Lack of a degree didn't seem to be a problem for the electrician I had working here this morning. I can't imagine him being forced to drive for Uber.
A quality education is a very good thing. I am proposing that many people are not critically evaluating what constitutes a good education and how much debt their education is worth.
People are paying their money, expecting a qualification and a job and perhaps that isn't what education is supposed to be about but as long as colleges are making money perhaps that is the best we can expect from many of them.
> Hired a dropout who ended up producing sports science research that probably could have netted him a Ph.D.
Is there any way he could turn that into actual Ph.D.? I ask out of curiosity, because many people do things in their professional lives that are equivalent of achievements in academic work, and I wonder if there's a way to turn former into the latter.
He/she can start publishing papers. Basically that's the only important thing to become a researcher/scholar. (You can be an independent scholar, so not associated with any research institute/university/group. But of course being in a group helps a lot.)
And then various universities and doctorate schools have various requirements for a PhD.
There are doctorate schools that don't require undergrad degrees or anything. And some don't require completing courses if you have enough publications. So in theory it's possible to just do a couple exams and a thesis (which can - and usually is - just a bit more in depth aggregation and exposition of your previous research).
Is it worth it? Well, sure, if you want to have a PhD, but that part is much easier than producing great scientific papers, so if the person in question has good ideas and a sort of constant "scientific output", then why not?
>There are doctorate schools that don't require undergrad degrees or anything.
AUT in NZ (as I said in another comment) seems to be one. Do you know of others to investigate? Within 2 years I should have at least 5 peer-reviewed papers published in open journals [PlosONE/PeerJ] (and probably 1-2 in closed, "elite" journals... something I'm opposed to but... business...), and I wouldn't mind looking into it.
It seems that admission requirements are ... very formal nowadays, but also (higher) academia is all about who knows who. So if you have a good reputation "in the field", getting into a PhD program would be a matter of asking.
Also, usually young/child prodigies were able to skip undergrad and go straight to a PhD, but that's a bit different.
Potentially. We've obtained IRB approval for some other studies we are working on. His particular research will almost certainly go into another paper and he'll be credited with multiple published works, and probably get cited quite a bit.
He has very little interest in starting up Ph.D. work, same as me (we're both college dropouts). However, AUT in NZ has offered to examine work for their Ph.D. program which is remote and based solely on research contributed. We might look into that.
I have essentially no interest in dealing with the machine that is academia, so unless it's minimal work, I'll probably pass. My employee feels the same.
You can buy degrees that turn "work experience" into credits, but nobody respects them, so it's not really worthwhile unless you really just want some letters after your name.
Shrug. I don't really respect the letters or degrees that people have anyway. Only reason I would do it is to help my employees get better opportunities.
For better or worse, College is the new high-school.
Of course a degree in of itself won't get you far but it's an easy filter that many companies use to quickly weed out candidates.
There are also other opportunities inside college (internships, friends, learning difficult concepts) that you realistically aren't going to find outside.
The value of a College degree depend heavily on how the individual leverages it but it's an important thing to have. Without what are you left with?
>The value of a College degree depend heavily on how the individual leverages it but it's an important thing to have. Without what are you left with?
Being a software developer with an impressive Github and set of independent work, the likes of which will impress the vast majority of good tech companies that need productivity and not papers to hang on a wall?
People that think that undergraduate degrees pass a "filter" are ones that are applying through open portals and hoping their resume is selected. Most of the good jobs in software development are obtained through networking in one form or another, in-person and online (Show HN is a good example, amongst millions of other ways to get your work out there).
More and more hiring managers are becoming like me. I blind your resume for education. I actively don't want it. I have found it to be a useless signal at best and a counterproductive signal at worst.
I also hire engineers and don't care about education. However, what you call networking is often bootstrapped by education and previous work experience.
Very few people have "an impressive Github" out of high school that will actually impress good tech companies. However, if you have a bachelor from an average university, you will at least get some phone interviews.
> it's an easy filter that many companies use to quickly weed out candidates.
That's going to have diminishing returns though, and become a useless metric. It won't get that bad in our lifetimes, but in 70 years, for our great-grandchildren, maybe.
I think it will. It already has started. As I told the OP, I blind resumes for education. I started the practice when I built a Data Science team for a tech company and noticed that education signaling was negatively correlated with performance, and it was worse the more "applicable" the degree was in (CompSci grads were among some of our worst employees, while Mathematics and Physics grads did exceptionally well).
There's a lot of reasons for this, but I think one major one is that the company I worked for was a C or B- player at best in the market. Any good CS graduate worked for a real company, startup, or did their own thing, leaving us with a lot of people who just held a piece of paper and thought it was worth something.
Never had a problem. I got into the US on an O-Visa and got an EB1 Green Card. I build a company from scratch to 80 people, I helped take another to IPO as part of the senior level and is now back building another kind of company.
All without a collage degree. Oh and where I come from it's even free.
Not that it's not helpfull but it's certainly not necessary.
Never had a problem; provable skills nearly always trump a degree in tech. What you mean is good luck getting a job with no experience without a degree.
