If you’re an employer, how much do you actually value a college degree?

How does it factor in when you choose employees, if at all?

Your question is too vague. It depends on the job.

I can tell you that recently we’ve run into a problem at my company where we are not allowed to promote an employee to director who does not have a 4 year degree. We recently had two canidate run up against this issue. Either could have had a degree in anything, but the lack of a credential limited their mobility. We eventually decided to go to bat for one and she was granted an exception but this is something to consider.

Recently had an issue with a former student who didn’t finish her last couple of credits due to some personal issues. After some time in the workplace, her new employer needed confirmation of a completed degree. Fortunately we were able to work with her and make everything official.

In my experience, a degree is often a non-negotiable requirement for some jobs. Depending on your intended field of employment, you may not need to check off that box, so work experience could be more valuable for some people.

Given equivalent candidates with and without the degree, I’ll take the one who the ability to stick with it and get the degree most of the time.

I work with a truly brilliant guy at my current client right now whose advancement is limited because he didn’t finish his degree. It definitely is slowing his career progress.

In some situations, most people have degrees, because most people need to learn the needed foundational knowledge in a structured environment, but some people have strong enough motivation to self-educate. So, while a degree per se may not be required, for most people, learning the foundational knowledge in college is more effective than trying to self-educate, even though there are some who can self-educate.

However, the most common causes of non-completion of college are running-out-of-money related, so this type of selection may select for applicants from higher SES backgrounds whose parents could contribute enough so that they would not run out of money before completing college.

@ucbalumnus I think that kind of economic selection is the point.

At my employer, it would be very rare to hire someone in most types of positions without a college degree or years of specialized experience. It’s a de facto requirement for many categories of jobs.

In addition to education, some positions require special certification. Talented people will be able to move only so far without meeting the requirement. My DH had a manager would was given 5-6 chances to get the industry certification the other team members had. The manager was blocked from promotion since he did not achieve the certification required for the next job and his team passed him by. It was embarrassing for him and showed that he made short-sighted choices earlier in his career when getting the certification might have been easier for him.

It is good to consider where you want to be five-10 yrs down the road. Do you want to move into management or leadership? Will not having a degree hold you back? It is significant in my industry and our two newest team members have two degrees. We are automating basic skill work and two team members who did not have degrees were phased out because they could not be promoted further.

degree - yes.
name of the school on the degree - no