Experience vs. college degree

I never once used the term intelligence. I'm sure, however, that nuances exist. I recall in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance a theme related to the dichotomy of scientific worth as it relates to the value of beauty. Which is more important? To know how to fix a motorcycle or to appreciate the way the wind whips your hair as you ride? The answer, of course, is that they're both of equal value.

In this case, however, intelligence relates to a person's ability to reach a conclusion if provided with certain information. Education is the process by which intelligent people receive that information. Some who have education lack intelligence. But the true fools in this world are those who have intelligence but have not acquired the knowledge to make use of it.

 

And just as bad are the fools who have acquired the knowledge but lack the intelligence to do anything with it.

 

I hear you loud and clear. I tend to agree that many colleges don't prepare certain students for the fields they have chosen. I think that could be said of some J-school programs. The system tends to fail when the delicate balance between studying and passing a class is tipped in the student's favor. Students tend to strive for the bare minimum. It becomes about achieving a grade rather than obtaining skill and/or knowledge.

That's why I believe the best J-schools put an emphasis on hands-on learning. It requires that students put what they've learned to work, and those who haven't learned see that the error of their ways.

 

Ah yes, but tis better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all.

 

For the record, the system is what it is, and any aspiring journalist needs to realize that not having a degree will only make things harder. So I'm not advocating not getting a degree.

I think the aforementioned system is unfair, and it's often plain stupid for a business such as ours to flat out deny opportunities to people who, for any number of reasons, didn't follow the prescribed path of high school-college-first full-time job.

I didn't attend college until I was almost 22. And in my personal experience, the three-plus years I spent not going to college after high school did more to shape the person I am today (personally and professionally) than any other portion of my life before or since.

 

I have issues with an industry that wants to pay people $15,000 a year to brand-new reporters wanting a college degree of any kind, but that's probably a discussion for another thread, which I think we've had recently.

 

There are a lot of problems and arguments that can be made from this topic....and a lot of opinions...
I will pretense this by saying I have a Management Degree, a Journalism Degree, and a Master's in Sport Management.

Here is mine:

I would NEVER hire someone under 30 or thereabouts without a college degree for a full-time job, unless they have been working part-time for me for a while.

I would however, consider a wide range of people without degrees for high positions. Why? Because experience does matter and if you were at college age in the 70s or maybe even the 80s, a degree was not required.

Now, 80 percent or higher of HS graduates are getting college degrees. About a year ago and I looked through the classifieds and I saw an ad for a Janitorial Manager...Bachelor's degree required. A college degree has become an educational standard for this generation and if you did not get one, something went wrong somewhere.

Yes, clips are the most important thing. However, almost all of the crop these days goes to college, not just the cream. The cream just go for free with scholarships or to IVY league schools.

Why would I hire someone who could not hack it in college for whatever reason? Because they have talent and good clips? I can ALWAYS go recruit at a college and find someone in the same talent range and with clips with a degree.

The work ethic is trickier. If they have good clips, they usually have a good work ethic. It takes work to be good. However, I do tend to see if they worked during college. I like to have some work experience out side of the field. Let's me know they want this job because they have done other things and they wanted this anyway. A person without a degree may have worked more or less than one with one. You have to look at the entire resume and in the interview underneath the resume to see if they really worked hard to be where they are not. The question "Do you feel you are a hard worker does not cut it either." Ask if they had a college job, ask if they had a job in high school. Ask them the hardest job they ever had to do. See the response and judge. See why they want to be in journalism.

After all, this is one of the WORST paying fields a college graduate can enter. The average college grad these days makes more than $35,000 straight out of college. In journalism they will be lucky to get $22,000 at a starting job. There has to be some level in commitment just to want to work for such crappy pay. Heck, they could go make $35,000 working retail management -- they don't care what you have a degree in, but you HAVE to have one.

This, of course, is a problem in itself as many of the young talented writers leave the field because of the pay. They go to law school or into PR (which is paying more by a little bit) or they work in retail for a lot better pay. You couple this with the problem of corporations firing and cutting down staff and the field is not exactly inviting. It becomes overly cutthroat and can create bad work environments. Co-workers do not see co-workers as colleagues but as competitors to move up in the business.

Teamwork goes out the door as people try to climb over each other so they can make a lousy $30k a year. In the end you get worse writers, who care less about what the readers want and more about how they can get ahead in the business. This in turn gives us a worse product. Not only do we not get to hire the best writers because they all went on to become lawyers and managers of Target, but we get people who don't care about readers. The business is slowly losing itself and no one seems to know why, even though it is fairly simple.

Our product stinks.

I know this is quite a tangent from the debate of a college grad versus a non-grad but it is all interrelated. If editors take to hiring young people without degrees as a common practice then the business will be in trouble. If we accept cuts and less people covering beats. Then we are in trouble. We have to take the best from everywhere to produce a quality product and these days that means entry-level people HAVE to have a degree.

After all shouldn't we require at least as much as the people who empty our trash cans?

 

Wow. That amounts to one big false conclusion.
We have spent five page debating this very simple, yet complex topic. If there is one conclusion, it's that there isn't one. There is no paradigm. There is no mold.
I'll continue one with one strategy. I will hire the best person, all criteria considered, for the position.

 

"80% of high school graduates earn a college degree?" Really?
"Good clips equals good work ethic?" Really?
"Because they have talent and good clips? I can ALWAYS go recruit at a college and find someone in the same talent range and with clips with a degree." If you say so.

 

Here's my take on this:

School is very, very important in my family. Between the four of us we have 10 degrees. In my family there was no choice but to complete college and keep going back for more.

I've got degrees, plural, but busted my ass at journalism-related jobs throughout high school and college. The fact that I chose career-oriented jobs instead of folding clothes at the mall or being a beer wench should have given me a leg up coming out of undergrad. I feel it did.

But going back for more after working for a while paralyzed my career trajectory. On many levels it wasn't worth it.

I once heard that graduate school isn't about what you know, it's about how many hoops you can jump through. I agree. Some may think it's the same with undergrad, but I would disagree. Four or more years of higher, broad-based education is a very good thing for young adults when today's high schools are little more than diploma factories.

But along those lines, one of the most important things I got out of my education was this: I learned how to Play The Game. I can navigate bureaucracy. I know how to say and do the right thing with professors and administrators. I understand the inner workings of educational institutions, which helps me to be a better journalist. I have repeated practice at performing within a specified process. I have superior time management and research skills.

I'm not saying these benefits come just with a college education. But it was nice to hone those skills in a protected environment before having to use them in the "real world".

 

I guess my outlook on this comes not just from my experience (working in this business for close to 13 years without a degree), but also coming from a family in which none of the six kids have a college degree. And I'm the only one who's ever attended a four-year school. Three of my brothers never graduated high school, yet we're all successful. And the more I work in a corporate environment, the more I realize I'm not wired to "fly a desk." I don't want to discount the work college graduates have done. But neither do I want a college graduate assuming he's more educated/more intelligent/knows more/ whatever you want to call it than those of us who have taken different paths. Obviously, times have changed, and the nondegree path gets harder by the day. But that's why I applaud the exceptions to the rule who have and will continue to succeed by taking the road less traveled.

 

college grads have no more than three points added to their IQ after four years of college, three points.