Saddled with student debt? Welcome to America's screwed generation

[AlBell]

The other bit of bad news for all you kids, according to tv this am, is that you will pay more into social security than you can expect to receive.

[joobie]

Originally Posted by Sam.I.Am

There isn't, but there is a way to make it so that less people go into debt get a useless degree. Make it mandatory that they attend and complete 2 years worth of general advanced study before going into a more specialized study program and make those classes hard as hell to pass.

a vendor who comes into my work was complaining about how his kid had no ideas what to study in college, so i suggested he send the kid to community college for a couple years to get some general studies out of the way as well as introduce him to what college is like, and the guy stuck his nose up in the air at the idea of his kid going to a community college.

fine, pay some outrageous amount of first year tuition and find out your kid would rather major in dope smoking if it floats your boat.

[Modified]

Originally Posted by AlBell

The other bit of bad news for all you kids, according to tv this am, is that you will pay more into social security than you can expect to receive.

I expect that by the time I retire, there will be means testing and my wife and I will get zero. At least I hope that is what happens. If not, then surely the country will be ruined.

[TellyKNeasuss]

By the end of this weekend I will have completed 242 hours of college classes, of which 61 hours were graduate classes. In the eyes of the business world, this does not imply that I'm qualified to do anything. Getting a college degree is no guarantee of anything.

[Caper]

Originally Posted by joobie

a vendor who comes into my work was complaining about how his kid had no ideas what to study in college, so i suggested he send the kid to community college for a couple years to get some general studies out of the way as well as introduce him to what college is like, and the guy stuck his nose up in the air at the idea of his kid going to a community college.

fine, pay some outrageous amount of first year tuition and find out your kid would rather major in dope smoking if it floats your boat.

Really? That was the attitude where I live in the 1980s. My father was principal at a vocational school.... we'd make fun of his students all the time. Over the 10 years people seem to be realizing just how much of a waste University can be.

Unless you know what you want to do (teaching, nursing, lawer,ect) and you know the path leads through University and you have the ability and dedication... University can be pretty useless. You come out with a Bachelor of Science and little idea what you want to do, you may find yourself in big trouble.

[Mark6]

Originally Posted by Caper

Unless you know what you want to do (teaching, nursing, lawer,ect) and you know the path leads through University and you have the ability and dedication... University can be pretty useless insidiously dangerous. You come out with a Bachelor of Science and little idea what you want to do, you may find yourself in big trouble.

fify

[bignickel]

One of Yahoo's News stories today:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/grandm...lege-debt.html

Quote:

It's no secret that falling behind on student loan payments can squash a borrower's hopes of building savings, buying a home or even finding work. Now, thousands of retirees are learning that defaulting on student-debt can threaten something that used to be untouchable: their Social Security benefits.

[Cain]

Originally Posted by bignickel

One of Yahoo's News stories today:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/grandm...lege-debt.html

Saw that story and I had mixed feelings.

[luchog]

Originally Posted by TellyKNeasuss

On the pro-college side, many jobs that don't really require anything that you'd learn in college still require a college degree to obtain.

Why do companies require college degrees for jobs that don't need the education? One theory is that it is a way for companies to reduce the volume of applications they receive. By requiring a college degree, you automatically cut the number of potential applicants in half. Another theory is that it is a legal way to bias your applicant pool in favor of applicants who come from middle or upper class families.

During the dotcom bubble, I worked for a very large company that required college degrees for entry-level customer-service jobs (they would make exceptions for those with a certain amount of relevant experience). They didn't care what your degree was in, only that you had one. For work that a sufficiently trained monkey could have done. It certainly did nothing to ensure that we had a better quality of customer service, or more diligent employees. It just meant that we had a lot of over-educated slackers with degrees in philosophy, women's studies (sorry, wymyn's studies), history, literature, etc.; who tended to take extended lunch breaks to go out into the parking lot and get stoned, and download pirated music instead of actually taking customer calls.

[luchog]

Originally Posted by commandlinegamer

They'll leave if there are better working conditions elsewhere. Want to retain your staff? Pay better wages, give them more time off, and where possible, opportunities for advancement.

