I recently heard a podcast of 60 minutes that I just loved! It seems there is a guy, Peter Thiel, who is actually encouraging people to think twice about automatically (is there a word "lemmingly?") signing up for college! How refreshing! The fact that he happens to be a millionaire means that some people will listen to him, that won't give a second thought to what an unknown like me says on a seldom read blog.
What he is doing is a great start, but I would so like to ask Mr. Thiel one question. Are you requiring college in all the businesses you own or strongly influence, for positions that really don't need college? Or do you think that only entrepreneurs should be able to skip college?
See, here's the thing: people who don't go to college can be paid less as employees, and yet maintain the same lifestyle as those who are college grads, and making more. Why? Because our budget doesn't have to include paying back college loans. So you can subtract the amount grads are paying monthly from our paychecks, and we won't feel the pinch. I'm not talking about people who know nothing. I'm talking about people who are just as able to do the job as your grads.
It seems to me, this would be a win-win situation. Employers' costs would go down, but employees would not have to downgrade the lifestyle associated with a particular type of job. Employers would also get the employee at a younger age--probably when their personal living costs were less, and they could actually be started at an even lower wage, as inexperienced workers to be trained. This is fair. It goes without saying that they should be given raises as time goes on and they become more valuable, having been fully trained in your company. To keep them at the lower wage, would of course be unfair.
Of course, this would mean that only non-college grads would have to be hired for certain positions. I don't mean just dishwashing. I mean positions where a non-graduate could do the job just as well, with the same in-house training you give your graduate hires. It is only when businesses begin to hire non-grads that people will risk not going to college.
Am I suggesting that college is unnecessary for all kinds of jobs? No. But I can tell you, as a person looking for a job, that I see plenty of jobs that I know, without a doubt, that I have the skills for, but would be denied on the basis of not having a degree. And the funny thing is that it can be a degree in basket weaving in many cases!
For jobs that require only basket-weaving degrees (no offense to real basket-weavers) training inevitably takes place on the job. If you hire a reasonably intelligent person who does not have a degree, the same training will take him/her to the same level.
A person who is a computer programmer would absolutely need to go to college, right? Well, not necessarily. There are plenty of people who have learned programming on their own. Likewise there are many who have learned a myriad of skills on their own. It is true that these are highly motivated people. But when you require a degree, you just eliminated a source that guarantees highly motivated people! Are those really the people you want to eliminate? What do you get then? People who have a degree, but maybe are not in love with that kind of work. Yes, some will be highly motivated. But often the high motivation is to get the piece of paper that will allow them to work, rather than the motivation to do a particular type of work.
Hiring non-grads will present some problems. It will require some new ways of thinking. How will we know who is qualified? I suggest there are plenty of methods that can be used to ascertain this. One of my favorites is hiring a person as a temp. You get to see how well they work, what they know about the particular kind of work, and even if they show up on time every day or not.
Another thing you can do is write up a test. (It can be oral or written, actually.) If certain content knowledge is an absolute pre-requisite, test your candidates on it. You may find that some non-grads score higher than your grads.
Have people on your staff who are knowledgeable about the skills required, perhaps in a similar position, interview with the candidate.
In short, the new issues that present themselves don't preclude hiring non-grads. They simply require a little creativity. Business as usual is bad business.
I have a lot more thoughts on this college thing that I won't delve deeply into right now.
- What about mentoring as a substitute for college? Colleges use this kind of strategy sometimes with internships. Why not skip the college part and just go straight to the internships?
- College tech careers often turn out people whose learning is already obsolete by the time they have graduated.
- Colleges are bad business. It seems to me that many of them are built on greed. They have left off the idea of really educating people. The fact that a college will charge you full price to even test out of a class is a great example of this fact.
- Why can't businesses just send people back to college for only the classes the employee needs, rather than things that do not pertain to their business? (Please don't give me the "go to college to be well-rounded" argument. You will see it isn't valid if you examine it a little more closely.)
- Learning is very important. College is just one way of learning. There are many, many other ways, some of which may be even better than college.
- The college degree you require for your employees is horribly outdated just ten years down the line, and perhaps even five years, or two years, if your business is technology. Is it really necessary then?
- Maybe someone needs to invent a test-out college, where you can go and be tested by experts, and get your degree once you prove you know the necessary content. It should be way less expensive, because the overhead would be minuscule compared to a normal college today. This kind of business could be used for employees as well, for upgrading their positions based on new studies or research they may have even done on their own time.
- I remember a former co-worker of mine. He was going to get fired for lacking one single college subject which would have completed his degree. While it is true he hadn't taken the subject, it was also true that he was teaching the subject at the time, in a local college. This didn't matter. He didn't have the degree, so he was not qualified. How to determine who is qualified needs to be re-examined from the top to the bottom. Business owners, it will save you money, and you will be less likely to hire inadequate employees.
- My brother-in-law, a programmer, told me of a new hire who could not program. When asked how he managed to get a degree, he simply said that he had cheated his way through college. And the company did not fire him, because it is such a hassle to fire people! Guess what. Lots of people are cheating their way through schools and colleges these days.
Okay, I can see this is going to evolve into another post--why employers should consider non-grads. What's in it for them?
End of rant.
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