I would hire someone without a degree, it really depends on the job and the person’s experience. For example, in programming a lot of people don’t have CS degrees, lot of people got a degree in something else and either switched to programming on the job, or took training classes at a place like Chubb, and if someone can program, does a degree in art history, music or history or French make them a better programmer? You still see jobs these days that say “bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience”, though it isn’t as common as it once was.Especially in tech with hiring foreign workers, many of them have degrees that are basically the equivalent of a trade school, the school they went to taught them programming and such, but was the equivalent of a two year degree here shrug. In IT over the years, there were a lot of people without college degrees doing the job, lot of computer operators would move into programming and other areas, for example, and often you got a lot of people who had done training programs in IT who had HS degrees, these days it is mostly going to be college graduates, though, and in many places they probably wouldn’t look at you if you at least didn’t have some college, most of them you would need a bachelor’s degree.
It is funny, there are these commercials they have been running on tv pushing firms to hire ‘different’ candidates, in the commercial you see this guy interviewing an African American woman, and he asks if she has a college degree, and she says no but that she had a lot of experience in life, did school without a car or a computer, all these things, and he decides to hire her…but it turns out to be a fantasy, the implication being he would be missing great candidates because their hiring was rooted in only a certain type of candidate. In a sense I agree with the commercial, the computer field especially has been littered with people, like the early “hackers” Steven Levy wrote about in his book by the same name at MIT, who helped in a sense create the modern computer industry, and many of them could care less about classes or getting a degree, MIT in fact had on their CS faculty someone who never even finished their UG degree…and yeah, the famous dropouts like Steve Jobs and Woz of Apple Computer (Wozniak when he created what became the apple I computer offered it to HP, where he was working, and they a)said who the heck would want that and b)said “guy doesn’t even have a degree, what does he know”, or Gates, founded their own businesses (it also could lead to a discussion about just how much finishing the degree really means, but that is another discussion:).
We have this going on in our department right now. Hiring for an assistant to the chairperson position. There are 3 applicants. Two have a bachelor’s degree but interviewed weak. (One when asked, why do you want this position? , the response was, “because it pays more money”). The third was in our department before and left for another position that turned out to be much different than what was advertised. She has a several year history with our department, knows the faculty, process, etc. Works hard and communicates well. Is personable. But…doesn’t have the bachelor’s - only an associates. It seems to be a sticking point with our admin. Seems to not make sense to me!
I have lots of programmer friends, so I’m aware of several individuals who got programming jobs without degrees, and at least a few companies who will hire programmers without degrees. Everybody has to pass a skills test, degree or not.
I don’t know why you wouldn’t especially since in your scenario you are hiring a known quantity.
Architecture used to have a path where you could apprentice for a certain number of years to an architect and become an architect as long as you could pass the licensing exam, (which when I took it was a grueling two day affair including one day of designing an entire building in eight hours), but I don’t know if any states allow that now.
@mathmom:
I don’t know about architecture, but with law (at least in NY State) you can sit for the bar exam if you have not gone to law school, you have to in a sense apprentice with a lawyer for a certain period of time (or at least that was true when my cousin took it in the late 80’s), with the CPA you can sit for the CPA exams without a public accounting degree if you have worked under a CPA for a certain number of years, and with the PE license (again, in NY State) you can take the exams if you have worked under engineers for a certain number of years (I don’t think it requires any of them be PE, but not sure, my brother is a PE, took it back in the 90’s). I don’t know how many people do that any more, or if the law has been changed since then, but there are a number of fields that allow ‘alternate certification’ like that I believe.
One can still do a similar apprenticeship to lawyer route here in my state. I met a person who recently got their license to practice after working as a law clerk for almost a decade - no law degree. Not a very common thing, but apparently every year there are a few of such applicants sitting for the bar exam.
For a Texas CPA license, it is 150 credit hours, a bachelors degree min plus other specific course level requirements.
There are some noteworthy older attorneys, such as the late John O’Quinn, who did not have an undergraduate degree before going to law school. Only 90 credit hours were required back then.
Looks like most people here say “yes” to this hypothetical question, but some mention external constraints like HR policies and such.
So where are the people who would say “no” and therefore contribute to “credential creep” where credentials like bachelor’s degrees are increasingly becoming required or preferred even for jobs where neither specific knowledge nor general skills from study to earn the credential are needed? It cannot all be due to occupational licensing requirements.
It isn’t about licensing requirements, since many of the jobs we are talking about don’t have them, it is credential creep, basically HR people decide that 'degree holder only" is the rule, likely because they think it is prestigious to have degree holders working there, not just saying that, have heard that from HR types over the years. It isn’t all that much different in a way than the firms that hire only graduates from Ivy league schools, it is mostly a kind of snobbery, that “only a college degree holder can maintain the high standards of our company” or “only people who have gone through the rigors of an elite school education can meet our standards” and both obviously are utter nonsense, but it exists nonetheless.
