[esk]

You're right—employers are being lazy.

It's safe for people in HR to mindlessly prefer mediocre Candidate A with a degree over stellar Candidate B without one, so instead of actually examining the values the candidates can bring to the company, they take the easy, defensible path.

Part of the process of employers' recognizing that someone learning online can easily learn more than someone going to a university will be to empower HR departments to honestly examine candidates' value to the company rather than looking at increasingly irrelevant badges on their resume.

In short, employers lazily prefer people with degrees. People want employment. People seek degrees. Universities see tons of demand and little pressure to improve, so they don't. Most graduates skills are irrelevant for today's employers, so they don't get hired. Employers can break this cycle by empowering their HR departments.

[patio11]

I think you are thinking of a fairly different phenomenon than I am thinking of. Let's take two candidates, A and B. A has a degree in Anime as Literature (a degree which fairly few people have but which is available if you want it from at least one university, and which we'll stipulate has fairly little commercial relevance in the United States) from, without loss of generality, Washington University in St. Louis (my alma mater). B has equivalent knowledge regarding postmodern interpretations of Evangelion but gained it all through self-study.

You are describing that companies discriminate against B in favor of A because their hiring processes are broken and doing so is organizationally safe. I agree that in many cases their hiring processes are broken, but think that it doesn't matter because companies do not care about anime. It is utterly irrelevant to them. Knowledge of anime does not make you more efficient at filling out TPS reports. However, the degree from WashU brackets you as Top X% of Valued Quality Y distribution, where Y might be "intelligence" or "ability to follow through on moderately complex tasks with long time horizons" or simply "success in a highly selective process" if you're feeling charitable or "social standing" if you're not. Prospective employers aren't allowed to effectively discriminate based on intelligence (no, really), so they can use possession of a degree as a proxy for it. By comparison, the actual contents of the education received post-matriculation are irrelevant, so the fact that Candidate B has objectively equivalent knowledge of anime is not meaningful to the prospective employer.

[m-photonic]

>Prospective employers aren't allowed to effectively discriminate based on intelligence (no, really), so they can use possession of a degree as a proxy for it.

Yep. Amy Wax has an excellent take on it here:

"The combination of well-documented racial differences in cognitive ability and the consistent link between ability and job performance generates a pattern that experts term “the validity-diversity tradeoff”: job selection devices that best predict future job performance generate the smallest number of minority hires in a broad range of positions. Indeed, the evidence indicates that most valid screening devices will have a significant adverse impact on blacks and will also violate the 4/5 rule under the law of disparate impact.

Because legitimately meritocratic (that is, job-related) job selection practices will routinely trigger prima facie violations of the disparate impact rule, employers who adopt such practices run the risk of being required to justify them – a costly and difficult task that encourages undesirable, self-protective behaviors and may result in unwarranted liability."

Source: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1795443

[antoncohen]

> I agree that in many cases their hiring processes are broken, but think that it doesn't matter because companies do not care about anime. It is utterly irrelevant to them. Knowledge of anime does not make you more efficient at filling out TPS reports.

I think it is both. The education system is broken, and has been for a long time. Degrees in Sociology and Communications have always been useless knowledge. The economic downturn has only brought that fact to the attention of people. At the same time employers are requiring job applicants have college degrees--any degree--for jobs that absolutely do not require degrees. I feel sorry for the people who got Business degrees, it was probably a wise choice when they started college, but by they time they graduated no one wanted to hire people with Business degrees.

I know one YC startup that requires the receptionists to have a college degrees, and they only pay them $12/hour in San Francisco, which frankly is not a living wage in SF. The letter "Serving people drinks was more rewarding" sounds a lot like the non-techie people I know. Get a Masters in Business Administration, think you did everything right with your 4.0 GPA. Then you graduate and can't find work. Maybe take a job in retail. After job hunting for a year you take that receptionist position, because hey, there's growth opportunity, which is better than retail. But it turns out there is no opportunity, the predatory management won't give raises because in this economy they can just fire you and hire another college grad at $12/hour.

Education has failed because they don't teach useful skills, yet they tell students that they are useful throughout their education. HR has failed because they haven't figured out how to find that diamond in the rough without putting up arbitrary requirements.