Circumventing the Four-Year University Machine
By Michelle Malay Carter on January 29, 2008
I’m not a futurist, but my last post about Management Megatrends got?me thinking about other potential “machines” that may become either irrelevant or reinvented in my lifetime.?? So this post is mostly musing and is more about questions than answers.? I’d love to get your perspective as I go out on a limb and poke at some deeply ingrained mindsets and institutions.
In a previous post I mentioned that now that Bill Gates has left his role in Microsoft day-to-day operations, he could not get hired back by his own organization because he has no college degree.
The four year university has been the requisite professional-job-attainment pathway for decades.?
- Has the pendulum swung too far??
- Has a university degree become a proxy for managerial judgment in hiring decisions??
- Are we giving a degree more reverence than it is due?? We all know bright, successful people without degrees and vice versa.
- With the widespread availability of online curriculum, will the?four year university model become obsolete?
I may need a four year degree to land a job with the “organizational machine”, but I don’t need one to start my own business.? As more and more of our?youngest and brightest reject the idea of sitting through four years of coursework, much of it they may find either irrelevant or uninteresting, will the degree become less and less coveted?
Wouldn’t it be neat?if education became more about building knowledge and skills our areas of interest and passion rather than about obtaining a degree?
Do we need to rethink the four year University?? Is the model still relevant in our digital age?? What do you think?
Filed Under Corporate Values, Organization Design, Personal Observation, Strategy, Talent Management
Comments
5 Responses to “Circumventing the Four-Year University Machine”
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Michelle,
Excellent! And a couple of excellent ways of illustrating the problems with the knee-jerk university degree requirement.
In many skilled-labor positions, the law requires that a hiring or promotion prerequisite be a bona fide qualification for successful performance of the work. Clearly, in many management jobs a 4-year degree may neither be required for success nor predict it. In fact, many argue that even the MBA is neither required nor predictive, either.
It would be nice if we could find ways other than the 4-year degree – or at least the 4-year business degree (liberal arts is far preferable, in my mind) – to measure threshold levels of discipline and basic skills.
Thanks for a great post!
Jim,
Thanks for the comment. Seems like we agree but have more questions than answers at this point.
Michelle
Great post! I like Jim’s take as well. The positive part is that people like Bill Gates had the guts and vision to take the risk. I think that will continue regardless of any change in how business looks at a degree (advanced or otherwise).
Corporate America, as one example, tends to value conformity and duplication. Anytime you have that combination you usually don’t have creative flexibility. In other words, HR and the hiring manager may not be willing to look at a candidate in a different way. They may see the person as either having or not having what the job description says they must.
I believe every guidance counselor, HR generalist, and hiring manager should be required to learn the art of vision and creative flexibility. The result wouldn’t solve every dilemma, but it would cetainly help in talent recruitment/retainment. And with the coming worker shortage, most organizations would be the better for it.
Eric,
Thanks for the comment. Yes, Bill Gates took the risk but then abandoned his non-degreed “peeps”.
I wonder if he’s ever even thought about this issue. Is he even aware that Microsoft requires college degrees for certain jobs.
Michelle
[…] In my last post, I talked about the four year university experience and how it might be becoming outdated.? I think one of the limitations of the current?system is the lack of process for quickly eliminating subjects we do not care for.? […]