It's not even necessary to pay all that much better, if the benefits and environment are good enough. When I worked for Large Internet Company, the pay rate for the vast majority of the non-critical positions was not only in the low end of the average range, in many cases it set the bottom boundary. But they had very good benefits, and one of the best corporate cultures I have ever encountered. During my tenure there, a few people left for better paying jobs elsewhere, but more people came from better paying jobs at places a whole lot less pleasant.

[Mark6]

Originally Posted by luchog

It's not even necessary to pay all that much better, if the benefits and environment are good enough. When I worked for Large Internet Company, the pay rate for the vast majority of the non-critical positions was not only in the low end of the average range, in many cases it set the bottom boundary. But they had very good benefits, and one of the best corporate cultures I have ever encountered. During my tenure there, a few people left for better paying jobs elsewhere, but more people came from better paying jobs at places a whole lot less pleasant.

Why did you leave?

[Morrigan]

This thread is very enlightening and depressing all at once. It sure as hell doesn't give me an incentive to return to school, though I had been struggling with the idea for a while.

I started writing a bit about my own experience in the job market and the education situation here, then I decided it was off-topic and not really relevant. Maybe I'll post it in Community later.

Originally Posted by Dave Rogers

Maybe they don't want to get beaten to death by policemen.

ZING!

Originally Posted by Daald

This is the reason we require it at my job. My employer cares about dedication and is aware of the fact that everything we do can be learned. The problem is how do you show that you have this dedication? That is where a college degree comes in.

Honestly, that sounds like complete and utter corporate BS to me.

Quote:

Another problem is that a college degree also guarantees some fundamentals. In my job we hired a senior programmer that had a lot of experience but no college degree. In code reviews we figured out that he didn't even know how to pass variables to functions and declared everything as static I have no idea how he was hired for 10 years as a programmer. You get all sorts I guess.

It's weird, because my experience has been the opposite. I've worked with "programmers" and DBAs with impressive degrees, one of whom came from a very wealthy family of diplomats and studied at the prestigious Harvard for a while, and he got his Master's at McGill University. He was also the worst programmer (I wouldn't even call him that) I had ever known, he didn't know any basics, he did nothing all day but he smooth talked the bosses and fooled them into thinking he was an asset for a long time. Until at some point we had a new IT director who wasn't a complete moron and he fired him, haha. This anecdote is particular I admit, but I've met many more IT/programmer guys with impressive degrees and less than impressive knowledge and skills.

Yet the best programmers I ever worked with are two guys without college degrees. One of them did study a bit at university but he never graduated, and the other has the same kind of degree I do, a DEC (technical degree) from a Cégep (I think the closest US equivalent to a Cégep is a vocational school or perhaps community college). And another excellent programmer I know is of course my boyfriend, whom I went to Cégep with. Again no Bachelor's or anything.

Quote:

After that guy, we started screening for basic programming skills. Write a loop that prints numbers between 1-100 and does something if it is divisible by 3, 5 etc. You would be surprised how many people can't.

I wouldn't be. I've had to screen applicants before and I didn't need such tests, but I knew which kind of technical questions to ask. It was so easy to tell the BS-ers from the genuine articles. They'd fumble about and try to sound smart or knowledgeable and repeat vaguely related buzzwords without understanding what they really meant. I don't get it. Did they think they could fool us?
I remember my interview for my second job ever. The IT director asked me a few technical questions. Some I knew what to answer right away, others I wasn't sure of, and when that happened, I said so. "I'm not sure, I'd have to look it up." or simply "I don't know, I never used this technology, but I can learn". No BS, no fumbling with buzzwords. I think he appreciated that, cause at the end of the interview he said "okay, you don't have that much experience [it was true enough] and you don't know everything, but I think you have potential", and he hired me. It never crossed my mind to try to "guess" the answers to his technical questions or try to pretend I knew what I didn't.