@TQfromtheU :
The guy who was the last CEO I worked for at my last company talked his way into Yale law school without an undergraduate degree, after having started, no kidding, as a sheep rancher:).
I think most of the “I’d hire the guy” aren’t really well thought through. The best answer above was the one that said it would depend on the personal knowledge of the person. If someone showed up interviewing as a general referral, I would wonder about the “informational content” of the fact that there was no degree. Sometimes that means that the person marches to a different drummer, and that only he can hear him.
In most positions today, you have a surfeit of applicants who are well qualified. Are there really that many people willing to go out on a limb and hire someone who is missing a piece of the standard applicants kit? Maybe there are, but for me, I think, realistically speaking, I’d want a very good story about why he hadn’t received or attempted to get a degree.
If you know the person directly, and his work, or someone that you highly trust knows him, that’s different. Without that, I think the degree-less candidate loses to the alternatives with a degree. (This might change if there is some objectively measurable skill to test, e.g. 94 mph fastball, 4.4 40 yard dash, 800 in Physics, able to ace a programmers test. )
I can hire someone to work in my office who is not licensed. I have the license everything goes out under my stamp. Actually working as an unlicensed architect is still part of the licensing process in most states, and you can hire draftsmen who after some experience are probably far more useful than someone straight out of architecture school. I know my first boss was appalled at how little I knew. Luckily he was very kind and kept give me raises as I became more useful.
Frank Lloyd Wright famously never completed his university degree work.
My response is included in the “HR constraints” bin. BTW, I understand why they are in place, but that’s another thread.
But allow me to play devil’s advocate and give one possible answer to the question:
I think that this could be a simple response to market forces. First is the growing number of BA/BS holders in the labor market. Couple that with the perceived/real value of a college education and you have an environment where non-degree holders will be at a disadvantage.
Here is a totally made up scenario. Say your hiring someone to train as a barista (no experience required). It makes sense that applications from candidates with degrees would be preferred - a degree implies a certain amount of maturity, dedication to task, etc. So a degree brings with it the “promise” of a more stable hire.
@dadx:
And I will throw the reverse at you, with a college degree these days being as common as it is, and with all the jerkwater colleges out there, many of which are diploma mills, does having that college degree mean all that much? I could argue the person who is working in their field without having gotten a college degree says something about them, that rather than punching the right tickets, going through what is expected of them and instead as you say marches to the beat of a different drummer,maybe that is just the person someone is looking for. In the end, if I see someone who has worked in the position in the industry, has worked for known companies, can talk about what they have done intelligently, can talk about how they think they could fit my team, pass any skills tests I would throw at them, then they deserve looking at. Put it this way, as a hiring manager a lot of the candidates who come through with the ‘standard’ credentials fail because they are people who have gone through everything seeking out the ‘standard credentials’ shrug.
It also depends on what kind of job we are talking about, if this were an entry level job or one where the person had little job experience, I would be reluctant, but if this is someone with a proven track record then to me that is like hiring people only because they went to X schools, when someone is experienced where they went to school (or didn’t) becomes less and less relevant, it should be all about what they have done in the working world and how they come off on the interview and the fit with the team.
What about a presumably common story like “I grew up in a lower middle income family in Pennsylvania, so my family could not afford to send me to college, and my 3.4 HS GPA was not enough to earn enough scholarships or get into a college with enough financial aid for me to attend”?
It also depends on the size of the company. In large, very formalized organizations, the HR runs the show. I am familiar with a couple of situations when the hiring manager could not hire someone who was highly qualified and came with a bunch of referrals yet did not meet the criteria randomly selected by the HR. The reason was simple - the person would not fit into the formal career ladder. OTOH, in small companies, hiring managers have much bigger discretion.
I worked for a large company where the HR department had decided that all applicants for a desperately needed job function had to pass a test related to a different job. We lost 4-6 well-qualified, highly recommended, experienced people who could not pass the stupid test. Unfortunately, the test wasn’t administered until after the multiple round of interviews. We were all upset with that process.
In the company where I work, if the job description says bachelor’s degree (and almost all do), no one who lacks that degree will be hired. Period. It doesn’t matter what your skills are, how much experience you have, or what you’ve accomplished. No degree means no job.
When I was hired six years ago, my starting date was held up for three weeks because the company verifies the college degrees of all new employees, and they were having difficulty with me because I’m so old that I earned my degree before the university computerized its records. The only record was a paper document kept in a warehouse miles from the campus – a place where the registrar’s staff usually went only once a month. I had to make multiple calls to the university to beg and plead with them to have someone make an extra trip to that warehouse to photocopy my records so that I could start the job.
