Kudos to E&Y for taking a radical approach to hiring.
However, as a concerned parent, I hope impressionable youngsters don't mistake this for 'Yay, I don't have to go to college to get a decent job anymore'.
The lifetime earnings for a college degree holder[1] is probably a lot more than for those without a degree.
If you can afford it, go to college. If you can help it, don't drop out. Get that degree. If possible, get a Masters degree. Those six years staying in school getting your undergraduate and graduate degrees, will make a huge difference in the rest of your life
We are not all destined to found unicorns or be an early employee in one. For the rest of us mortals, going to college will make a difference.
Even a Thiel Fellow probably needs to be admitted to a very competitive school to drop out and get the Thiel Fellowship.
> The lifetime earnings for a college degree holder[1] is probably a lot more than for those without a degree.
> Even a Thiel Fellow probably needs to be admitted to a very competitive school to drop out and get the Thiel Fellowship.
You pointed out the flaw in that sort of thinking yourself. Absolutely you should strive be the type of person who can get into and graduate from an elite school. The value of then actually doing it is what's suspect.
I don't think there have been any statistically significant studies done on such people (who were accepted to elite schools and declined to go in favor of starting a company), but I would love to read them if anyone has seen one.
> Absolutely you should strive be the type of person who can get into and graduate from an elite school. The value of then actually doing it is what's suspect.
What's more, it might pay off even more to actually be accepted into an elite school, but never start it, and instead carry the letter of acceptance to an employer and get a job.
Much of the real value of degrees to the prospective employee is in added leverage. As long as "enough" employers in field X require degrees, and as long as either a) the unemployment rate in X is low enough or b) your demonstrable skill is high enough, your value is increased by having that degree in X simply because now (non-competes, collusion pacts, and similar practices aside) there is competition for you.
Conversely, if you don't have the degree, your choices for employment are (perhaps unfairly) limited - not just by the employers themselves, but also by immigration policies that limit visas for skilled work to degree-holders. (Of course, if either of those limits were to disappear overnight, universities that have implicitly bet on rising value by rapidly increasing their tuition fees would be in deep, deep trouble, save perhaps those with virtually bottomless endowments. Sort of a speculative bubble, in a way.)
Exactly. One employer unilaterally lowering or eliminating its standards with respect to degrees is not going to do anything in a competitive employment market. What's more, if the labor market becomes a buyer's market for employers, filtering by degree will happen, just because it cuts down the number of applicants.
If you just want to cut down the number of applicants, that's even easier - just pick a random sample to look at.
It only makes sense to do it based on features of the individual candidates if you believe the remaining pool is, on average, better. (... or maybe more precisely, "that you will be able to select better candidates from the remaining pool for a given amount of effort").
No, filtering in the presence of an excessive number of applicants makes sense if the resulting pool is not worse than the original pool. They're saying academic performance is not correlated with professional competence. That means precisely that filtering by degree results in a not worse applicant pool.
Why expend additional effort to filter along meaningless axes to wind up with some unknown lesser number of applicants (which you might then want to shrink further) when you can already filter meaninglessly to end up with precisely the number of applications you want (by simply grabbing randomly and dropping the others on the floor)?
Because it lets people feel better about themselves and is - superficially - justifiable.
A lot of what we do in hiring, even in tech, is effectively just ways to whittle down numbers of applicants, but even here on HN there are people who will insist their way of whittling numbers down improves the applicant pool, because hand-waving and superficial logic.
You are probably right. My intend in pointing out the Thiel Fellowship is that even if you decide to drop out of an undergraduate degree, the chances of doing better without a degree finally is only if you are part of an exclusive/elite group of outliers such as Thiel fellows.
There are always outliers and then there is the general case.
I unfortunately don't remember where I heard this (maybe in the Freakonomics episode "Is college really worth it?" [1]), but 6 years of college clearly beat 6 years of experience.
Also: getting 6 years of relevant work experience is (way) harder if you don't have a college degree in the first place... The famous "you need professional experience to get a job, you need a job to get professional experience".
I initially dropped out of university after a year and started to work (went back to university a few years later). The jobs I was offered with 4 years of experience and just a high school diploma sucked in comparison to the jobs I got offered once I had 4 years of university and a degree under my belt.
I did not go to college. My first full time job was 3 years as what was basically help desk, with a bit of systems administration work thrown in. It did not pay particularly well, but it was still around the level that a lot of people with "normal" (none-STEM/Medical/etc type) degrees start at. After I got bored of it, I did some random consulting/contract work for various companies. A connection I met at one of those got me a job working for a company that would eventually wind up being purchased by IBM. At that place I was making as much as most of the people I went to high school with that were graduating with engineering degrees around that time and getting started in the industry.
My next place of employment after a few years at that company put my salary range into a level that basically none of my peers from high school are at, including ones that have STEM degrees and law degrees. The couple that went on to become doctors are just now finishing up their residencies and will probably be beating me soon.
One of my good friends from school followed a pretty similar path as me, and has an excellent job as a security engineer for a fortune 10 company without a degree.
