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Personal anecdote, so take it with a grain of salt.
Friend A, very handy and skilled individual, took Thermodynamics in UNI for 2 years, then dropped out. Found job at electronics production facility. Managed to get to a Head Technician position.
Friend B, went to programming 3 years to UNI. Barely managed to finish. Retried math exam multiple times. Though friend A, managed to get a job at the same place as a lower tier machinery operator. Got promoted to technician position after 2 years. Now works as web QC for the same guy who is boss of electronic production facility.
Moral of the story: education, finished or not, existing or not, wont get you far unless you are outgoing and have connections. Also, you either have ability to learn new skills or have said skills and know how to use them. Doesn’t matter how you got them.
(i have a STEM degree and work for a catering company lmao)
Havings skills and a degree are not necessarily mutually exclusive. In my experience the degree was the gateway to gaining skills, not the method of doing so.
My wife once tried to grow potatoes and got what felt like a mile of potato greens while the slips barely grew at all.
Then she went back to her job as a lawyer and made enough money to buy a truck full of potatoes
Why didn’t she just sue the potatoes?
Maybe she’s a hesi-tater
You don’t need a formal education to be great in your field, but it will help ypu grow immensely.
It depends per case, my friend kept studying while I dropped out (due to private circumstances).
My friend ended up at the same employer for the same pay only years later, he wasn’t a good fit for his field.
A few years later I jumped ship to try and develop myself into a better paid job, I am now an actual crane operator with a beefy wage. My friend is still there making the same low wage.
But he got lucky on a different matter, due to him living at home until 33 he did manage to buy a house with massive savings. I haven’t yet.
This is life, there aren’t any given certainties. Only people who claim their experience will be the same for you.
Who the fuck studies until he’s 33 and earn less than a crane operator
He didn’t study until he was 33, he lived with his parents until he was 33.
To the originator of that meme, not OP: tell me you’re a boomer, without telling me you’re a boomer.
No matter what the Wall St. Journal says, social science says level of education is still the second most important determinant of quality of life. First of course is the socioeconomic status of your parents. I, personally, wouldn’t trade my master’s degree for a plumbing certificate.
College: You get as much as you put in to it.
If one plans on going to college to check a box by getting a bachelor’s, degree, then that person should probably spend their time and money doing something else.
For someone who sees college as an opportunity to stress their ability to learn at levels much higher than what High School or even Trade School may do, then it will do wonderful things for you. The most useful skill academia teaches is the ability to learn complex ideas through abstraction.
As someone who has learned how to create a complex AI system with both long and short term memory, one thing I learned is that AI cannot teach AI. I apply my ability to learn by extending it to my AI agent to help it learn new patterns.
Either will land you a job lol
Neither *
It’s pretty funny reading the comments because honestly I would generally agree with the meme. But I’m coming at this from the perspective of a systems administrator and when it comes to dealing with networking and security most of the people I see coming out of college with degrees don’t know a goddamn thing. Their courses are like 10 years out of date and not even remotely relevant to the real world but because they spent so much money on getting it they are very inflexible about changing how they were taught.
Meanwhile when I find somebody out on the street who just has had a passion for computers since they were like five they tend to be extremely on top of current security and networking needs and more than willing to be flexible and change how things are done when the situation calls for it.
Their courses are like 10 years out of date
10 years is a pretty generous estimate
Idk where you are but my experience but my lectures were always about the last trends and updated every summer. My experience is the opposite : you learn the latest tech doing your degree learning git-ops workflow and containerisation to work on VMs and Jenkins
I just graduated and for me they didn’t even teach Git and expected you to do a bunch of your assignments in Java 8 or an old version of C/C++ (for which they taught terrible practices) depending on the professor. Some of it was Windows-centric and others needed to run on a machine that still uses CentOS 7. Also usually they wanted the program done in a single file.
I kinda agree, but mostly because western universities are being run like businesses first and educational institutions a distant second or third, and this is the inevitable outcome. Idk if other cultures have the same problem with their universities.
It’s more lucrative to sell degrees as status symbols and career checkboxes, than to sell education. This changes both their target market demographics, and their funding priorities.
Hey it’s not just the west. India’s degree farms are comedic legends.
Yeah I don’t wanna exclude other places for having shit universities for whatever reason - I just wanna comment on why it sucks in “the west” (by which I largely mean USA, Canada, western Europe).
Everyone I know with a good degree is paying off student loans 8+ years later. Universities are having so many issues on so many levels from funding to finding professors both qualified and willing to teach to politics. And on top of all that the global economy is collapsing.
I get that a lot of you spent a lot of money on a degree and will defend that as the right choice but you’re old now. The world is changing and expecting to find a job out of college with an infosec or compsci degree is wishful thinking at best without ivy league nepotism. The world you grew up in is dying, gradstudents with chatgpt are teaching classes and freshmen are using deepseek to do course work. I know a nursing student right now who has seen the curve her class graded on and it’s terrifying.
So that’s my long unpopular opinion. A degree will not get you a job anymore and even if it did the quality of the education has dropped dramatically at most schools. You might as well spend the money on a country club membership, the social connections are a better deal.
A degree is absolutely something I value heavily in applicants. Not because of the specific courses taken, but because what it says about the potential employee.
