, there are always exceptional individuals. But by definition, they are few and far between. It's not like going to school precludes you from learning other things and being flexible, creative, with burning passion for learning, etc. I would still encourage my kids to finish school and aim to get into a good university, I think.
I never managed to finish my degree mainly due to dyslexia, and started working as a self-taught programmer, but I can only second this opinion. My CV doesn't get past most first screenings and even then people sort of treat you like a second class citizen.
Maybe I should start lying about my lack of a degree like a real con man.
Perhaps. But let's assume those of us who've "made it" are generally acting in good faith (because a world-system built on sand will never last) and not simply slaves to their hind brain.
What's probably true is that between the current market (at least in tech), automated application systems (and, yes, LLMs) of various kinds, etc. companies are just being flooded by applications. They can (and do) various things--lean very hard into referrals, randomly throw half the applications into the trash, etc. But at least one not totally irrational filter is a 10 second credentials check--which is at least objective assuming the person isn't lying. Why not take advantage of a lot of admissions office effort?
At the same time, I can remember the day when certain credentials were non-negotiable and this is probably still true to a certain degree in fields like Big Law and management consulting.
As someone in the job market right now, with 15+ years experience but no degree... This is an unfortunately very visible trend. It's Especially boggling to see a job posting wanting 10+ years of experience but still demanding you provide your GPA.
It’s been 20 years since I’ve ever been asked for proof of my degree, and also 20 years since it has ever come up during an interview.
I think university only counts when you’re freshly graduated because you don’t have a lot to work with given the pool of candidates… but once you instead require X years of experience then education does not matter - but if it ever did, nope it out of the interview because they sound like amateurs.
I was asked not just for my GPA but the specific grades for all of my university courses >10 years prior even though I had worked in FANG for many years. The recruiter apologized for it and said the directive came from HR.
HR is not your friend. "Human resources" -- guffaw! Of course, the Human behind the desk is more than their role.
Conversely, I've met brilliant people living on the street because [trauma]--who can't get a leg up because they're stuck in a proverbial catch-22 where bureacratic desk-jockeys can't help (even if they want to) because those of us working in state/corporate jobs love kicking the can.
I hope future generations figure out how to get shit done.
There is a delay in the perceived value of the job as well as a delay in acquisition of a degree/pedigree so the calculus must take into account the expected job value at the end of the degree.
In my view, given that the tech job value is in decline, and will continue this decline for the foreseeable future, the net present value of the job is much lower that the perceived value. Prospective students should take this into account, especially the middling ones.
When I decided to go to university in 2001 it was after the dot-com crash and classes were very small. We were told that all programming jobs in the future will be done by Indians and there was not future for us in this feild. I took the bet that they were wrong and did quite well out of. But I was also a rather gifted student with a natural affinity to programming so I figured it was something I wanted to do even if it turned out that I was wrong.
My prediction now is that this downturn in tech prospects is not a temporary setback as seen in previous downturns and is more structural and permanent. The pie is not growing fast enough to turn efficiencies into consumer surplus and instead efficiencies are driving down wages at a time where government policies are exasperating income inequality in an effort to chase GDP. I don't know how someone starting today would escape the intentional demand destruction / crushing of the middle class. Maybe there is some margin left in the high pedigree -> good job strategy but I am not confident in it.
Since I think the expected payoff of high pedigree degrees are worth less than what other people think a more economically defensive strategy of not taking on large amounts of debt and self teaching as much as possible would be the way to go even if historically that has not been true.
Somehow, late stage capitalism seems to bring us to this winner-take-all environment. We are being separated into rich and poor and forced farther and farther apart.
In large part for the reasons you stated, I'm sending one kid to a $100k per year private university instead of the $7k per year state school.
I was helping my kid try to apply for summer jobs. It involved a lot of 2FA apps and QR codes, which needed to be installed on a phone with the latest security updates, plenty of space, and a fast internet connection. The same was true onboarding the student onto the university.
Why do we tolerate this world where the bar is so high and getting higher all the time?
> Why do we tolerate this world where the bar is so high and getting higher all the time?
There isn’t a single “bar”. The company the parent commenter was talking about was a single company at a single point in the job market using a single heuristic.
These anecdotes are anecdotes, not representative of the entire industry.
The pointy end of the job market has always been selective. There have been companies that select from specific universities for decades, if not longer. It’s not a new phenomenon, nor is it a universal practice.
The pointy end of the job market has always been exclusive.
It’s interesting because I’ve seen the direct opposite. Also, it’s been at least 15 years since I’ve ever been asked for my references… but mine have never been called regardless
As a child who went through this, I could not put a child of my own through that system; I couldn’t do the pointless teacher-pleasing busy-work and it took a piece of my soul and childhood away. On the other hand, I totally understand the necessity of it. Squaring the circle on those two contradictory feelings was quite simple for me - simply don’t have children. I thought I was a bit unusual for that, buy it seems that this is more common than I thought; fertility is falling throughout the developed world and I think super intensive parenting expectations have to be at least a part of that.