Networking + ability will help a lot in making up for not having a degree.
It's not really comparable though. Most traditional degrees lead to long progressive careers. Practical software engineering can do, but generally doesn't. Other IT fields even less so. Especially since it's a degree heavy field to begin with.
I dropped out of university after a year and did a startup for 2 years. The jobs I've been offered since parting ways with the startup have been as good or better than my peers who went the traditional route.
I think the takeaway is that, in certain fields and certain jobs, it's possible to get enough experience to be qualified for high quality jobs without a degree if you're willing to put in the effort. There's no "good job please" shortcut, but a degree isn't necessarily a prerequisite now.
Tangentially. The jobs where mostly of the sys. admin, support and web CRUD development variety, and now I do mainly programming of the data analysis and modelling variety.
This is very true of graduate school vs not, but I'm not so sure about undergrad. A few points:
I stopped going to school after undergrad and started working, while most of my friends went and did grad school. When they graduated I was already ahead of the salaries they were being offered and had 5 years of experience. I'd also been earning twice as much as them for those five years and had considerable savings.
Also, I've hired people who never went to college. They were fairly qualified but what I found was odd gaps in their knowledge. They could write good code but then didn't know anything about say bayesian probability, so I would have to design the software for them which they could then code. They could certainly learn about bayesian probability, but the problem was they didn't even know it existed so they were pursuing a terrible solution to the problem that had a well known and simpler solution, until someone who went to college came and informed them. Perhaps the same applies to those who went to grad school, but I've never found that to be the case in practice.
"They were fairly qualified but what I found was odd gaps in their knowledge."
This very much goes both ways. A lot of recent college graduates lack practical software engineering experience, has overlooked the importance of related fields[0] and tend to be stuck in this examination mindset of individual correctness.
> They were fairly qualified but what I found was odd gaps in their knowledge.
As long as everyone knows that would be considered an odd gap in knowledge, you can prepare for that faster and cheaper than college (if not faster, it's certainly more cost-efficient). I could study endlessly worrying about knowledge gaps that would be an easy solution to a problem I currently have. There is value in splitting up the knowledge burden of solving problems. You can go wide, they can go deep.
I say this with no knowledge of what bayesian probability is because I've never studied it!
To fill in all these gaps you'd need the equivalent of a 4 year CS degree. I say this as someone who worked as a software engineer for about 5 years before going back for my degree.
You spend most of a CS degree studying the theory and techniques developed over the last 60+ years. These techniques are incredibly useful time and again.
It's the difference between spending a month trying to solve a problem or realizing the problem is actually just a version of a graph theory problem that was solved 50 years ago.
There are many positions in the field that can be filled by people without degrees. But there are also many that need someone who knows the theory and history. That's not to say that there aren't rare individuals who learn all this through self study, but they are rare.
5 years of grad school implies a PhD - in which case they should be hyper specialize in some field. Sounds like your friends just chose the wrong subject to pursue a PhD in. Normally you're supposed to end up being one of the top 20 experts in a very narrow field of study.
In generally this doesn't bear out in computer science (which I still think is barely qualified to be a department)
They are in fact top experts in their fields (1/2 were computer science and the other 1/2 were chemistry). But even being the top in your field doesn't outweigh 5 years of experience.
Maybe for their first jobs in industry. But assuming they aren't in academia, I'm betting a PhD in an in-demand CS field will be making a lot more than someone with a BS and 5 extra years experience in a few years.
Not to mention that for the type of jobs that require a PhD, the 5 years it takes is 5 years of relevant experience. And there are many jobs that are effectively closed to people without PhDs regardless of how much experience they have.
Depends if the jobs you can get offer experience that will take you where you want to go.
In some companies it might be possible to start out in the mail room and end up as the CEO. But if you spend six years in the mail room and you're still in the mail room, you're probably not at that type of company.
>The lifetime earnings for a college degree holder[1] is probably a lot more than for those without a degree.
The problem with these kind of studies is that they take the average, and income only has a lower bound. From my personal observation, many of my university classmates (Spain, '12) would have been better off if they had opted for a technical degree.
">The lifetime earnings for a college degree holder[1] is probably a lot more than for those without a degree."
I'm assuming this statement is true. I, as an American, have heard it forever. If it's true, I don't think it's true just because of the degree.
While I get clobbered for this next statement, I'm tired of dancing around it. A lot of college graduates come from rich families. I have yet to find one rich family who didn't help out their kids in one way, or another. Some pay for Everything. Some, especially, the father, knows first hand just how difficult it is to make real money in America. They help out their kids get through expensive graduate programs, finance that business, co-sign for that first house, the perks can be tiny, like access to the family lawyer--who actually gives honest advice, etc.
The poor and middle class kids usually have caring parents, but no one is helping them out. There's not much guidance growing up--not because the parents don't care; they just don't know. And as to money, most just can't help out.
In my high school, the kids who "made it" had rich parents. Even the ones who went to UC Santa Cruz, and came home with different brains, are doing well right now. I know so many average, below average rich kids, who with family money, just seem to do well. Most don't talk about it, because it's embarrassing, but I've just seen too often to be anything other than external factors(money), and the right guidance.
