More than a thousand Harvard students walked out of their commencement ceremony yesterday to support 13 undergraduates who were barred from graduating after they participated in the Gaza solidarity encampment in Harvard Yard.
Asmer Safi, one of the 13 pro-Palestinian student protesters barred from graduating, says that while his future has been thrown into uncertainty while he is on probation, he has no regrets about standing up for Palestinian rights.
Graduation is optional. The dream we were sold in highschool of “go to college” was propaganda spun up by colleges looking to pad their books with your tuition. Many jobs you are seeking have apprenticeship programs where they pay you to learn.
College is and remains a giant expensive mixer to find someone to date. That’s mostly it. Anything outside of a select few professions can be learned outside of a campus with fresher material.
If you want to learn a profession there is nothing gatekeeping you from doing it.
I can’t speak for you, but I personally want a doctor who learned the profession through an organization that gatekeeps people who didn’t go to college from doing it.
It’s almost as if you breezed by the acknowledgement that some jobs do require secondary education. A fun fact about those doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals: following school they then spend another 4+ years in residency where they actually develop the skills they need to be that doctor you were referring to.
You acknowledged that first and then you said- “If you want to learn a profession there is nothing gatekeeping you from doing it.”
So the second thing you said contradicted the former. I assumed via the way time works that the second one was the one you meant to say.
The gatekeeping happens at the end or after the university and before you enter the profession.
It’s generally called a test (or multiple tests) which judge the quality of one’s knowledge before one is allowed to practice as an expert in a certain area.
The graduation is the part where the University produces a certificate in which they state that they have indeed tested somebody’s knowledge and how good it was determined to be. If a person goes through the whole learning process but don’t get that certificate, future employeers might not (in some areas, they legally can’t) consider that person for employment in that area (I explain why at the end).
Generally the actual learning is not gatekept: for example, in my area - software development - people absolutelly can do the entire learning outside formal education and still end up working in it professionally, though at the start of one’s career one still has to have some kind of evidence of one’s capabilities (which in this case isn’t provided by a University having assessed your knowledge on it), so normally the path to it that bypasses Academia involves first working professionally in an adjacent area (such as systems administration) and moving from that to software development (good sys admins have to know how to program)
However for “protected professions” (such as Law) or for were the costs of errors can mean death (such as Medical or Civil Pilot) at minimum you have to be assessed including a significant practical period under supervisions (a couple of years for a Medical doctor depending on speciality, 1000h of flight for Civil Pilots, plus specific training each kind of plane they’re flying) and that practicing under supervision is lot harded - often impossible - to get if a person didn’t come via a formal education setting.
Also in some areas it’s pretty close to impossible to get certified as knowledgeable without going through the entire formal Education process, which is indeed unfair and should not be the case - if should be possible for anybody to pay to be assessed and certified without having to pay for the formal learning.
Even in areas which are neither protected professions nor life-and-death, not having the certification which is the Diploma negativelly impacts a person’s chances to find their first and maybe second jobs. The problem is when hiring managers get lots of candidates for a position, they don’t have time to talk to them all because they also have to do their normal job alongside candidate selection, so instead they prune the list of candidates and not having something that in some way certificates that a candidate has the required knowledge (which for a first job is generally a Diploma, but for latter jobs is going to be previous job experience) is a common criteria because it usually works.
College increases your pay rate and opens the door to research and development, there is no alternative. You’re not going to engineer bridges and plan cities without a degree. The majority of Citizen Science papers submitted are students pursuing a PhD, and the vast majority of them have incredibly small sample sizes for data sources.
You’re just not going to have a large impact without a degree, and the number of exceptions prove the rule.
This is true. I went back to school for computer science. As soon as I graduated, received a significant bump in pay at my current job. Well worth it.
Pay rate increases while at your job and gaining “higher” education is a mixed bag. How much did that education cost vs the pay raise? How long is required to break even on that investment? With the constantly rising costs for said education that gap isn’t getting smaller either.
The sciences are, certainly, one field that can benefit from higher ed. Of course I made such an acknowledgement in my original statement as well. While it seems a few dozen people chose to take that as ‘we don’t need no education’… the statement was directed at funneling the masses through a system to extract profit… and to have a high hit rate offer courses that could be learned directly from the trade being entered. It’s a racket. A long con. And it’s an unfortunate reality a lot of students don’t realize they are caught in until they exit the machine on the other side.
According to the USA’s BLS the median pay going from a high school graduate to master’s degree more than doubles to 5988 a month, and this doesn’t even consider how employable that person is as a result of their degree rather only the ones who are employed meaning that the average HS graduate probably has even less to live off of.
A Graduate Student might pay roughly $950 USD a month, so even on master’s degree salary it’s a benefit of $2054 USD.
HS 746 * 4 = 2984
Masters 1497 * 4 = 5988
Difference 5988 - 2984 = 3004
After Loan Repayment 3004 - 950 = 2054
In other nations the Education might even be offered for free, even for immigrants, in which case it is even better.
I may not like the state of academics as a profit driven business, it’s one of the many dead dream machines of our modern society, but education as an option for bettering one’s self and as a concept is something I vehemently defend.
It massivelly, massivelly depends on the area.
In cases were errors can mean death, people will simply not be allowed to practice without the kind of “practical learning whilst under supervision and being assessed” that you see for example for doctors, and which are incredibly hard to conduct outside a formal education environment so in practice you’ll probably not find it (often only people who are trained doctors from countries whose universities are not recognized locally get that kind of opportunities without going through the local formal education system so that they can gain compatibility and practice locally).