While I wouldn't describe it as late-stage capitalism, the situation OP is describing definitely isn't sustainable, we're all becoming more like Korea or China, high stratified and overstressed societies that may well be dead ends given their declining birthrates.
I recall the controversy about Amy Chua's Tiger Mom a decade ago, the funny thing is that Amy Chua today believes that her methods would be insufficient for the competition today. When we have parents fighting for top kindergartens and extracurriculars for 5 year-olds, you know this is getting out of hand. And the worst part is, for all the rise of "overachievers" going into these jobs, services and products in society just seem to be getting worse and worse.
> And the worst part is, for all the rise of "overachievers" going into these jobs, services and products in society just seem to be getting worse and worse.
Sounds natural, as the profit-driven corporate machinery is getting more qualified and more obedient workforce than ever before!
I totally agree with the your frustration over the technological barriers... you should not need a cell phone to survive/thrive in this world. We're designing a world where the concept of "affordance" is replaced by "dependence".
On the other hand,
investing the $93k/year difference in the state/public institutions where your child might have gone seems like a better pathway to a win-win scenario.
(But, does this really make any sense when our learning institutions move at a bureacratic snails pace, and are bogged down by egos and other inefficiencies? Meh.)
Perhaps we should consider running learning-institutions like lean startups where, instead of success being measured by capital wealth, well-being and innovation are the KPIs.
> So far it's working for them. As the job market gets worse, I think this trend of stronger emphasis on degrees and pedigrees will only get stronger.
In retrospect, some of the worst advice I got from the internet and even the real world was that college was overrated.
I did well in college, went above and beyond in my studies, and learned a lot. But I did not go to the most prestigious university I could have attended. It was far more of a missed opportunity than I would have guessed.
At the time, the narrative was that colleges are antiquated institutions. They were going away for top careers, and people were fools to invest so much time and money into what was dismissed as rote memorization. Influential and powerful tech figures ranted about college being bad, people obsessed over entrepreneurs who had dropped out of college, and everyone could tell you about Peter Thiel paying people to drop out of college.
Years later, I realized that all of those famous and influential people ranting about college actually did everything in their power to send their kids to prestigious universities. They knew the value of those degrees. Those internet commenters beating the “college bad” drum were more angry about their own degrees being at a disadvantage than they were about speaking any truths.
I’m doing fine with my own degree, but there were so many times where it would have been so much easier to walk into situations with a degree from an Ivy League university. I sat at a table one time where the head of the department I joined flat out told us that he’d need to hire someone with an Ivy League degree or experience at one of the Big management firms to lead us, otherwise the other part of the company wouldn’t take us seriously. These situations do exist, although they’re not everywhere. As long as the situation exists, it’s statistically more helpful to have that prestigious degree.
Pro tip, people hate ivy droppers. The only people who will respond well are other people who went to the same ivy as you.
The value of an Ivy Education is that you become friends with people who have rich parents, and those people bring you into the stuff they start because they have the capital to do whatever they want.
> The only people who will respond well are other people who went to the same ivy as you.
Not my experience at all. I’ve been at multiple companies where the top management came from different Ivies (or similarly prestigious universities).
They all promoted and hired people from other prestigious universities.
I have never actually seen this proverbial situation where an entire company clique is all from one, single university except at very, very small startups.
At big companies, it’s less about the exact uni and more about where it falls in the rankings. Anything top-10 is basically interchangeable.
Being at an Ivy doesn't buy you much 10+ years into your career as an ordinary applicant in most industries, a lot of people hardly make it that far down a resume before tossing it. Getting your first job out of college (or getting recruited while in college) and knowing people from an Ivy who are 10+ years into their career and being able to skip the applicant pile is very different.
I'm pretty skeptical of the networking with rich people theory. Of course, it happens. But I'm not sure it's a rationale, by itself, to go to Harvard if you can. While I've done business with various people I know in school I can't point to any clear examples where some opportunity came along because of school connections. Professional connections, yes, in pretty much every case. But very little to do with school.
I got invited to a startup that had a good exit through school connections. I left a good bit before the exit because my school chum became a megalomaniac that was impossible to work with, but I can at least give you n=1.
Oh. Totally happens--probably especially at small companies/startups. I'm just saying it probably isn't a great bet if that's your main reason for going to the school.
On the other hand, with the toughening of the job market, companies are selecting by degrees and pedigrees more than ever. The last company I worked for is currently doing this exactly, only looking at applications from people graduating from select universities.
So far it's working for them. As the job market gets worse, I think this trend of stronger emphasis on degrees and pedigrees will only get stronger.
Of course at the individual level, there are always exceptional individuals. But by definition, they are few and far between. It's not like going to school precludes you from learning other things and being flexible, creative, with burning passion for learning, etc. I would still encourage my kids to finish school and aim to get into a good university, I think.