A perfect example is our California Luitentant governor. He was a few years ahead of me in high school. I watched his family help him out everytime he failed, and he failed a lot.
Whether it was his learning disorder, his no direction college/baseball? career, his failed bars, his failed businesses, his legal problems, etc.; his family always helped him out. This dude would have been homeless if not for that powerful family. It's more common than people think. Yes, I used an extreme example because I just watched this guy on some tech channel abusing all the tech lingo, and he's fresh on my mind.
I know HN doesn't like it when we talk about family privilege; why? (Yes--I know their are rich kids who get no help, and made it by way of Horatio Alger's path. You're the exception though.
That's why I have always been for helping out the poor and middle class kids. The help is not enough, but take advantage of what's available. And I know--it's not fair that you have to finance that business through the credit card mafia. Yes, you will watch some of your friends get these cushy positions in life. Don't beat yourself up over it--you probally didn't have much/any help?
If you do make it, try to help the ones who really didn't have the support. No, they won't ask out of , but just give them a shot? They are grateful? If anything don't take advantage of them? I'm not sure some colleges/businesses/professionals don't take advantage of them? Remember--rich kids don't go to schools that advertise?
(Went to rant pretty quick. Sorry--It just seems like we get this college debate too often. If I was to do it over again; Yes, I would go to college. I had a great time, on so many levels. I just might, with these tuition levels, after graduation, build up my credit. I might then start to pay off student loans with cc debt. I would then file chapter 7, and start fresh. It's a glitch that's there, but is hard to pull off. These cc companies still redline, so your access to cash, will vary by county. And there's the morality clause the poor, and middle class are spoon feed--which will prevent this tactic from becomming popular? Think of it as a strategic bankruptcy? Yea, that one the rich do all the time? Do it my the book--don't do anything illegial.)
Oh, I don't know - it just depends on what your kids want to do. I think it's sad that we've reached a point where you're expected to have a four year degree, and $80k of debt in order to get a job as a receptionist or a barista.
> I think it's sad that we've reached a point where you're expected to have a four year degree, and $80k of debt in order to get a job as a receptionist or a barista.
(a) They can become a receptionist or barista once they've definitively proved to themselves that they can't get a degree and do something more fulfilling, intellectually stimulating and ultimately likely to lead them to lives with more freedom and time to devote to their own projects.
(b) The 80k debt is a problem with the USA, not nearly so much with developed countries elsewhere. I expect you'd agree with this but it shouldn't be a reason not to go to university; the USA just needs to get away from making people pay so much for their education and healthcare. (The article was about the UK). I work in the USA and I've just got back from traveling in Indonesia for a couple of weeks. It was really sad to see that all the people we met traveling were from Europe and none from the USA: I think a large part of this is that young Americans go into debt for college and think that they can't afford to travel, and thus don't become as familiar with other cultures.
> (a) They can become a receptionist or barista once they've definitively proved to themselves that they can't get a degree and do something more fulfilling, intellectually stimulating and ultimately likely to lead them to lives with more freedom and time to devote to their own projects.
It's entirely possible to be intellectually capable of passing a degree, and even to force one's self to do it, but be utterly unsuited for the sort of work that it equips you for. More to the point, it's reasonable to expect people to know that about themselves before they go, school work is not that dissimilar to university work.
If you're struggling to get through a degree, having to really force yourself to do the work, I question whether you're likely to find what it enables you to do more fulfilling or intellectually stimulating. What possible reason would you have to believe that continuing to do something that makes you miserable will make you happy if you end up in a job where those skills are relevant?
It is possible to be smart but uninspired. And the down side of people telling you not to give up, that this roll of the dice will pay off even if the others didn't, is the gambler at the table as morning rolls in, holding his last five dollars in the world.
This has never worked out before, but now...
College isn't for everyone, and many will know long before they go whether they enjoy the sort of work they're likely to do there. They can go later, when and if they discover a passion it would have value to. In the absence of such, their going is a waste of time and money whether or not they pass.
I was really surprised when Congress decided to make it very hard or almost impossible to discharge Student Loan debt through bankruptcy while forgiving other types of debt.
This fact in addition to the fleecing of the nation's youth by the For-Profit Colleges has given a really bad impression about going to college.
The best thing a nation can do for its future is to encourage (and make it easy) for students to get the best education that they can.
You can bet that India and China are investing heavily in their nation's youth and encouraging STEM based higher education. They understand that this is of strategic importance.
I am amused by how effective nationalism is, when used to cloth motives that might be considered more base. (personally, I think greed is often less evil than nationalism, but I'm a bit weird.)
In this case, industry wants more programmers, but doesn't want to pay the wages that would make this happen in a free market.
> In this case, industry wants more programmers, but doesn't want to pay the wages that would make this happen in a free market.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Do you know someone who considered studying computer science but decided not to because the wages were too low? If not then how would increased wages increase supply?
>I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Do you know someone who considered studying computer science but decided not to because the wages were too low?
Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying happens.
The thing you have to remember is that this isn't a choice between underwater basket weaving and computer science... you're competing for the top tier students. The people who would have gone into law, medicine, top-tier business or finance instead. And compared to those careers, programmers don't get paid very well at all.
Even if some of them can't make it as programmers, certainly, some of them could. My own stereotypes are that while most of the business people I know lack the requisite gray matter, most of the people I know who studied law or medicine could have quite easily become programmers. (how many of them would switch for mere money? I don't know.)
If working as a programmer paid more than being a business person, working in finance, being a lawyer or being a doctor, it wouldn't change everyone's mind, sure... but it certainly would change many minds.
I don't know if that's true anymore. Programmers don't make finance money, but they make doctor or lawyer money (higher at the bottom end, maybe a bit lower at the top end). Programming has pulled far away from the low six figure ceiling that used to apply and still does in most engineering fields, even for people with elite qualifications.
see, this isn't my impression. do you have data? my impression is that $150K is the cap for us regular folks and world-class programmers can make in the low $200K range... if they are willing to live in one of the highest cost of living areas around.
I mean, unless you are like the other person who was talking to me and are counting managers and business people who also have programming skills. But I count those as managers or business people, because they're getting paid as managers or business people for doing manager or business person jobs.
My impression is that $300K is pretty middle of the road for doctors, even in lower cost of living areas.
For lawyers, my impression was that the bottom half got shit, like less than we do, but the sky is the limit for the top half.
My impression is that programmers were sort of the opposite of lawyers, in that our pay bands really are pretty narrow... there isn't even a doubling between the best and the average.
> If working as a programmer paid more than being a business person, working in finance, being a lawyer or being a doctor
Even if money is your only motivation programming is a better choice than any of those.
Being a programmer makes you more money more quickly than any of those professions and has a higher ceiling to boot. How many billionaire lawyers and doctors are there? How many businesspeople, financiers, lawyers, or doctors make six figures at 22 years old?
Not only that, it's also less risky! How many programmers are $250k in debt at 25 years old without having worked a day in their lives in their chosen professions? How many doctors? How many lawyers?
>Being a programmer makes you more money more quickly than any of those professions and has a higher ceiling to boot. How many billionaire lawyers and doctors are there? How many businesspeople, financiers, lawyers, or doctors make six figures at 22 years old?
I agree on the first part. If you are optimizing for cash at 22, you are best off as a programmer.
However, by the time you are 30? your doctor and lawyer friends are making 3x what you are.
As for your ceiling argument, you are simply wrong. There are some programmers who made the jump to business person who have done very well but those people made their billions doing business, not programming.
You can make a strong argument that if you want to be a business person today, you should first get training as an Engineer; many of the most ambitious MBAs I have met had an Engineering undergrad. That's valid, but they are still business people more than programmers.
If you actually just want to be a programmer, you have to be world-class to make a quarter-million a year. I mean, I know some guys who do it... but they are absolutely incredible in ways that most of us simply couldn't be. For the rest of us, "six figures" means "we're going to peak around $150K/yr" - and that's only if we live in a place with incredibly high rent.
Realistically, Doctors and Lawyers cap out much higher than Programmers.
>Not only that, it's also less risky! How many programmers are $250k in debt at 25 years old without having worked a day in their lives in their chosen professions? How many doctors? How many lawyers?
Eh, there are plenty of people who wash out of computer science programs. That's true of both doctors and lawyers; you do have a point that because doctor and lawyer training takes longer, you have the risk that if you wash out later in the process, you will have wasted a lot more money.
> You can make a strong argument that if you want to be a business person today, you should first get training as an Engineer
It sounds like we're in violent agreement on this point. It's much, much easier to become a millionaire/billionaire if you can invent/write/build some kind of prototype yourself than by raising investment capital and finding/convincing others to build it for you.
> Eh, there are plenty of people who wash out of computer science programs. That's true of both doctors and lawyers; you do have a point that because doctor and lawyer training takes longer, you have the risk that if you wash out later in the process, you will have wasted a lot more money.
Not just that: If you're a mediocre programmer you can still make $50k working 9-5 writing enterprise Java CRUD apps. If you're a mediocre 'businessman' or lawyer you're working at Starbucks if at all.
>It sounds like we're in violent agreement on this point. It's much, much easier to become a millionaire/billionaire if you can invent/write/build some kind of prototype yourself than by raising investment capital and finding/convincing others to build it for you.
Yes, programming is a useful skill, no argument there.
I'm just saying that some of the people going into law, medicine, etc... would go into programming if the pay was better.
I got out of college 11 years ago without nearly that much debt. I had loans for a little over $16,000 for In-State tuition to a state school. But I just checked, and now it costs over $100,000 for 4 years there. That's insane.
Degrees are the most useful for immigration purposes I've found. It lets you have an ability to work in many places in the world.
But that is bureaucratic requirements more than any specific merit about the degree, where you get your degree or how much you spend on your degree, time or money.
Does getting that graduate degree help? I stuck it out for the degree (Computer Science), and I don't think it helped much with my job prospects. I get paid the same as my peers who only did undergrad.