The best part was, a few years later at a different job (when I was more senior) when my colleague, a MySQL expert (he even did those super-hard-but-probably-useless certifications), asked basic MySQL questions to applicants. Such as, "what is an index? why and how do you use indexes?". And one applicant going "oh, an index, well, you use it to... index data, of course". He just spouted meaningless buzzwords and tried to pretend he knew. He could have said "oh, I heard this term before but I never worked with them before so I don't really know how indexes actually work". That would be a lot more acceptable than making **** up in front of a MySQL certified guy with a very low tolerance for BS.

Originally Posted by TellyKNeasuss

I don't agree that having a college degree guarantees fundamentals. I've worked with many programmers with Bachelor's, or even Master's, degrees who didn't know anything about data structures or what the differences between object-oriented, structured, and functional programming are. Or, for that matter, why it is a bad idea to put 108 'if' statements in a single function, as one person whom I worked with at the National Snow and Ice Data Center did (and was commended for her creative programming ability!!!).

lol. Glad to see it's the same nonsense elsewhere than where I used to work. XD

Originally Posted by Sam.I.Am

There isn't, but there is a way to make it so that less people go into debt get a useless degree. Make it mandatory that they attend and complete 2 years worth of general advanced study before going into a more specialized study program and make those classes hard as hell to pass.

Well, we have the "pre-university" types of Cégep programs here (I didn't do that, I did a "technical" program which is 3 years and can lead straight to the job market), which is exactly what you describe: 2 years of general advanced study, more or less related to the field you seek at university. I don't know that it's really "hard as hell to pass", though, but maybe even that helps a bit? Every high school graduates has to go through this before going to uni, though "mature student" (e.g. someone over 21) can go straight to uni and skip Cégep.
Tuition for Cégep is a LOT cheaper than uni too. But it's not really that hard to pass, and I think universities are overflowing with students. Then again we aren't savage about uni tuition either (despite recent attempts by our government to become more like that... that did not go over well xD) so student debt isn't as ridiculous. :P

[Daald]

Let me try it one more time to convey what I mean.

The people a good employer looks for have passion and ability in the field they are hiring for.

The thinking goes that if a candidate has the passion and ability they would get a relevant degree in the area they are passionate about.

The only thing that would hold them back is something very severe otherwise you could say they might be lacking in passion or ability.

With that in mind it makes sense to start looking for the people that have passion and ability within the pool of people that have the requisite degree as you are more likely to find them there.

The degree does not confer passion or ability to a person looking just to get the degree.
The lack of degree does not imply you lack passion or ability.
The degree program applied to a person that has passion and ability will help that person gain fundamental improvements to their abilities.

[Mark6]

Originally Posted by Daald

Let me try it one more time to convey what I mean.

The people a good employer looks for have passion and ability in the field they are hiring for.

The thinking goes that if a candidate has the passion and ability they would get a relevant degree in the area they are passionate about.

The only thing that would hold them back is something very severe otherwise you could say they might be lacking in passion or ability.

With that in mind it makes sense to start looking for the people that have passion and ability within the pool of people that have the requisite degree as you are more likely to find them there.

Which is perfectly sensible until you realize that "lack of money" IS "something very severe", and far more so in US today than 20 or 40 years ago.

Also this does not explain employers like one Luchog described, who ask for any degree -- not the relevant one.

[Daald]

Originally Posted by Mark6

Which is perfectly sensible until you realize that "lack of money" IS "something very severe", and far more so in US today than 20 or 40 years ago.

Also this does not explain employers like one Luchog described, who ask for any degree -- not the relevant one.

Yes, but how many are there? If you can't show that the brightest and most talented are broke and can't get financial aid to go to community college or some other hardship then the system will stay as it is and wait for those people to overcome their challenges.

Secondly, I was not trying to explain employers that Luchog described. Just because they exist does not invalidate the need to filter by degree.

[TellyKNeasuss]

Originally Posted by Daald

Let me try it one more time to convey what I mean.

The people a good employer looks for have passion and ability in the field they are hiring for.

The thinking goes that if a candidate has the passion and ability they would get a relevant degree in the area they are passionate about.

The only thing that would hold them back is something very severe otherwise you could say they might be lacking in passion or ability.

