When you're in a position to hire or influence hiring, will you consider those without degrees?
I ask because I hear this sentiment a lot but we still have a system becoming more reliant on degrees. The universities may be the gatekeepers of those degrees but they're not the ones gatekeeping the jobs. They have no influence there. They were not the ones who decided degree = credentials. I ask because many people eventually grow in their jobs to a point where they have significant influence over hiring. So when that time comes will you perpetuate the system you criticize or push against it? Truthfully, this is a thing that can be done with little to no risk to your own employment.
I see your point, but the issue is that it's quite futile to shame students for playing the game that people in the industry has set up. It doesn't help that in the past, college degrees were in fact more relevant than today, especially before the era of the internet and wikipedia, so if older people who are currently in charge of hiring aren't aware of these changes, they might just apply their outdated personal experience and just assume college degrees hold the same weight as they did in the past.
I'm pretty certain when kids these days eventually become responsible for hiring decisions, they probably will handle things differently since their experiences are different.
I do appreciate that you do that! People making change is the only way change can happen.
But I think the second part is amiss. I do agree that educators (being one) need to recognize the reality of the environment. But I think you also can't ignore that the reason the degrees are used to signal qualification is because the degree is intended to signal that some knowledge is held by a specific person. Yes, things have changed. It did used to be that interviews were much shorter, with a degree being a strong signal (at minimum, it is a signal that someone can sufficiently follow directions and manage their time). Should that mean those tasked with ensuring a student gets their education does not get their education? I get your point, but I think it is barking up the wrong tree. Asking academia to change only furthers the problem as it lets employers shift blame. It is like getting upset at a minimum wage worker for increased prices due to tariffs.
The really weird thing is we're now in this bizarroland setting where employers will filter for degree and then spend months and a lot of time and money putting candidates through testing rounds. Making them do tons of leetcode and other things to evaluate their performance. Where the candidates spend months studying to pass the interviews. And the complaints here are probably more apt, about how the material they need to study is not significantly relevant to the skills needed for a job[0]. Worse, it doesn't seem to be achieving the results it is setting out to seek.
As they say about the stock market "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent". My point is that some academics are making classes easier. Grade inflation is a measurable phenomena and it sure got worse with Covid. My point is that employers are acting irrationally.
[0] I'll give an example. I had an interview a few weeks ago and we had run a bit longer than expected prior to getting to the coding portion of the interview and where their coding software crashed a few times, giving us 10 minutes to do what was expected to be 30. Finally coding, the program crashed and I said "I don't use a lot of Juypter Notebooks, does the kernel crash when OOM?" I'm explaining my thought process aloud and frankly, I'd never hit this on the job. No answer. I quickly scroll through logs, say "I'm going to guess that's the issue, I'd normally guess and if wrong google it". Yes, it was the right answer. But there was no reason to do this, especially with me guessing right. This wasn't some dinky startup, it was a multi-trillion dollar company...
When you're in a position to hire or influence hiring, will you consider those without degrees?
I ask because I hear this sentiment a lot but we still have a system becoming more reliant on degrees. The universities may be the gatekeepers of those degrees but they're not the ones gatekeeping the jobs. They have no influence there. They were not the ones who decided degree = credentials. I ask because many people eventually grow in their jobs to a point where they have significant influence over hiring. So when that time comes will you perpetuate the system you criticize or push against it? Truthfully, this is a thing that can be done with little to no risk to your own employment.