I think from a strictly economic point of view, a graduate degree is a terrible investment.
Look at it this way - you could spend the 4+ years you spend in grad school working in a high paying job, investing all the difference between grad school stipend and your pay. Once you add all the career progression you can make in the time you spend in grad school - it's obvious that grad school is a net loser, monetarily speaking.
The upside is that, if you pick something that you love, in grad school you get to spend time dedicated to learning and studying something fascinating - and with a good professor, you'll have a pretty fantastic time. In short - do grad school if you are interested in your project, don't do it as a sort of career investment.
If you're doing grad school full time then it should only take 2 years for a Masters.
You can get a Masters in 4 years while also working at your high paying job. That just costs you a night or two a week (and not that much money, depending on the school)
He is talking about a phd, a masters is an absolutely terrible investment, and strong negative hiring signal whenever I see it, unless it was done strictly to immigrate to the US.
I've worked with so many people that were amazing, and had Masters, and others who were nearly useless to destructive. I don't believe it is a signal at all.
Precisely why I did not do a Masters. I found out I learned a lot more (relevant skills in the 'real' world) in my summer internships than I did during the semesters in school.
Yes, especially if your graduate degree involves skills such as programming and statistics and certain scientific areas which are likely to translate well into industry. One thing that a PhD (and Masters to a lesser extent I guess) tends to give is an appreciation for the depth and volume of work that is out there in the research literature; another thing is the important skill of knowing when you don't understand something. Another thing is math and statistics: rather than being just abstract areas of knowledge in which you can do the homework exercises, after a quantitative graduate degree these become tools you actually have experience of using.
Something that people often miss in these conversations is that there is a very strong networking effect from a graduate degree. Doing a graduate degree will mean that via your supervisor you will meet and probably work with some of the top people in your field. I think you would find it hard to cold-email them to ask for a job if you hadn't been introduced to that network via graduate education.
My Masters in applied math seems to at least somewhat impress people and I feel it has opened up many a door that would have been much harder to get through without it. While I don't know if I get paid more or not, I certainly feel it has let me get involved with far more interesting work.
In certain parts of the country (the Bay Area), that need people with specialized/advanced knowledge in CS (which a Masters would definitely provide), I would expect that your graduate CS degree will definitely give you a leg up on those without one.
If you have an undergraduate degree in a non-CS subject but you get a graduate degree in CS, your will have about the same or better knowledge than a person with a graduate degree in CS.
Of course, there is a great amount of subjectivity given to the School that you attended and your work experience after that.
It increases your worldwide mobility. For example, someone getting a green card (US) gets onto the EB-2 track rather than EB-3, they get 25 points instead of 20 in the education category for Canada, etc.
> Kudos to E&Y for taking a radical approach to hiring.
Kudos to E&Y for taking a sensible approach to hiring.
As I'm sure your aware most colleges and secondary schools share similar patterns for teaching and student evaluation. Those patterns are not optimal for all brain types. Furthermore those patterns are not optimal for all work types.
Anecdotally many of use can point to one or more unimpressive individuals holding impressive credentials of post graduate education.
Personally speaking, I'm a high school dropout. I work in a niche that did not exist during the time I would have been in college. What degree plan would have served me best? Oddly enough, a degree in philosophy. Obviously that would have been mine (and my parents) last choice.
I'm not saying college or secondary education are bad, it's just that when I look ahead for my children, it's a crap shoot. Should I pressure them to attend college? Why? Short of medicine, and certain credentialed professions what essential knowledge about their future profession will they learn in college that they could not possibly learn on their own (ab initio or ad hoc) through various other means?
I wish I could speak for professions such as Medicine or Law, but I can't. I can however speak for an Engineering degree. The following is an example of what a typical CS undergraduate student would study in the US[1]:
● AL - Algorithms and Complexity
● AR - Architecture and Organization
● CN - Computational Science
● DS - Discrete Structures
● GV - Graphics and Visualization
● HCI - Human-Computer Interaction
● IAS - Information Assurance and Security
● IM - Information Management
● IS - Intelligent Systems
● NC - Networking and Communications
● OS - Operating Systems
● PBD - Platform-based Development
● PD - Parallel and Distributed Computing
● PL - Programming Languages
● SDF - Software Development Fundamentals
● SE - Software Engineering
● SF - Systems Fundamentals
● SP - Social Issues and Professional Practice
A typical 4 year undergraduate degree covers 120 credits typically divided among 40 (3 credits each) or more subjects.
In addition to the 18 or so above the rest of the subjects include subjects in primary engineering, mathematics, electronics, mechanics, humanities and several others in addition to all the related practical/lab work.
Most lay people assume that getting a degree in CS means learning HTML, CSS, one or two programming languages and most possibly some CRUD application development with a database backend.
Hence the prevalence of 'boot camps' of various natures that create 'rock stars'.
There is no way in heck that a person who is not forced into the degree track is going to be motivated enough to study all of this stuff. A lot of this is very very hard.
