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More and more companies are getting away from requiring a useless BA. Zurich, based in Schaumburg, IL, is one of them. 

I saw first hand how they are doing it - paid apprenticeships and internships combined with targeted coursework at the community college. It's working.

Apprenticeship Programs: Earn and Learn: Harper College

More and more companies are getting away from requiring a useless BA. Zurich, based in Schaumburg, IL, is one of them.

I saw first hand how they are doing it - paid apprenticeships and internships combined with targeted coursework at the community college. It's working.

Apprenticeship Programs: Earn and Learn: Harper College

I don't understand how paid apprenticeships haven't been a thing for hundreds of years.  It's basically an investment that you're able to dictate the success of, all while not treating the person like a slave.  

You'd be surprised.


I'd say this might be even more of a thing as we've moved to more online and automated hiring platforms like indeed.com. Let's say you're looking to post a job and you're in a meeting discussing requirements... How much pushback will you get for saying "well, maybe we should restrict it to those with college degrees, which will probably limit our applicant pool to the best"? None. So then you put that as a filter on the job, and you only see resumes with a college degree.

this this this this this
It's 2021, not 1965

Personally, I think the degree issue comes down to intelligence.  If you are smart enough to USE a degree then you should get one, if not then it is probably a waste of time and money to get one.  In @bwarbiany 's example, his wife's degrees are useless to her job but they probably helped get her in the door and she is smart enough to do college grad level work so it is worth it to her.  However, if you get a degree in Art History then end up serving coffee at Starbucks . . .  Well, you could have served coffee without spending four years getting a worthless degree and you would have some major advantages:

• Four years more experience
• No College Debt

I think the cutoff for whether or not a degree is worthwhile is around the top third in IQ.  Here is a link to BLS showing educational attainment of the US workforce (I am reading from a graph and guessing the approximate percentages:

• 27% Associates Degree or "Some College"
• 26% HS Graduate, no college
• 25% Bachelor's Degree only
• 14% Advanced Degree
• 8% Less than HS Diploma

As you can see the current US workforce has a total of almost 40% with at least a college degree so my one third above may be a touch low, perhaps it really is top 40% or perhaps a big chunk of those with Bachelor's degrees are working at Starbucks, I don't know.  

Top quartile is an IQ of approximately 110+ while top third is an IQ of approximately 107+ and top 40% is an IQ of approximately 104.  My theory is that if your IQ is <104 then a degree will not be useful to you and if you are above 109 then it will.  If you are in the range of about 104-109 then it is probably close to a coin-flip.  

As a country we should be sending all HS graduates with IQ of 110+ to college and not sending any HS graduates with an IQ of <104.  This idea would NEVER pass, but if you were going to make college free I would advocate for limiting that to those with an IQ of 110+ because it is probably a waste of money for those below there.  

I doubt most college degrees require above-average intelligence.  

I think it's more socioeconomic.  College grads are more likely to have parents who are college grads (who, in turn, generally have more money).  Having financial support from your family is probably more predictive to completing your degree than IQ.  Although, they may just walk hand-in-hand, idk.  
I do know that if you're not getting money and/or food from your family, it's a lot harder to finish college, no matter how smart you are.  That's why so many seemingly blindly walk into debt and deal with those repercussions the rest of their lives.  

No simple solutions here, anyway.

I realized that just having a college degree of any sort means you finished something, you got up and showed some discipline about going  to class, it's a reasonable indication you would take a job seriously.

The best technician I ever had was an associate degreed person, and I had some really good ones.  For a while, we couldn't hire a tech with a college degree, which was rather odd.