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[quote]
At Shengda, the downgraded diploma struck some students as a body blow, one that could cripple their chances of securing a good office job.</p>
<p>"There are not many positions open in the business world compared with the number of applicants, and they all go to the national-level university graduates," said a Shengda junior studying transportation, who asked to be identified only by his surname, Wang, to avoid angering college authorities.</p>
<p>Mr. Wang, who spoke by telephone from inside the sealed campus, said he came from an impoverished farming community in Henan. His parents devoted their savings and borrowed heavily from friends and relatives to pay his tuition, which he said greatly exceeded his family's annual income.</p>
<p>"I do not support violence, but the spirit of the students just collapsed," he said. "The school must admit its error and refund our money."</p>
<p>His anger stems partly from the fact that most fresh college graduates will not find work that comes close to meeting their expectations, meaning they will have to struggle to pay off the debts their relatives shouldered on their behalf.
<p>In the US, it's the education for sure. But in China there does not seem (to me at least) to be as much opportunity if you don't have the BEST test scores and BEST degree.</p>
<p>It's both and it depends. A degree that lacks true educational substance probably won't go far. A general education alone without a degree might be enough and might not, it depends on what one can make of it, but certain doors will never open if you don't have the degree to knock on them with. This may be irrelevant if one goes into business on their own. In the technical area, degrees tend to be more necessary. In certain other areas (medical field for example), a degree is imperative.</p>
<p>We just went through a painful process at the office of hiring a kid out of college. We started with a huge stack of resumes and nice cover letters, and ended up with two finalists, one from Williams and the other from Claremont McKenna, both with better than 3.5 GPAs. Neither had the spark so the decision was stalling when a late resume arrived from Berkeley. Yesterday, we hired the kid from Berkeley, which is a sub-par degree in our office (the decision-makers come from Pomona, Georgetown, Kenyon, Williams, Claremont, Washington Lee). Looks to me, based on what I just saw, that it's the kid and not the degree ...</p>
<p>I would never consider a Berkeley degree subpar! Especially not against the competition listed above. This is sheer bias for one's alma mater as opposed to any kind of objective standards. It says less about the "kid", the education, the degree than about the employers. W&L against Berkeley? Wow.</p>
<p>Very true, reasonabledad. I was assuming that the degrees were in the same field. But if employers are going to compare apples and oranges, they may end up with lemons.</p>
<p>About 15 yrs ago, when MBAs were highly touted, management brought in a recent grad to learn the ropes in our ofc. Within 2 yrs, that person replaced my boss. Shortly thereafter, we had a vacancy in our area...so we advertised for the position and received over 20 resumes. Before leaving for vacation, Mr. MBA asked us to interview 8 applicants and narrow it down to 3 for him. There was 1 young woman whom we all felt was extremely qualified and we enjoyed interviewing. To make a long story short, our boss nixed her because "the MBA program at Georgetown is not high caliber." Wow! As individuals, he and I were different as night and day...but, I learned a lot during the 2 yrs I worked for him...that my children will never be disqualified from a job because the caliber of their education was questionable.</p>
<p>It really depends. Undergrad is certainly about the education, but I can tell you for many with an MBA, including myself and many classmates at a top business school, it was about the degree.</p>
<p>I think it varies greatly. Where I grew up in a small rural impoverished area, the whole reason for going to college was to get a degree that would get you off the farm and into a good job with a steady paycheck and benefits. So it was all about the degree. We needed to get a degree that gave us a specific skill set to offer. I chose nursing. My friends chose education, accounting, engineering, etc. because we knew those degrees would prepare us for a job which was what we needed.</p>
<p>People born into different circumstances have a different perspectives.</p>
<p>I'll give y'all this snippet from Fortune Magazine regarding the hiring practices at Google:</p>
<p>"For the most part, it takes a degree from an Ivy League school, or MIT, Stanford, CalTech, or Carnegie Mellon--America's top engineering schools--even to get invited to interview. Brin and Page still keep a hand in all the hiring, from executives to administrative assistants. And to them, work experience counts far less than where you went to school, how you did on your SATs, and your grade-point average. "If you've been at Cisco for 20 years, they don't want you," says an employee."</p>
<p>As some of the above hiring stories show, the biases of the people doing the hiring are (1) critically important, and (2) not easy to stereotype. I make decisions based on my quirks that result in different hiring outcomes than the manager who sits right next to me in his hiring decisions for similar positions in the same firm. When hiring interns or permanent employees we share resumes with each other and often have different reactions to the same resume. A school loved by one may be considered pretentious and snobby by the other.</p>
<p>When working for a NYC firm, I got resumes in batches of 30, 50, or 100--my choice. All were totally qualified (vetted by HR). When you have an infinite number of people to chose from, you must make arbitrary decisions based on personal biases about schools, degrees, and look of the resume just to whittle down the list. These biases are not necessarily firm wide, in my experience. Everybody's favorite list of schools is different (not to mention favorite list of other attributes). </p>
<p>In short, I care about where the education was received, as do my fellow managers. We will rarely hire from a school we don't "know" regardless of other attributes of the applicant. On the other hand, I would be hard pressed to come up with a single firm wide list of schools that are "the ticket" to getting hired as that is more manager specific.</p>
<p>An interesting tidbit from the profile of the extremely successful Cambridge, MA city manager for the last 25 years (from Boston Sunday Globe, July 2, 2006). It seems like it's neither the degree nor the school, but definitely the person:</p>
<p>"One of the things he is most proud of is taking Cambridge from a bond rating of B to AAA, making it one of only about a dozen cities in the state and 70 nationally, with such high bond rating."
"Numbers have always been his game."</p>
<p>At UMass-Amherst, Healy first studied chemistry, anticipating medical school, but quickly switched to English and got his teaching certificate. In 1965, he took his first teaching job..."</p>
<p>Interesting how the personal biases/experiences of the one doing the hiring weigh so heavily. OTOH, it seems a lot like college admission, when the pool of applicants is also vast and the decisions come down to fine points about fit made by (subjective) strangers.</p>
<p>There is obviously a list of schools that connote "very smart," and other than the fact that it generally includes the nationally-ultra-well-regarded schools, this list varies regionally. </p>
<p>UC Berkeley has become one of those nationally prominent schools, but it wasn't always that way. 25 years ago, over half my high school went UCs, and <em>lots</em> of B students went to Berkelely. Cal Poly was a safety. No more!!</p>
<p>I know my U and my degree got me in the door many times but I also targeted my applications to people likely to respond favorably (fellow alumni.) It seems really dicey to go cold through HR. Having a direct contact with an advocate in the company is so much more likely to yield an interview.</p>
<p>I was NEVER asked for my GPA, not even once, nor was I ever asked to produce proof that I had actually attended or graduated. (In one job, teaching english at a prep school, I had to be recommended by two of my English professors, I recall.)</p>
<p>Somehow one probably ends up hired at the right place that values one's unique set of qualifications, skills, personality, etc.</p>
<p>I had a friend who applied cold for a plum job with an experimental theater producer in NYC-- he wrote his cover letter in free verse, & printed it on really groovy handmade artsy paper... and he got the job.</p>