Now, after studying all of this, do you think you will use even a small fraction of this in the types of jobs a typical IT/software consultant would do in 90% of the run of the mill jobs out there. NO. However the degree exposed you to subjects that you would never be exposed to unless you were in that field. And this is only an undergraduate degree.
There is more to a degree that what you can learn by self motivation. At least in the technical space.
You could study the stuff listed in 2 years of school max. The rest of university (from my experience) is fluff designed to fill up four years so they can bring in more tuition dollars.
How many people would pay $1,100 for "Intro to Spanish" or "Society, Technology and Values" if it wasn't a requirement to get your CS degree?
> There is no way in heck that a person who is not forced into the degree track is going to be motivated enough to study all of this stuff. A lot of this is very very hard.
Bullshit. I'm studying this stuff now and it is hard but I love it.
'Yay, I don't have to go to college to get a decent job anymore'
That's always been true. Vocational careers earn pretty good money (quite a lot more than a lot of degrees) and have good career prospects, particularly with parents looking down on vocational training for a career.
College is not a good idea for everyone. People who struggled in high school are unlikely to finish college, and most of the college premium comes from the degree itself: there's a huge gap in earnings between "some college" and "college graduate" (and less of a gap in student loan balance).
> The lifetime earnings for a college degree holder[1] is probably a lot more than for those without a degree.
Which degree may matter a lot too. Without coming down either side of the thing, when you have literature and art-history students in the same category as engineering and law students...
You don't sound particularly impressed. Despite you're misgivings about the rookies, these firms have effectively rolled the old master & apprentice system forward into the 21st century.
The billing machine you mention is also not quite right. In practice the vast majority of the fees negotiated up front (often on tender basis) & driven by hours only on paper. So effectively the Big 4 firm loses money if there are freeloader rookies on board (revenue stays the same, staff costs go up).
I can definitely understand the value of a Big 4 firm when it comes to accounting/auditing.
It is the IT Consultancy part that I have concerns with.
I understand the value of the Master & Apprentice model. However I would rather not pay for the Apprentice's training myself.
I know there was a push for separating the Accounting/Auditing side from the IT consultancy side after the Enron and related scandals but they have probably coalesced back together.
>However I would rather not pay for the Apprentice's training myself.
No more than any other business model that has people learning on the job - I'm tempted to say less as the process is designed from top to bottom to deal with & compensate for people learning on the job.
The more junior people come with much lower cost so there is actually a lot of pressure on those "one or two really smart people" you mentioned (aka seniors) to drive effective utilisation of the rookies. This also means people start of being told "do this" monkey fashion...but then very quickly (<3 years) progress to a position where you're expected to demonstrate real world leadership over sizable teams in a client facing capacity. Its far from perfect, but its a system that pumps out an incredible amount of young people that went through a trial-by-fire education in real world business & walked away with solid skills.
>It is the IT Consultancy part that I have concerns with.
Not something I can specifically comment on to be honest I've seen fairly little of that (saw some cool real time cyber attack monitoring stuff though - which caught me by surprise). As I see it all the professions (Law, IT, Accounting etc) are always trying to eat each other's lunch so there will be uncomfortable moves into someone else's territory. (And be judged as unqualified by the incumbent)
>they have probably coalesced back together.
It'll depend on the firm in question. From personal experience - on the ground the divisions (Accounting vs advisory) are pretty cliquey in my experience even if they are supposedly "together" from a legal perspective. Kinda like a programmer would have to make a very real effort to get transferred to sales/finance/HR department in the average company...they're different tribes.
This has been my experience as well at PWC. There are one or two seniors on the team while the rest of the team is staffed with interns/new associates/coop students.
This is a very long time coming. So extremely talented individuals who had to work through university (and so grades suffered) will have an opportunity to compete on a level playing ground. TBH, this makes sense. Many of the well rounded / think for yourself / independent people I met in university were supporting themselves while in University.
Does E&Y really want well rounded / think for yourself / independent people? Or do they want people who will learn the regulations; who will apply them ruthlessly; and who are always acting to maximize the profitability of the company?
If it's a matter of doing what you're told, computers are great for that. Complex problems that require human level intelligence require people who can make localized decisions without being hand held all the way through. The problem of new grads that performed well at university is that they are best at solving narrow, well defined problems. If that's all that E&Y is doing, I question whether they are providing any competitive value.
Yes, one would assume a forward thinking, competitive accounting firm is developing such software / hardware. Who's going to be more successful in the future? The accounting firm with an army of yes men that do what they're told, or the accounting firm with extremely talented / hardworking / creative individuals working alongside computers doing all the grunt work? I think E&Y recognizes that all the assembly line aspects of their job is rapidly vanishing and what's left is the hard part that has no clear, easy answers.
>Instead, the company will use numerical tests and online “strength” assessments to assess the potential of applicants.
I'm not certain that focusing on numeracy tests to assess an applicant is such a great step forward. I get the sense that this will only encourage candidates to "study for the test" and will actually produce more false positives.
I think this is a good move, but I'm worried that people will understand it as "education is useless, I should go work".