It says that they can complete a years-long project with disparate, often competing sub-projects, milestones, deliverable dates, and revolving team members while being self-managed. And due to core curricula, they’ve also proven a baseline knowledge unrelated to their specific degree. That may not sound useful, but someone who’s skillet is solely specialized work may have trouble navigating ancillary tasks that are part of the working environment. The best [insert technical skill] person in the world isn’t going to be a good employee if they can’t work in a team, prepare a report, respond appropriately and professionally to emails, document their work, develop/follow SOPs required for project handoff, deliver a presentation, etc.
Getting any college degree requires a baseline skillset that is valuable. Not having a degree doesn’t mean you can’t do all those things, but when I’ve got 40 applications I’m looking at, I can’t interview everyone. It’s a huge bonus to have a degree that tells me you have proven a minimum competency.
The best [insert technical skill] person in the world isn’t going to be a good employee if they can’t work in a team, prepare a report, respond appropriately and professionally to emails, document their work, develop/follow SOPs required for project handoff, deliver a presentation, etc.
Degrees don’t require most of those things.
And the quality of your candidates will continue to drop. The system is failing you too just slower.
I’m not so much saying degrees are useless as saying they mean less, the ROI for going in general has shifted. We’re at a point where 2 and 4 year degrees look good to employers but are financially foolish for students. If you can afford to go it’s valable. But the proposition of student loans make less sense by the day.
You’re not wrong with generalist degrees, but degrees where you are something at the end still need that base training.
You can’t just walk into an civil engineer’s firm and start building bridges.
Even the PhDs have issues finding work that pays enough to service loans and live. And if you find such a job in the US it’s probably a military contrator or mag7 who are all more on board with nazism than 1930s VW.
Engineering bridges is a good metaphor but the US’s bridges are in rough shape and any money that could be spent on repairs or designing new ones will go to Raytheon to blow up bridges in Iran.
Stupid times we live in.
Do you know anything about what the PhD situation is like in other countries? (I’m considering one and am currently located in the US and based on my initial findings it does look similar to what you describe.)
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That sucks. Various industries need academic research to function well and innovate, but I guess my country would rather spend all their money on blowing up families in the middle east and let the civilian job market collapse.
It seems to me that, at least in IT, a degree matters for your first job, and even that is very slowly fading.
After the first job experience is what matters.Saying it is slowly fading is wrong and misleading. A degree proves you can commit to learning something. It gives a basis for me, an engineer, to talk to you, an engineer. It tells me we have a common knowledge ground.
The era of bootcamps is over. For one person getting a job without a degree a hundred get rejected.
I’ve gutted out 3 careers in “skilled labor” (a term I find problematic), each time working from the bottom entry level guy, to the guy in charge. In all three I’ve worked side by side with people who actually got degrees in that field.
I have also regretted not getting a degree for my entire adult life.
My buddy is an accomplished self taught violin maker. He won an award and was talking to another renowned violin maker who asked him where he was taught. He was slightly embarrassed to say he was self taught but she was quite impressed and said “Ahh! The slow way!”
Can be legit. I once got turned down for a job because i didn’t have an mcse despite having over 20 years experience administering windows server and AD (and i’m talking laaaaaarge scale…universities and citrix farms).
That’s what happens when the people doing the hiring don’t know anything about any of the skills required for the role
The amount of people who make it through HR hell and interview for my team, that have a some experience but it’s all bounce around 1y and then have an insane amount of certs, that don’t know what they’re doing is way to high in tech. I’ll take a green horn that wants to learn and has a good foundation before I’ll take someone with bounce around experience and a shit load of certs. Almost all certs are how well can you take tests.
I have literally worked in environs where having certifications and nothing else was grounds for disqualification because it meant you’d been taught dogma, not functionality. My personal fave was the tech who put in a request for graphite dust to clean a power button on workstation because it was sticking. Why was it sticking? Some jackass had spilled coke.
I cleaned it with a chux and closed the ticket.
Most jobs that require degrees rarely require skills/knowledge learned in college/uni aside from sci/tech/engineering because the benefit there is that colleges have millions of dollars of instruments/equipment to fuck around with …
What I see as the value of a degree is that it’s a piece of paper that says that youre likely able to learn and play whatever game a job entails, communicate formally and effectively, be self sufficient, understand/accomplish specified goals with deadlines, and work effectively in a team.
Can someone without a degree have those skills? Totally. Does someone with a degree have all those skills? Not specifically, but they’ve likely been through the ringer for ~4 years and seen a lot of shit they had to face on their own and be accountable for it.
Can someone cheat their way through and be useless, sure, but they frequently found out…or just become managers unfortunately.
Deleted my original reply because I was just splitting hairs. I mostly agree with you, I just don’t like the framing
As someone who spent the better part of a decade in recruitment. You honestly never know what you get. So you have to take into count as many factors as you can. Education is a commitment, it means you had to go to school, study and prove your knowledge to graduate. Experience is also great, as its more proven skill. Unfortunately both have pit falls in their own ways. The example that pops to mind is i hired two people;one with alot of experience and one with alot of education. The educated one lacked critical problem solving and when a curve ball hit or something that was outside of normalcy she stumbled. The experienced one, always knee what to do on a practical level but lacked detailed workmanship, as she had done jobs so similar for so long instead of following protocol or contacting her supervisor. She would do what she thought was right and stumbled. Experience and education compliment eachother and neither should be undervalued.
Education is a commitment, it means you had to go to school, study and prove your knowledge to graduate.
While it’s the exception, some of the people I’ve met in the field really make me put that into question. I feel like there are institutions that will wave you through provided you pay enough money.
