QOTD

[selenite0]

A discussion on Transterrestrial Musings wandered on the subject of people who've had successful careers without ever getting degrees. Someone suggested forming an association to explore how common that is. Jay Manifold commented:

the anthropology of such a group would presumably be a hilarious inversion of the usual credentialism, where the college dropouts are ranked above the graduates, the people who never went to college at all are higher up, the ones with GEDs are still higher, and so on until some guy suckled by wolves is running the thing.

The original discussion, on recent graduates surprised to find out that NGOs promoting political activism in the third world don't offer lots of well-paying jobs, is also worth reading.

Comments

[phanatic.livejournal.com]

I'm always impressed to see people who so readily confuse a degree with an education.

[kd5mdk.livejournal.com]

There's a lot of strong feelings in that thread.

[stevenehrbar.livejournal.com]

It's simple enough. These young Washingtonians are supremely selfish — they want a job that feeds both their sense of moral superiority and makes them rich. When they find out that reality isn't conforming to their selfish desires, they respond by whining about it.

[thegameiam.livejournal.com]

Just want to say that not all of us Washingtonians are quite like that - I've got a Heinleinian distrust of credentialism...

[stevenehrbar.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I was specifically referring back to the main thread that was mentioned, which means the "young Washingtonians" in question are the WaPo story's profiled "I should be making a hundred thousand dollars a year at a job reducing gender discrimination in Africa" types. The WaPo article calls them "altruists", but I was casting around for another term.

[thegameiam.livejournal.com]

There are some less-than-flattering terms which come to mind for those folks ... ;)

[pokeyburro.livejournal.com]

"I've got a Heinleinian distrust of credentialism..."

...who taught you to think that way?

[selenite.livejournal.com]

It doesn't matter, as long as the teacher had the proper training to get the point across.

Right?

[thegameiam.livejournal.com]

Mostly that's been accumulated over years: I worked in food service and retail for many years, so I got to see the direct correlation between effort and performance.

Then when I moved into a tech career, I found that the people who had certificates weren't any more knowledgeable than those without, and in many cases, what they thought they knew was wrong: there are lots of things on the assorted tests which just aren't correct in the real world.

Among other things, I do technical interviews now, and fully expect people to understand why things work the way they do, and to be conversant in them. I don't pass a whole lot of the folks who come to me - that isn't to say that they can't learn, but many of them don't know what they think they do. (My classic example of this is that many networking people do not know whether or not specific routing protocols are guaranteed to converge - this is dependent on which algorithm they use, and the algorithms are qualitatively different).

[pokeyburro.livejournal.com]

I think I effectively agree with you. I was just snarking your quote. :-)

To be honest, I like to think I know how software works, partly due to a degree in computer science. I also like to think I know how credentials work, though I have no degree in education. Degrees and certificates may not signify understanding, but they do signify exposure, and that certain tests were passed.

It's going to have to be up to the employer to recognize the functional difference between a CS degree from MIT, one from UT Austin, and one from ITT, as well as understand the difference between someone who paid attention to those educations and one who was coasting through.

At the same time, it can be all too easy to conclude, quite wrongly, that certification actually means you're less likely to know how things work.

[countrycousin.livejournal.com]

I didn't see Freeman Dyson mentioned. He showed that Feynman and Schwinger, apparently speaking different languages, were mathematically equivalent. He was at Cornell at the time; I understand that Cornell didn't want to give him his PhD for that work - obviously there was nothing new in it! (I don't have a reference for that, but I see his Wikipedia entry mentions an honorary degree.) Another school (Wikipedia says it was Cornell; I'd like to believe that, being an alumnus, but that's not how I heard it) was willing to give him a professorship, and he later was at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

I actually favor getting formally educated and appropriate certificates, but that's principally for us mundane.

[montedavis.livejournal.com]

I never did get around to all the undergraduate degree requirements (second school, third major in 5 years), because

(1) I'd been busy teaching AP-level courses at a highly ranked private school for two years before my nominal graduation date,

(2) I had an offer to go teach in Italy that looked better than sticking around to fill in in the gaps in concentration requirements

(3) My mentor, the world-class eminence on the faculty of the institution in question, went to bat for me and said "he's been doing postgrad-level work since he got here, so don't be silly."

[selenite.livejournal.com]

I'm glad they were sensible. A classmate of mine was bounced out of a three-year Masters program after the 2nd year because they decided she couldn't make up the undergrad requirements she was missing . . . possibly true, but if she got through two years successfully how badly did she need them?

[montedavis.livejournal.com]

Yep. Much more recently, still uncredentialed, I taught undergrads as an adjunct while going partway through the same university's teacher-training M.Ed. program aimed at teaching HS English.

It was bizarre: they had no problem interviewing me, looking at my work and work experience, and judging that I was competent to teach their own students. But the same body of evidence, including having taught HS English at age 19-21, didn't win me any slack at all in running the gantlet of "how to get credentials to teach HS English." (Don't ask, I still get the shakes.)