Am I wrong in thinking that "not completed" is often vastly closer to "having a degree" than "never started"? Obviously some people fail out of degrees completely, but many start a degree because they're capable and simply find out they dislike the content.
Not completed shows that you were accepted to an institution, so it matters how selective the institution was. There’s a lot of research that shows there’s some (wage) benefit to the first year of college, then not so much for the second or third, but a lot more for the degree. Bryan Caplan’s book on the subject covers this ‘sheepskin effect’ very well.
You get the filtering effect for MIT/Stanford/etc. Then it's a mix between "decided the academic thing wasn't right for me" and "it got tough so decided to bail" whether or not that's ever explicitly stated. (Or random family etc. issues etc.)
Starting college and not completing it is a mixed signal as compared to never starting.
If you allowed me 1000s of trials and I could wager on each of them, I'd wager that the SAT scores of those who started were higher than the SAT scores of those who never started. In that regard, being accepted to and starting college is a positive signal.
At the same time, someone who started and dropped out might be seen as a signal that they could not conform to and complete a structured program. Or maybe they couldn't hack the collegiate level work after coasting through primary and secondary education. In that regard, someone who never attended college but taught themself programming (at least enough to pass the tech screen on 'all else equal' footing with degreed candidates) might be a better bet than someone who dropped out after two years in a comp sci program and screened the same.
> Or maybe they couldn't hack the collegiate level work after coasting through primary and secondary education.
Or maybe at 20 years old they didn't yet know what they wanted to do with the rest of their life but had been pushed into college anyway by overzealous parents and teachers.
If an infallible oracle told you that was the case and you had two candidates who interviewed otherwise equally in every regard, would you hire the college graduate or the candidate who got railroaded into attending a bit of college and then dropped out?
I think the tie goes to the college graduate for over half of the hiring managers, and I don't think that's crazy at all.
> you had two candidates who interviewed otherwise equally in every regard
That's different from the original quote, which was simply:
> If there are two candidates — one with a degree, one without, “to many hiring managers, it will feel risky,” he said.
But your question is interesting. Have you considered that if it's possible for a dropout to performally equally to a degree holder in every perceivable respect, it raises doubts about the value of a degree?
Suppose that you had two candidates who interviewed otherwise equally in every regard and also both had degrees, indeed from the same institution. Then how would you choose? By height? Age? Gender? Physical attractiveness?
If you have two indistinguishable candidates on relevant dimensions who both passed the interview bar and are the best two candidates you have for one position, literally just flip a coin, hire the winner, and move on.
> If you have two indistinguishable candidates on relevant dimensions who both passed the interview bar and are the best two candidates you have for one position, literally just flip a coin, hire the winner, and move on.
Agreed.
Now explain how having completed a degree is a "relevant dimension", unlike height, age, etc. You ignored my first question: "Have you considered that if it's possible for a dropout to performally equally to a degree holder in every perceivable respect, it raises doubts about the value of a degree?" My second question was actually intended to highlight the issue.
What you appear to be doing with "I have evidence that the person with a degree can follow rules/policies and track towards a long-term goal with success" is reaching for one arbitrary personal characteristic and inventing an idiosyncratic, non-scientific psychological theory in order to justify discrimination. Others do the same thing with age and gender, for example (younger people and men are just better at programming, they say). You don't know the life story of these people, and there are any number of reasons for someone not completing a degree: monetary problems, family problems, a major illness or injury, natural disaster, etc. Moreover, if you select just based on degree completion, you give job candidates no opportunity to show evidence that they "can follow rules/policies and track towards a long-term goal with success" in ways other than competing a degree. It's simply a bias toward degree holders. By your own admission, you're not using the degree as evidence of job-relevant skills but rather as a psychological, "life story" factor.
I am biased towards degree holders for programming and other tech roles. It’s not a requirement or some magic talisman of “hire immediately”, but all else equal, I’ll prefer it and, all else equal, I will use it to discriminate (in the “distinguish” or “tell one thing from another” sense).
> Now explain how having completed a degree is a "relevant dimension", unlike height, age, etc.
As a population, I believe that college graduates almost certainly score higher on measures of intelligence and conscientiousness than non-grads. I believe that's both true and valid for use in selecting employees for roles where intelligence and conscientiousness are useful qualities.
> Have you considered that if it's possible for a dropout to [perform] equally to a degree holder in every perceivable respect, it raises doubts about the value of a degree?
Of course it's possible for a non-degree holder to outperform a degree holder, or for a Mech E or English major to outperform a Comp Sci grad. That doesn’t mean I think a Comp Sci degree has no relevance or value to an SWE job.
You seem to be imagining some boogeyman where “has degree” is treated as the high-order bit rather than what I’ve been consistently saying (and what I think is relevant to the article under discussion): that it’s closer to a tie-breaker (or low-order bit) and a sensible one in many regards.