The problem here is very obviously that most educational systems are completely broken. The american one maybe the most, since it's so "famous".
I come from France, I had a better education than you can get probably anywhere in the world (I went to les Mines de Paris, roughly equivalent to the top 10% of MIT), and EVERYTHING, since I was 5 years old, was free and based on merit. This leads to people with degrees actually being much more performant in the workplace. I am 100% sure this study would have opposite results in France, as it is very easy to look at what the alumni of my school go to become.
People, education is primordial, paying for education is a sin that brings all this shit out. Someone needs to fix this, and probably no one will in my lifetime in america, it is very sad
Glad to hear you're happy with your education in France. But...
First: The article is about the U.K., not the U.S., so I'm not sure why you're bemoaning the state of U.S. education here.
Second:
>I come from France, I had a better education than you can get probably anywhere in the world (I went to les Mines de Paris, roughly equivalent to the top 10% of MIT), and EVERYTHING, since I was 5 years old, was free and based on merit. This leads to people with degrees actually being much more performant in the workplace. I am 100% sure this study would have opposite results in France, as it is very easy to look at what the alumni of my school go to become.
This is not very persuasive. One could run the same line of argument about American (or Chinese, or British, etc.) universities, since in the U.S., like France and most other places, it remains the case that college graduates earn much more than their peers without college education, and even more so (sometimes dramatically) at elite universities.
But apparently this just doesn't necessarily translate into success at Ernst & Young.
It's particularly weak since there is a significant network effect in Les grandes ecoles, having much smaller classes than US-style universities. Not all of the benefits of having been to one are down to the quality of the curriculum,
In any case I think it's foolish to read too much into this. Large corporations try a lot of things, and they don't always work out for the best. If E&Y really finds that it improves the quality of their workforce and their competitors follow suit, it will be interesting, but until then it's just an experiment.
> I come from France, I had a better education than you can get probably anywhere in the world (I went to les Mines de Paris, roughly equivalent to the top 10% of MIT)
What is it about French Universities that makes them so exceptional? I ask because I've heard this "I come from a French University, and it is reaaaally good" refrain from a lot of French people – but I haven't seen that many exceptional performance amongst them. [I should say though, I have met some really great and hard-working French university graduates, so the overall level is definitely quite good.]
I suspect that, much like the U.S., the French simply have grown accustomed to seeing themselves as having the best education in the world. So when I read comments like this, I just tell myself that this must be what it's like all the time for people in other countries hearing Americans bragging about the U.S.
As for the evidence that one system is better than the other, I think I'll stay out of that one, other than to say that I don't know how you would reliably measure this objectively except by looking at a ranking that attempts capture programs' reputations among employers in the field. Even this will, of course, exhibit some form of national bias, though interestingly the most well-known ranking, U.S. News and World Report ranks many Chinese universities very highly, which might suggest that their national bias isn't too extreme. And then there is the problem of controlling for differences in population, etc.
> I suspect that, much like the U.S., the French simply have grown accustomed to seeing themselves as having the best education in the world. So when I read comments like this, I just tell myself that this must be what it's like all the time for people in other countries hearing Americans bragging about the U.S.
In my experience (not American, though I work in the US), that isn't usually the case in the tech field. I've almost never heard Americans bragging about how good or exclusive their school is.
Now there is a lot of mystique about being from the Ivy League in the US, but it is usually confined to status and social connections within the US ("ooooh, he went to Harvard and the Yale for grad school, must have connections") rather than being compared worldwide. Maybe this is what you mean by "bragging about the US"?
He's not even talking about an university and rather about a selective public college that only selects few people. Its selection is elitist and surprise, people who come out of it are good + have a good network. I'd say there's a strong selecition bias there.
I understand it that E&Y's priorities are not with successfully educated candidates.
Who can easily get onto degree courses (but may not be successful there), and then easily be coached through online tests? One type of person: rich people with connections.
Depends very much on the course, I think, and the university. I was the only kid from my high school applying to Cambridge, and what prep they gave me was quite misguided, but I don't think it's possible to fake the process (in-person, test with ten hard problems (not requiring any knowledge outside the standard high school course, just more problem-solving ability) where you're not expected to solve more than two or three, then discussing them with your interviewers). I felt like there was some of what you describe with the people I met in humanities courses (of course you can attribute some of that to STEM snobbery), but on the side I saw, once you applied (and sure, I suspect there are people with the ability but without the wealth or connections who are too intimidated to apply), they wanted the best, and I'm sure they got them.
I got a place after my state school simply advised me not to bother applying. Independent schools don't give such misguided advice.
33% of Cambridge students (today) come from the 7% independent sector, with privilege evident at every level: independent candidates far more likely to apply, independent candidates still more likely to be offered a place upon application.
I don't have the data about the results but I suspect this trend reverses.
The big consultancies don't really give a crap what you studied or what skills you have, they just want your intelligence and self-discipline. Now they're dropping the assumption that not having a degree means you're not smart. Nothing more, and nothing less.
