So what's it worth to you?

I’ve been hearing talk about the usefulness and value of college degrees for a long time. My ‘baby’ brother just earned his last weekend, and one just has to wonder sometimes: what’s it worth?

From years’ worth of observation, I’ve learned that degrees fall into two broad categories: ‘worthwhile’, and ‘worthless’.

To elaborate on those two vauge classifications, a worthwhile degree is an essential tool in building one’s success. I’ve always defined success as accomplishing what you set out to achieve, or at least reaching a reasonable substitute destination through life’s many twists and turns. If you earn a degree and it gets you where you want to go or somewhere else that’s just as good if not better, it was all worthwhile.

Worthless is a tricky concept. I like to think that everything and everyone has at least some value, though I’ll admit one often has to dig around awhile to find what little there may be. Sometimes, though, what you gain simply isn’t worth the price you have to pay to get it. Worthless people are like this: he or she may be a relative or a so-called friend, but when it comes down to it, being connected to them is a bitter experience that can be quite costly and hardly worth the expense and hassle this person causes you. Some college experiences are like that. It’s not at all uncommon anymore for a person to pay good money to get into a trade school or vocational program only to learn that the seldom spoken of realities of some professions makes them a poor career choice for you, or that an industry you’d planned to work in isn’t what it used to be. In hindsight, even though not proceeding further had value in and of itself, one often realizes they could’ve learned that for a whole lot less money!

Some of the best degrees one can have are the ‘tech’ type degrees, considered from three perspectives. Most students who pursue those lines of work just about lived it anyway, so they are making opportunities to answer their calling in life. Jobs are often easy to get, as experienced workers don’t pose quite the competition they do in many other career fields due to the rapid pace of development in this field and the difficulty many people have keeping up. Employers love it because the recent graduates are generally fresh and ready to go and only recent graduates ever seem to be current enough in the industry to handle the ‘hands on’ aspect the entry level positions consist of. Schools love it, because the high job placement rates make them look good.
Some of the worst degrees to have are the ‘tech’ types. These types of jobs can be and are readily outsourced to India and other developing economies, and only those aggressive folks can keep up with change. If you’ve got a degree in some type of Information Technology area but you earned it ten years ago, good luck! Hopefully you’ve been active in the industry all along and can easily prove it.

I learned a long time ago that some degrees amount to little more than very expensive raffle tickets. Once upon a time, college was only for the sons of wealth and a good number of them washed out. It was tough to get in, and graduating four years later was a whole lot harder. However, anyone who could survive the extraordinarily rigorous years of study was pretty much equipped to handle whatever might come up. In those days of yore, if you held a degree, you were just about as good as gold and if you remained up to new challenges, you’d never be wanting for employment. Those days are long gone.

I’ve participated in many discussions where people cannot believe how some college graduates ever got into a post-secondary school, let alone earned a degree. Not only are they marginally qualified in their career field, the level of competence they demonstrate in merely functioning in life is abysmal. Once upon a time, a sure way to get the boot from any college was to be tardy or absent from class more than very infrequently. This is a lot of what, as the old saying went, separated the wheat from the chaff. If one lacked a vigorous work ethic, a degree with their name on it wasn’t going to be in the cards.

What happened is that the schools got greedy. They woke up at some point in the last fifty years and realized that they really were a business more than they were an institution. Dismissing the poor performers costs them revenue, and it may in fact turn off whole generations of the jilted students’ families, to boot! A little bit of ‘the customer is always right’ mentality leads to significant softening of the standards.

So did being forced to integrate the genders and racial minorities. There’s no doubt in my mind that it would have happened entirely on its own sooner or later, but later is generally the way nature works. When the government starts applying pressure for change, you get artificial results. As most of us are aware, some artificial things are excellent, perhaps even better than the real thing. Sometimes, too, that just isn’t the case! Admission exams have always been tough, but if you had a very solid high school education you could handle it. The problem with that is, though, that in the mid-20th century, most women and the majority of Americans who were other than Caucasian didn’t have a solid high school education that focused on college preparation like well to do adolescent boys did. It wasn’t too many years before that when most men left school at the eighth grade to work on the farm. Women’s public school experience still often focused on a career in homemaking until roughly the WWII era. Even when the schools were desegregated, most students with darker skin tones lived in regions with less than stellar economies that didn’t have the tax base to provide for passable schools, let alone good ones. The only way to allow indiscriminate access to college was to lower standards so people could actually get in with the high school educations they had received, not those which they hoped their children would get.