With that in mind it makes sense to start looking for the people that have passion and ability within the pool of people that have the requisite degree as you are more likely to find them there.

Are you talking about hiring people straight out of college? If so, this might have some truth to it. Otherwise, it's been my experience that employers don't care what degrees you have or what you majored in. Nor do they care what your GPA was.

I do agree that employers tend to look for someone with passion. Unfortunately, passion and ability are not perfectly correlated. I've worked with many people who were enthusiastic about their work and exuded lots of confidence who were much better at talking the talk than walking the walk. Many people have passion and confidence simply because their knowledge of a field is so limited that they don't what really constitutes "good".

[TellyKNeasuss]

Originally Posted by Morrigan

I started writing a bit about my own experience in the job market and the education situation here, then I decided it was off-topic and not really relevant. Maybe I'll post it in Community later.

Please do. I'd love to get someone else's impression.

Quote:

I wouldn't be. I've had to screen applicants before and I didn't need such tests, but I knew which kind of technical questions to ask. It was so easy to tell the BS-ers from the genuine articles. They'd fumble about and try to sound smart or knowledgeable and repeat vaguely related buzzwords without understanding what they really meant. I don't get it. Did they think they could fool us?

BS-ers manage to fool a lot of people, more than enough to generally have successful careers. When I worked at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, I was amazed that I was the only person who realized that the women who put the 108 'if' statements in a single function (and had another function with a string of 'if..else if..else if' statements that took up 4 entire pages) didn't know what she was doing. Because she used "object-oriented" or "entity-relationship" in every other sentence, just about everyone else thought that she was a genius and that I was an idiot because I didn't recognize her genius.

To tie in with this thread, the most important thing that a college education does for you is to teach you how to talk and act like a stereotypical person in your chosen field. Talking and acting "properly" are more important that technical competence.

[Morrigan]

You are 100% correct about that last sentence. The same McGill master's degree ignoramus I was talking about managed to negotiate a salary that was about twice of what the standard programmers earned. He was the worst "IT professional" I ever worked with, but he was one of the best manipulators and smooth talkers ever.

[luchog]

Originally Posted by Mark6

Why did you leave?

Laid off. They closed the office I worked in and moved its operations to the Midwest. I was offered relocation assistance; but I had no interest in moving from the left coast to North Dakota.

[luchog]

[quote=Morrigan;8523846]I wouldn't be. I've had to screen applicants before and I didn't need such tests, but I knew which kind of technical questions to ask. It was so easy to tell the BS-ers from the genuine articles. They'd fumble about and try to sound smart or knowledgeable and repeat vaguely related buzzwords without understanding what they really meant. I don't get it. Did they think they could fool us?

Originally Posted by TellyKNeasuss

BS-ers manage to fool a lot of people, more than enough to generally have successful careers. When I worked at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, I was amazed that I was the only person who realized that the women who put the 108 'if' statements in a single function (and had another function with a string of 'if..else if..else if' statements that took up 4 entire pages) didn't know what she was doing. Because she used "object-oriented" or "entity-relationship" in every other sentence, just about everyone else thought that she was a genius and that I was an idiot because I didn't recognize her genius.

The problem is that too much of technical hiring is done by managers with little to no technical expertise. They are the sort of people who think in buzzwords, and as long as the applicant can spout a convincing line of BS with an air of confidence, then chances are good they'll be hired. Or, if they do have technical expertise, it's either out of date, or in the wrong area (eg. network admins hiring programmers), or it's all on paper with little practical experience.

I remember back during the dotcom bubble when there was a flood of MCSE certifications on the market. Due to the proliferation of Windows NT Server platforms, businesses were hiring just about anyone with an MCSE, and most positions required one or they wouldn't bother to even call for an interview. This led to a boom in certification mills, organizations that would teach people how to pass the exams, not how to do the job. So suddenly the job market was inundated with people who had shiny new certifications, and absolutely no clue how to actually do the job they were certified for. That soon branched out to all the other high-demand certification -- A+, Network+, CCNA, etc. -- and soon even a legitimately acquired certification wasn't worth the paper it was written on. Technical/vocational schools were churning them out by the hundreds.