(Everything I've ever heard about these consultancies suggest they are very bad places to work, if anyone's tempted)
People who join consultancies at the start of their career are normally not doing it because it is a good place to work. Instead, it is a launching point. Experience, money, and the "up or out" management style which means you'll have rapid advancement until you start to stagnate, then you leave on your own personal path. Some will succeed, some will not.
To me, it seems like a path for management-minded individuals that is analogous to doing YC for your startup. Put all your life into it, play the games with the people who have money, most people will wash out early, but a few notables will become wealthy and have a powerful network to continue your career.
To be fair, the workplace quality of these consultancies is really dependant on which country you work in. There are barely any good stories about the U.S. member firms, but I know from experience that they can be a great and rewarding place to work in Europe.
Maggie Stilwell, EY’s managing partner for talent, said the changes would “open up opportunities for talented individuals regardless of their background and provide greater access to the profession”.
My wife's employer instituted a similar policy: instead of a qualification requirement, they now ask candidates to do a lengthy take-home exercise.
Her experience is that, if anything, it's actually damaging for accessibility, because in practice the candidates who have the confidence (and possibly outside help) to do well are pretty well exclusively the ones with traditional backgrounds, a sense of entitlement, and high grades from good institutions.
Many, but I'd not say all, blanket degree requirements are a unfair and inefficiency-driving discriminatory practice along the lines of the criminal record check-box.
We need a ban the box campaign for academic credentials so that applicants are judged on their skill and merit and not on too often flimsy credentials.
This is a great step. In several cases, degrees can be a good way to filter applicants, but having them as mandatory requirements in these cases can sometimes deny a potentially good candidate an opportunity. For example, I know a lot of great front-end engineers who don't know what Big O is.
Good! Having done a lot of recruiting recently I've noticed no correlation between degree classification and problem solving ability. I have a 2:2 myself :)
The title for the HN submission is currently very misleading.
HN headline: "Ernst and Young Drops Degree Requirement for Recruitment"
THE headline: "Ernst and Young drops degree classification threshold for graduate recruitment"
The meaning is very different: the first suggests you no longer need to have a degree at all; the second merely suggests you no longer need to have done well in your degree.
Also worth noting is that Ernst and Young already had a 'EY School Leaver Programme' (5 year training programme for people direct from school).
Companies like them and Deloitte still offer traditional auditing and accounting services, but their cash cow is mostly in IT contracting for government and Fortune 500-type companies.
Not to mention that when it comes to accounting and fiscal advice, they're more tax avoidance companies than accounting companies.
Take away the big four, and I wonder if $tech_multinational would dare to play things like the double Irish for some time. Just as an example, have a closer look at EU commission president Juncker's activities in his former job in Luxemburg, and you'll see what I mean.
Well duh. If we don't need degrees to create computer programs, then why would someone need a degree for any other job in the world, which just involve pushing buttons on software programs we create?
> Personally, I prefer my doctors ... to have formal qualifications.
Why? So they can charge you more? You know medical school in the US is pass/fail and has a 96% graduation rate? Its completion at that point is practically meaningless.
And all so I have to pay $50 to get a vaccine administered because nobody is allowed to prescribe one without a $250k medical degree.
I don't see an issue with a 96% graduation rate when med schools are incredibly difficult to get in to. Not only that but even within med schools, depending on how well you do you might not get in to specific programs; for example you have to do better to be a surgeon than to be a general physician.
If they didn't have a 96% graduation rate I think we would be screwed because we already do not have enough doctors as it is. And with med schools it's not like you can increase the number of students easily as each student requires a lot of resources due to requiring residency and things like that.
The selection criteria for medical school admission has little to do with skill and more to do with how likable you are in your personal statement and interview.
After someone passes that selection criteria (which again, seems to have little to do with being a competent physician), it doesn't seem like enough of them are being filtered out for being bad at actual medicine.
I went to a good school in mathematics and we only had a 70% graduation rate. The people who dropped out or switched majors had passed the rigorous selection criteria just like the rest of us. I'm suspicious the equivalent cohort in medical school just get pushed through and graduate all the same and become bad doctors.
> And with med schools it's not like you can increase the number of students easily as each student requires a lot of resources due to requiring residency and things like that.
Most who can't hack it fail in first year. I don't think watching lectures and writing exams in first and second years is all that resource-intensive. And even if it were, they'd be paying tuition to cover it all the same.
However, as a concerned parent, I hope impressionable youngsters don't mistake this for 'Yay, I don't have to go to college to get a decent job anymore'.
The lifetime earnings for a college degree holder[1] is probably a lot more than for those without a degree.
If you can afford it, go to college. If you can help it, don't drop out. Get that degree. If possible, get a Masters degree. Those six years staying in school getting your undergraduate and graduate degrees, will make a huge difference in the rest of your life
We are not all destined to found unicorns or be an early employee in one. For the rest of us mortals, going to college will make a difference.
Even a Thiel Fellow probably needs to be admitted to a very competitive school to drop out and get the Thiel Fellowship.
[1] Forbes; http://www.forbes.com/sites/troyonink/2014/05/05/federal-res...