This may have been good for jump starting fair access to college, but like so many things in the most diverse nation in the world, it has not been without long term consequences.
Businesspeople I know go absolutely nuts when they have to deal with people who never would’ve been able to get through college in yesteryear due to their lack of organizational skills and motivation. The only way to insulate a business from their toxic presence? Insist on experience! Especially if you manage or own a smaller firm that cannot afford the luxury of gambling on a ‘greenhorn’ employee. In a lot of companies, one person not earning their keep can wreak disaster. Fortunately, public safety is still looked after, and the professional licensing exams for architects, physicians, some engineers, and others are extraordinarily demanding and not everyone who graduates from college passes them. Schools are hurt in the long run by graduating poor performers, too. If you get to know enough business managers, you’ll soon learn that some schools pick up a reputation for the quality of the graduates. This may vary from time to time and place to place, but ‘party school’ isn’t what you want your interviewer thinking when he or she is noting where you earned your degree. If that’s the case, those who went before you have done you a great disservice and you’d best be hoping the ‘gatekeeper’ in front of you can see through your resume and notice that the established reputation of your alma mater clearly doesn’t apply to you!

Most of the unemployed people I know, excepting the disabled or completely unfit, hold degrees. As a ‘ticket’, that piece of paper gets you into positions that have greater responsibility, and greater risk. Among that risk: less security in your specific job. You run the risk of being out on the street when your company gets bought out. Whenever ‘downsizing’ happens. Whenever someone decides that there’s too many chiefs and not enough Indians. The list goes on and on.

This is really part of why these jobs pay more. Ever wonder why CEO’s often make so much? If a company does not fare well under that person’s leadership, even if for reasons largely outside of their control, odds are very good they’ll never work again. As is said in law enforcement, once a chief, always a chief. An average CEO’s career in the chief executive officer phase is something like five years. They either retire, or they’re fired. Production staff, unskilled and semi-skilled labor is generally available for those who willing to do the work. The nation is sorely missing people who physically make things happen. Our society is a bit top heavy, though, filled with people who really don’t want to get their hands dirty or chance straining their back.

Labor intensive positions can often be found and began in one day, or within a week in many places. Most managerial or highly specialized positions take months to find or to fill, depending on which side of the desk you’re on, and more than a few dollars are going to be spent on either side. If a blue collar types loses their job in many places, they can often be working somewhere else fairly soon, even though it may mean a significant pay cut. The white collar crowd will likely be looking for between six and eighteen months and more often than not, relocating will be necessary.

The sad reality is that a college degree doesn't have the 'guarantee' aspect that it once had. You can spend a lot of time and money on earning one, only to discover that you still can't get into your desired career for one of a number of reasons, and may not be able to get into anything close. Of course, if you borrowed any significant sum of money for tuition and expenses, lenders aren't very appreciative of this fact. They still want their money, and a student loan can't even be discharged in bankruptcy if the industry your career interest was in collapses right as you're about to enter it.

You can still effectively be shut out because of personal characteristics that just don't sit well with interviewing managers. It's not fair, but it's life. Sometimes there are requirements that you just can't meet. I know a lot of people with criminal justice degrees that never get anywhere. They couldn't pass a physical or a psychological evaluation, so they never were admitted to a law enforcement academy, which will most often admit whoever the various municipalities they serve send them, degree or not. Are there other jobs you can get with a criminal justice degree? You bet. But, if it's a job in the criminal justice field, you'll find yourself competing with ex-street cops who have five or more years of experience with the clientele, and while a few people who've never worn a badge or carried a gun on duty do get selected for some of the available positions, a heck of a lot of them don't. Never underestimate the power of relevent experience!

Business degrees are often the worst. Without elaborating too much, you learn that business is pretty much whatever one wants it to be, ideally legal and ethical, but not necessarily. If you have a business degree, and a lot of people do, but no experience, I wish you well! Where I'm from, the secretarial students will often start out better than those with business degrees.

When I was pursuing my degree in business, Iowa had recently passed a law mandating schools to administer anonymous surveys in all classes once per semester to evaluate the quality of the instruction and course. Apparently too many professors at the state universities wanted to work on research and as a result assistants and graduate students were giving the lectures instead. The problem with this was that a lot of these people weren't from these parts and didn't speak English in a way that could be readily understood. A lot of money was being paid for tuition and the lectures were mostly unintelligible. Ouch. Of course, tuition keeps rising and come to find out, a huge amount of it is going towards athletic programs and 'student attractions' such as rock climbing walls. Double ouch!

On the upside, one’s major is no longer such a big deal. The way things have evolved, you can get your degree in just about anything and find you’ll be able to get hired in a wide variety of positions if you’re willing to go where the jobs are and think outside the box a bit. Not everyone wants to do that, naturally. Once upon a time, a BA in psychology was useful mostly as a stepping stone to a Master’s degree or Ph.D. That’s not the case anymore. You could just as easily find yourself working in advertising, customer service, or most anything else these days!

Internships and work experience are now vital. One might not be the strongest student in the world, but if they’re a good worker, they might just have it made. Prove that lifelong learning is an acceptable course for you, and odds are you’ll go far no matter where you end up.
Hopefully my little brother will get to discover this first hand when he ends up where he wants to be someday!

Always learning himself,

The TiGor