In other areas it’s just because practically the having a Diploma or not is an easy way to prune down tons of candidates for entry-level positions: for example if you’re a hiring manager in IT still having to do all the other work alongside hiring and you have 20 candidates for a single entry level position, putting aside those who neither have relevant job experience nor a Diploma is pretty logical and has a high probability of avoid wasting time with people who have no clue how to do the job - you need to be pretty free of other work to spend the time interviewing all 20 candidates just in case one of the has all the necessary knowledge but no proof of it.
Mind you, even things like Software Development still hire people without Diplomas - they just have to show relevant experience such as having worked in an adjacent area which also uses those skill or having participated in open source projects.
However going through the whole paid for formal education process to get a Diploma and then not actually being able to work in that area because there are far fewer jobs that graduates can indeed often be considered a con - it really depends on how useful all that preparation in a formal education setting ends up being for your actual job.
That use to be the case for programming jobs, but ever since the layoffs, those with a degree are at an advantage. I was laid off, but it only took me 6 weeks to land a new job thanks to my CS degree. My cohorts without a degree have been looking for 6 months…
I’ve seen the opposite be true as well - but food for thought here: some of your cohorts probably had similar work experience as you… meaning the differentiator (tie breaker) was certainly the additional “experience.” I’m glad you found the job. Layoffs have been brutal lately.
Learning a profession is sadly a relatively small part of how an institution helps you get a good job.
There are a number of jobs that have an insurmountable check box for “has college degree” in the HR checklist. Doesn’t matter if every interviewer says “hire him”, HR will refuse. Hell about three years into my career, my employer lost some records including their documentation that I had a degree, and they had informed me that I had three months to get my university to prove my status again, or my job would be terminated, that I had gotten and by their own admission I could not possibly have had if hadn’t proven it before, but their process was clear, so I had to get them what they wanted to keep the job.
Further, there are particularly exclusive companies that may insist on a particular set of colleges, e.g a list of ivy League universities that they will accept applicants from and nothing else will cut it, because they advertise their ivy League credentials to clients.
Even without a formal list, the names carry weight. When I was working on vetting candidates, which was usually a pretty grueling interview process, management had one guy skip the interviews and go straight to job offer because they saw MIT as their school.
In my experience, the people from there are not special and are not particularly better equipped for the sorts of work I deal with, but branding carries a lot of weight.
That sounds like a rough experience friend, but if I was working at a company that needed to check up on my documentation after working there for some time - I’d probably find a new job where I wasn’t just employee 253966.
To your point about names carrying their weight - that’s a problem in itself: what about those that don’t go to ivy league? What about those that do that simply lack any marketable skill outside of where they went?
I agree that the interview process at a lot of aforementioned places is particularly awful. Once working there it typically doesn’t improve. The facilities are nice enough, sure… but I’ve seen far too many people working for companies like that get laid off regardless of how performant they were. They are just a line item.
The point I made initially was that many jobs do not require the degree to do the work. Many professions do not benefit from a 4 year college building a curriculum around now outdated information.
There are good companies and good professions that do not have those requirements.
That sounds like a rough experience friend, but if I was working at a company that needed to check up on my documentation after working there for some time - I’d probably find a new job where I wasn’t just employee 253966
It was a mild inconvenience inflicted by a bureaucratic HR I almost never dealt with. If I acted out by walking on the job, well that job was paying about 40% more than other offers I had on the table. It simply was an anecdote to demonstrate that some companies have formalities around the degree.
To your point about names carrying their weight - that’s a problem in itself: what about those that don’t go to ivy league? What about those that do that simply lack any marketable skill outside of where they went?
Not saying it is the most rational or the most fair, I’m simply saying it is a thing, and a thing that these would-be-graduates likely paid a lot of money for, specifically. Some of them might have had offers lined up at ‘Harvard-only’ companies (which sounds terrible, but I’ve heard it’s a thing and a thing that earn lots of money). Also, what if these would-be grads are in that camp of ‘no marketable skills apart from the name on their degree’? Then for them they especially want that institutional name on their degree.
I’ve seen far too many people working for companies like that get laid off regardless of how performant they were. They are just a line item.
This is good advice, but keep in mind you could lose your job wherever, so it’s less a game of trying to find out where you won’t get laid off, but about mitigation for if it happens, in terms of contractual severance and savings. Sure if a place is particularly layoff happy, maybe not worth the trouble, but no matter how personal and respectful the treatment you get is, layoff is always in the picture, up to and including the employer just completely going out of business.
There are good companies and good professions that do not have those requirements.
Sure, but these people paid for a Harvard degree and are presumably on a career track where that would be very valuable. The good companies and good professions may not be as lucrative for those graduation candidates as options that the Harvard degree would open up.
While it’s true that many people’s careers post-college are not directly related to their degree, it’s still valuable to employers.
What a degree says is that an individual can sucessfully complete a project that takes years of work and at least enough professionalism to get through.
I see this point used frequently - and it isn’t wrong … but it’s only half of a statement. In that time let’s say someone holds a position for 4 years of experience. These two things are not equally weighted, but very similar at that point. As time progresses that piece of paper continues to lose value when compared to experience in the field.
The degree is, in essence, a signal that someone has achieved at least the base level of competency in a field and stuck with it for x time. So assuming 2 parties with 0 work experience vie for a job naturally the degree holder will win out. It gets murkier when comparing someone with 4 years with in field experience to a 4 year degree holder with 0 experience.
The point I aimed to make was just that. It’s a perfectly reasonable assertion.
There’s a world of difference in dedication to completing a 4-year project when you’re being paid to be there working and when you are not.
Sucessfully completing a college degree shows that someone is driven, can accomplish goals, and make forward-looking decisions.
