Do Your Job Candidates Really Need a College Degree?
Posted April 1st, 2013
College degrees. They have become the sine qua non for employers looking for people to hire. So many companies require them, even for low-level jobs. They are what a high school diploma was in the past. But given the state of the economy, the state of higher education, and the state of business today, some experts are seriously questioning the need to require college degrees for employment.
After all, much better and more accurate predictors of performance now exist, some argue. For example, if your company needs a programmer, there are measurement tools such as TopCoder and GitHub. If you are looking for sales people, you can see what they have sold and how well. If you are looking for people who are self-starters, you can look to see if they have an entrepreneurial background.
There are also many different evaluation tools out there that can be administered to people to determine how suitable they are for the job. Not only that, there are now many online courses people can take to gain knowledge. There is a lot of buzz currently about MOOCs, massive, open, online courses offered by some of the nation’s top universities.
All of these things give a give an indication of a person’s ability, says Andrew McAfee, a business research analyst. A college degree isn’t necessarily the best indication of a person’s ability, and as a barometer of competence, it’s continually declining.
Part of the reason for the decline is that students on college campuses don’t appear to be learning all that much – some statistics show that almost half of college students learned very little during their first two years, and more than one-third showed little learning even after four years. Moreover, it is taking longer and longer for students to complete their degrees, and dropout rates have been rising.
It’s about time businesses hold higher education accountable for its product, McAfee says. But that probably won’t happen until employers begin shifting away from college degrees as a measure of ability. And, he says, there is no better time for that shift to begin than now.
While McAfee has a strong opinion, college degrees as well as other certifications all contribute to a candidates profile. Candidates gain experience in college as well as in the workplace. Be sure to look for certifications and skill sets that the candidate has gained, beyond their college degree. All of their experience whether in academia or in the work place is important.
If you are an IT company in the San Francisco Bay area looking for IT professionals, Bayside Solutions can get the people you need. Contact us today.