If someone out-interviews another for a role and clears the bar, you hire the out-performer. When you otherwise can’t tell which candidate is stronger and get down to the area where coin flips become a sensible selection mechanism, I think it's wise to choose the degree holder over using the coin. Other people might rely on height or appearance; I can't control what they do.
> As a population, I believe that college graduates almost certainly score higher on measures of intelligence and conscientiousness than non-grads. I believe that's both true and valid for use in selecting employees.
1) You can believe whatever you want to believe, but that doesn't necessarily make it true.
2) If you're looking for IQ, then why don't you administer IQ tests to job candidates rather than looking at an extremely unreliable proxy for it?
3) You're admitting to using population statistics to evaluate individual job candidates. Do you even realize what you're saying here? That's literally prejudice. By the exact same reasoning, you could discriminate based on race, for example, e.g., Asian vs. white vs. black. The only difference between racial discimination and degree discrimination in this respect is the legality of it. Even if I granted for the sake of argument that your empirical speculation about scores and measures were true, you're just talking about averages, and many individual members of every population will be above average or below average.
> You seem to be imagining some boogeyman where “has degree” is treated as the high-order bit rather than what I’ve been consistently saying (and what I think is relevant to the article under discussion): that it’s closer to a tie-breaker (or low-order bit) and a sensible one in many regards.
It is often used as the "high-order bit". Like I already said a few comments ago, the quote from the article was different from your quote.
But I don't think it's a sensible tie-breaker. You're taking a degree as a "life story" factor, but that's an arbitrary, singular choice of many possible life story factors.
Also, you seemed to change your story a bit in the last comment, talking specifically about a comp sci degree rather than a degree in general, but there's nothing unique about comp sci vs. other degrees to indicate "can follow rules/policies and track towards a long-term goal with success" or to indicate "IQ".
> You're admitting to using population statistics to evaluate individual job candidates.
I am, in effect, using the membership among the population of college degree holders as a tie-breaker.
If you choose to judge that as indistinguishable from, or equivalent to, discrimination based on race, we have a point of disagreement that isn't likely to be resolved.
I would note that there's not much a leap from "this criterion makes sense as a tie-breaker" to "this criterion makes sense as a résumé filter when you have a very large number of applicants".
Then I’d not hire them for being so short-sighted. Your college degree has nothing, at all, to do with the rest of your life unless you want it to and you work to make sure that it does.
Seems like this wouldn’t need to be said on a tech board.
> If you allowed me 1000s of trials and I could wager on each of them, I'd wager that the SAT scores of those who started were higher than the SAT scores of those who never started. In that regard, being accepted to and starting college is a positive signal.
If theory behind your wagers was correct, and if you're optimizing for SAT scores.
I dropped out of engineering after my first year because of the math. My high school had an experimental math program that was designed for people who wouldn’t need higher level math, which kind of screwed me. I was generally good at math and tests, so I placed into a higher level course than high school prepared me for. Because I did so well on the test, they wouldn’t allow me to take a lower level class. I tried. On the first day the teacher handed me a letter telling me I was departmentally dropped.
This didn’t lead me to fully dropping out of school. I pivoted over to CIS, graduated, and worked my way up to a principal software engineer.
Did these people you’re talking about totally quit, or did they find a solution to the problem? Employers are going to tend to like those who find alternative solutions.
IQ isn’t useless, it’s just not the only measure that matters. Conscientiousness, for example, probably played a role in those who quit or not.
Not completing something simply because you dislike it is a big red flag. At work you often have to finish stuff you don’t like, you don’t want employee that will start something but rely on others to finish it.
Maybe the earlier working years and experience, as well as money saved, was worth more than the opportunities the degree could open up. If not, and being passed over for jobs later in life is becoming a problem, maybe that original assessment was incorrect.
This is generally only something a person can have certainty about in hindsight.
There’s always value in completing, but if you instead do something more valueable, and can explain it, it might be the opposite of a red flag.
But the comment explicitly stated “dislike the content”.
And if you get a degree from college, it means you made something out of a lot of classes that at first glance, seemed useless. Also research skills, and the ability to pick something up on your own, maybe with a little help and practice.
But what do I know I’m a college grad who barely gets any interviews for anything.
Which is a shame, because in this case University itself often doesn't need to justify itself as more than an arbitrary time sink that rewards people who can both do the work intellectually, and afford both the fee and time to sink into it.
That would be a situation for which I'd request a transcript - probably the only situation, because the second you're handed that degree I no longer care what your grades were.
Where I'm from, if you're bombing out of classes you'll be excluded from university. Takes about two years if you're terrible and incapable of getting the message. But it's something I would like to know because it is a signal.
