“Worthless Degree Awareness Month.” That is assuming, of course, you are kind enough to participate and help bring about an end to a veritable scourge – worthless degrees.
“Worthless Degree Awareness Month.” That is assuming, of course, you are kind enough to participate and help bring about an end to a veritable scourge – worthless degrees.
Why do I suspect that Ryerson’s “Doctor Journalism” would feel warm & comfy with this American colleague of his?!
instead of “worthless degree” would it not be better to call them “white swan degrees”?
This is the age of credential-ism. for deadbeats. Who have rendered experience as out moated. With owning a piece of paper as superior to hands on reality.
It serves several purposes.
One it allows anyone to jump seniority of any position.
Two. You can enable anyone to take any position for quota reasons, including family members. Three the paper itself has become more important than the job.
Four, you can use it to promote more Women into higher paying jobs with a leadership venue. Over anyone who has actually worked.
Five. As an administrator you can pretend, even if you only have labours, how well schooled you workforce is.How your budget deserves more money.
Its all a straw-man, or should I say paper moon project.
I have a useless degree in climate science. It’s useless because I passed the statistics course.
(wish I was kidding)
Captain, I recently read your book “Worthless” (on Kindle), which I discovered because of my constant visits to this site. Just this evening I went to a choir concert of young boys to eighteen-year-olds, and as the oldest boys who had sung for the last time(about 10 of them were leaving high school for university) said goodbye to the audience, each mentioned what they were going to college or university for. I really ached for them and their future dreams, most likely to be crushed by debt and unemployment, as I heard almost every one mention “environmental studies”, “theatre”, “musical theory” or “I’m going to such-and-such college to explore where my passion lies”, etc. I think only one mentioned something with the word “science” in it. And the last one said, “Not going to college because I don’t know what I’m going to do yet.” I thought: “Kid, you’ll probably come out ahead of everyone in a few years.” So you see, your book won yet another convert :-). If I can help it my growing children will NOT be taking worthless degrees.
After seeing the debt load that students are currently taking on, I consider myself very lucky as I was able to pay for my university tuition by working during the summer months. And the degrees I got in physiology and neurophysiology got me a job not because of the degree, but rather that I was a self taught programmer and hardware hacker.
I must disappoint parents whose kids I also see as patients and when they ask me if they should take a degree in music, I tell them that they’d be far better off becoming an electrician or some other skilled trade. The nice thing about being able to fix things is that one will never be out of work. There’s nothing stopping people from studying music theory in their spare time. Occasionally I am pleasantly surprised such as a patient of mine with a social work degree who’s now gone back to school to become a welder.
Credentialism is to a large degree responsible for people assuming that they need a degree in a subject. Most of the areas outside of medicine that I dabble in are the result of my learning on my own and it would have never occurred to me to take a university course in digital design when I could get IC manuals out of the library and play around with making circuits. In the 1970’s, my hardware hacking experience was good enough to get me a job whereas today I’d probably be passed up in favor of someone with the correct piece of paper even if they had way less experience.
I’m not sure at what point society degenerated to the degree that having the proper official pieces of paper became far more important than whether one actually had a practical knowledge of a subject. Self-study seems to be on the decline whereas in previous generations this was the norm and society functioned much better. When I was growing up, there was a far smaller fraction of people I knew who assumed that they would only learn something by taking a course in the subject. Most of the useless degrees out there are so straightforward that an individual could acquire the necessary knowledge by reading the textbooks – that is if they can stomach wading through the BS that is inherent in subjects such as sociology and [insert victim group here] studies. Areas where one makes faster progress working under a skilled practitioner of an art such as welding, pottery, and medicine do require a formal apprenticeship period as this results in more efficient transfer of skills to the student in a discipline where there’s more to it than just reading a textbook.
During the month of June I’ll try to steer as many of my young patients away from useless degrees as possible but, working in what is a blue collar town, most kids seem to make the right choices and go for various trades.
Loki –
Your comment struck a chord with me – academic credentials are virtually worthless without an ancillary accreditation of a DOPE – Doctorate of Practical Experience.
Requires no external permission, only inveterate curiosity & pragmatism coupled with healthy skepticism.