Would you hire someone without a bachelor's degree to a job where people typically have them?

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41

@roethlisbuger:
Actually, it won’t, I can tell you that from experience. All that means is that the person in question graduated from a program where they have taken and presumably passed the course work that is felt to be necessary to meet the needs of the accreditation group. Real world is very different than college, and things like the ability to think on one’s feet, the ability to understand business concepts, the real world implications of engineering, the human elements, the ability to be creative and come up with unique solutions, are things that college quite frankly doesn’t necessarily teach, it simply indicates they have the foundations. Not to mention that ‘college degree’ may not even be in the field they are hiring for, plenty of people hire on with degrees in art history, music, history, foreign languages, in the IT realm who didn’t study it in college, who learned it later on, lots of ex science graduates end up in IT that way as well.

Yes, someone with a CS or Engineering degree has been given certain foundations, but I wasn’t talking about hiring someone with experience, once someone has experience whether they had an EE degree or a CS degree might not matter much, if they showed they could do the job. In CS there are some areas where I would argue a CS degree would be important, in areas like system programming, natural language, machine learning, it would be pretty hard for someone to learn that without a course of study, whereas regular programming, like java programming, it would be all about their experience and knowledge.

42

It took me 2 years to get an entry level job in my field when I returned to work after a number of years out of the professional workforce. Less than 4 years after finally getting the entry level job, I got a job as a director in my field. Sometimes the constraints of the job description keep excellent candidates from even being considered …

If the applicant pool is not going to be overwhelming, why not think/look “outside the box?”

43

Companies need something to gauge the competency of individuals they hire. The larger the company the more important that becomes. One reason is that if performance issues crop up it is a long and time-consuming process to let someone go.

This is why I have never hired an entry level non-CS major. It;s simple a way to reduce risk. It’s also why I typically look for BS degrees from universities that I know have good CS reputations (this addresses the “diploma mill” problem which I agree is real). When looking at experienced hires I have considered non-CS degree holders. I have hired physics majors, math majors, and EEs based on their documented expertise. I don’t recall seeing any history majors (for instance) probably because of the details of the job requirements. I would not be opposed to that - I just have not seen any.

44

I don’t have a degree and have been promoted up to the point that if I want to continue to earn the salary that I do, I can never leave my job. Despite decades of experience, I would never be considered for a job comparable to the one I have anywhere else.

Nowadays, in law firms, receptionists, secretaries, filing assistants, catering assistants require a four-year degree, so higher level jobs certainly do. At the height of the downturn, we had people in those positions from the very top schools in the country and even with advanced degrees from top schools. The downside to requiring degrees in positions that don’t need them and don’t have any level of prestige, is that when you hire the candidates the company wants, they leave as quickly as something comes along that gives them more respect and a better path forward. Which can be expensive.

45

Yes, and I would argue those foundations are important. If someone has the right foundations, they can be hired into an entry level position and taught the rest of what they need to know to operate in the real world. If someone lacks those foundations, they’re not going to work out. In the real world, not the OP’s hypothetical of a prior assuming the candidate without the degree would be perfect for the job, I need to see evidence someone possesses those foundations, and that’s extremely hard for a candidate to demonstrate without a degree or significant experience.

46

No a degree in art history doesn’t make them a better programmer, but a CS/ECE degree does. To use a specific example, in multithreaded programming, it’s very easy to create race conditions. If you don’t understand how modern compilers reorder instructions, OS scheduling, and how processors reorder instructions on modern architectures, you’re not going to know what you don’t know. If those race conditions are rare, they might not be caught in testing, and only discovered after the product goes out the door.

47

At an older cousin’s co-founded engineering tech startup which been around and expanded greatly since its founding over a decade ago, the work the firm is involved with is much more technically involved and demanding than most entry or sometimes even mid-level CS/programmer shops.

Even so and despite the fact most of the co-founders…including the cousin have engineering PhDs from top 10 or higher programs, they have hired employees who were non-engineering/STEM majors or even those who aren’t college graduates. He recounted he’s hired a few employees whose highest levels of education were a year or two of community college.

However, all employees must pass a rigorous series of interviews…including a live evaluation of their performance in a work situation. Prospective hires who were regarded as the best performing…especially on the live evaluation or demonstrated analytical/intellectual skills which show potential which they could develop were hired regardless of whether one had a bachelors or not. However, due to the nature of the work they do, applicant pool, and the interview evaluation process…vast majority tend to be engineering/STEM graduates from elite/respectable college programs.