Another part of the problem is that so much of the initial applicant screening is done by HR and recruiters, not by technical staff; and they rarely have the ability to tell true expertise from a good line of BS. All they look for are the certifications, degrees, and/or buzzwords. So a lot of highly qualified applicants will get missed, while a lot of confident BS artists get to to move on to the next level in the hiring process.

[AlBell]

Sorting a stack of resumes with a pile that contains only college graduates is a big time-saver in finding the right candidate without examining all resumes.

[Morrigan]

Originally Posted by AlBell

Sorting a stack of resumes with a pile that contains only college graduates is a big time-saver in finding the right candidate without examining all resumes.

Except that, as I demonstrated, having a college degree in no way guarantees being qualified, and vice-versa.

[TellyKNeasuss]

Originally Posted by Morrigan

Except that, as I demonstrated, having a college degree in no way guarantees being qualified, and vice-versa.

That's a problem to be dealt with later. Requiring a college degree has at least 3 advantages:
1) Reduces the number of applications that need to be reviewed;
2) Increases the chance that the person who gets hired comes from a "good" family and knows how to talk and act like a "professional";
3) Allows the hiring manager to have specific items that he/she can use to brag to his/her managers about the person that was just hired.

Whether the person hired is actually well-qualified for the job is something to be dealt with later. Generally, everyone involved is acting in their own immediate self-interest, and requiring a college degree allows a hiring manager to minimize his/her effort while getting "objective" criteria to base the hiring decision on.

[Mark6]

Originally Posted by TellyKNeasuss

That's a problem to be dealt with later. Requiring a college degree has at least 3 advantages:
1) Reduces the number of applications that need to be reviewed;
2) Increases the chance that the person who gets hired comes from a "good" family and knows how to talk and act like a "professional";
3) Allows the hiring manager to have specific items that he/she can use to brag to his/her managers about the person that was just hired.

Whether the person hired is actually well-qualified for the job is something to be dealt with later. Generally, everyone involved is acting in their own immediate self-interest, and requiring a college degree allows a hiring manager to minimize his/her effort while getting "objective" criteria to base the hiring decision on.

I cannot tell whether you are being sarcastic or not. And if you are not sarcastic, whether you think all this is a good thing or not.

[AlBell]

Originally Posted by TellyKNeasuss

That's a problem to be dealt with later. Requiring a college degree has at least 3 advantages:
1) Reduces the number of applications that need to be reviewed;
2) Increases the chance that the person who gets hired comes from a "good" family and knows how to talk and act like a "professional";
3) Allows the hiring manager to have specific items that he/she can use to brag to his/her managers about the person that was just hired.

Whether the person hired is actually well-qualified for the job is something to be dealt with later. Generally, everyone involved is acting in their own immediate self-interest, and requiring a college degree allows a hiring manager to minimize his/her effort while getting "objective" criteria to base the hiring decision on.

Yes, that's what I meant, although 3) is a bit iffy imo.

For the person reviewing the resumes, definitely a good thing. And good luck trying to convince your boss and/or HR to hire someone without a degree.

[TellyKNeasuss]

Originally Posted by Mark6

I cannot tell whether you are being sarcastic or not. And if you are not sarcastic, whether you think all this is a good thing or not.

Perhaps being cynical. There's not much contention that companies are requiring college degrees for jobs which don't require skills that are unique to college grads. That they do this to reduce the number of applicants is a widespread opinion on job board forums. It's as good a guess as any.

I have no idea how hiring decisions are made, which was reflected in my 3rd item. There seems to be a desire to make the decision be "objective", i.e., based on the applicant having specific years of experience doing specific tasks with specific tools, rather than based on the applicant's intelligence, overall knowledge, and growth potential, which require information which can't simply be listed on a resume/CV. I don't believe that hiring based on experience with specific tools is necessarily an effective way of choosing the employee who will work out best in the long term.

[rwguinn]

HR departments have changed over the years. Their task now is to disqualify applicants