48

@ mathmom - Frank Lloyd Wright originally started out as an engineering student. He couldn’t hack the engineering coursework and dropped out and became a self taught architect. He may have been a great artist but he was an extremely poor (actually, nonexistent) engineer. Many of his buildings that are standing today are falling apart, due to his insistence of esthetics over sound structural engineering (and the building codes of that day must have allowed him to get away with the same). One of his famous quirks was his dislike of expansion joints in reinforced concrete, which of course are required to compensate for temperature dependent expansion and contraction of the steel reinforcement. Wright felt that expansion joints detracted from the esthetic appeal of the surface, so he merely omitted them. That should have been overruled by the engineers and building code enforcement of that time. Without expansion joints the concrete will crack and come apart. This was famously demonstrated in the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, whose RC facade was literally falling apart. The museum underwent a $30 million restoration of the facade and underlying structure. - Michael, Ph.D., P.E., Electrical Engineering

49

The person I replaced got promoted to Senior Electrical Engineer and he doesn’t have a degree. But in the CA state government there is a lot of bureaucracy in the engineering jobs that perhaps you don’t even need an engineering degree tondo the job… Some of my engineering coworkers have degrees in non-engineering fields. It’s probably stricter to get hired now, but I hear that people can qualify now by just by having any 4 year degree + an EIT

50

You cannot sit for the EIT or PE exam without an ABET accredited undergraduate (bachelor) 4 year engineering degree, except in a few states that still (and hopefully will discontinue the practice of) permit one to sit for the exams having had extensive experience working under licensed engineers. You aren’t an engineer without a degree, period. Engineering, like medicine and law, requires specific knowledge and skills, which is why one goes to school to learn them.

51

I think for most rote jobs you don’t need a degree (ie technician jobs.) However, for ones that require thinking on your feet or looking at multiple solutions for a problem a degree would be better to have.

A example would be in the lab sciences how a technician doesn’t need a degree to run lab tests. However, if you want to do quality original research you better have a PhD. Usually even a masters would not cut it.

52

Good thing I work under a PE with a few others in the office who arewilling to stamp off my application if I apply once I get two years next year (already passed PE exam). It’s power settlements and someone from Southern CA Edison was surprised that engineers are hired to do this work…

53

Rote technician jobs do not require a 4 year engineering degree, hence the title “Technician”.

54

^I guess my example wasn’t the best. haha

A better one might be how in tech QA analysts are preferred to have some type of bachelors degree, but you can get by without one. However, if you want to be a good QA manager it’s better to have one so that you can better understand a project and testing at all levels.

55

Not always depending on time period and area of the world. Before the 19th century, engineering was a discipline/profession one learned mostly through apprenticeships.

Incidentally, the same was the case for law* and to a lesser extent medicine even though both were offered as a field of study in universities going back several hundred years.

Interestingly enough, it was the US which were among the pioneers in making engineering a university-level course…first through West Point which trained most US engineers in the first half of the 19th century and then other universities/technical institutes.

In other countries well into the 20th century, many areas of applied engineering were still mostly learned through apprenticeships or in some cases, offered as a course of study in higher vocational institutes one entered after middle schools or middle of high school(i.e. Britain’s former Polytechnics) such as the STEM-centered vocational high school meant to prepare students for entry into the former Soviet/current Russian armed forces’ officer training schools that a younger Russian friend attended before and during the collapse of the USSR.

Not surprisingly, when his family sought asylum in the US in the mid-'90s and he ended up being admitted to a current top 60 university to study engineering/CS, he excelled despite only having been in the US for a year before starting undergrad.

  • Technically, one can still become a lawyer through apprenticeship rather than attending law school as was the case in the past(i.e. Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln both became lawyers through that method despite the lack of a university education). However, that's become a far less of an optimal path for multiple reasons.
56

I could argue that just by getting a college degree you are better at thinking on your feet or looking for multiple solutions to a problem, a lot of college coursework unless things have changed much, often boils down to spitting back what the teacher wants, and I suspect that hasn’t changed much.Yes, I did have teachers who stressed creativity and thinking, I took a major’s physic’s section for 2nd semester physics because I didn’t want the general one, and the teacher made you think as did the guy in the lab…but I also ran into, for example, where you could be penalized for original thinking, even if right, or that emphasized the wrote work (I had one TA who routinely used to take points off because I didn’t show steps that involved basic algebra, which is idiotic for a science course, or even basic math). I would especially argue in a world where many kids seem to be gaming the system to get into top level colleges and where taking chances and thinking differently is seen as a path to ruination, I really wonder how much original thinking these kids do, or how well they can think on their feet.

To be honest, I learned a lot more about thinking on my feet from working when I was growing up, working construction and how to solve problems or even working in a retail store, or when I was a member of a rescue squad and dealing with some pretty intense situations.

That doesn’t mean I think that getting an education in college for something like engineering or whatnot doesn’t have its advantages, it does, when you study engineering or computer science you learn a pretty broad spectrum of things, that even if they aren’t directly applicable to a specific job can be valuable (even though these days, for example, I doubt many programmers use the things they learned in analysis of algorithms to figure out the best and worst runtimes of something they have written, understanding that can help make for better programming), and one of the things that someone who has learned on the job is they have a lot of practical knowledge about the things directly involved in their job/area, but may have some gaps someone who learned in college wouldn’t have. I wouldn’t quite compare engineering to medicine, the training is very different and the subject matter is different, too, for a number of reasons, and with modern medicine with what it requires, it would be next to impossible to learn it as an apprentice entirely, though parts of medicine are still a kind of apprenticeship from what i understand, clinical rotations in med school then internship and residency are pretty close to what apprentices did in a sense.

The big thing is that this kind of self taught thing is dying out simply because more and more people are going to college and it is becoming a new minimum standard, like a HS diploma once was for many jobs. The complexity is also much greater, so this kind of thing will become rarer and rarer, simple numbers predict that.

57

@cobrat - Yes, at one time a long time ago medical and legal practitioners were also trained by apprentice. Modern society recognized that professions that affect the public welfare and safety such as those, engineering, architecture, accounting, and many others need to have the specialized knowledge formally taught and the people evaluated for their competency before allowing them to practice to clients. I can tell you I would not want to drive on a bridge, fly in an airplane, or have my life be dependent upon a medical device “designed” by a self-taught or self-styled “engineer”, would you?

@musicprnt - I don’t know about you, but when I attended Stevens Institute of Technology, Rutgers, and M.I.T., three of the oldest engineering schools and scientific universities in the United States, our coursework certainly was not “spitting back what the teacher wants”. We had to demonstrate that we understood the underlying theory of the subject and solve practical problems by applying that theory. If you didn’t understand the theory and application, you didn’t get a good grade. Those schools emphasized original thinking.

There is a big difference between requiring a degree for a job unrelated to the degree just because many people have them and requiring the engineering or computer science degree for an engineering or software development job. In the first case, the degree may have no bearing on the job, in the second case it most certainly does. An engineering or computer science degree demonstrates the person is goal oriented, has at least a reasonable level of intelligence and logical problem solving ability, and has the work ethic to stick out the 4 years it takes to obtain the degree.

58

^^ Well said @Engineer80

59

However, it could work the other way, if the “overqualified” person with a BA/BS degree is more likely to leave due to other job opportunities appearing for him/her (whether such other job opportunities actually need something indicated by the person’s BA/BS degree or just require a BA/BS degree for credential-creep reasons).

60

While this discussion about fields such as engineering and law is interesting, it’s a major veer off the original OP - which specified:

I guess we have gone down the rabbit hole of thinking up examples of ways to get standard credentials without a degree – but as I understood the OP, I think the question was more along the line of, would you hire @zoosermom for whatever position she now occupies (she posted that she doesn’t have a degree, but is stuck with her present employer because she couldn’t qualify for the same job elsewhere).

So I think the area where this comes up is more in administrative jobs or business… Perhaps a job with the word “manager” in the title. And I think that experience often counts for a lot more-- the experienced, non-degreed employee may be far more competent and able to hit the ground running in their new position. Although the flip side of the coin is that some employers prefer to hire students straight out of college because they can train and mold the person more to their expectations. And while experienced + college degree looks better on paper than experienced without college degree, the real issue is the demonstrated capability of the employee, not the paper they can present.