Snobbiness about Degrees
Read more articles on Life's Nuances and Let Me Share With You.January 15, 2007
Posted by Karen Amato Schwartz
January 15, 2007
Posted by Karen Amato Schwartz
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As I peruse job ads on freelance writing networks, I’m taken aback by postings which demand specific college degrees in this field. In fact, I have strong feelings about the matter in most fields other than accounting, medicine, law, engineering and some teaching jobs. I think it’s a cop out for businesses who don’t want to spend time checking applicants. They obviously think that a degree is enough to weed people out. In the real world it isn’t.
The reason I feel deeply about this matter is that I have no degree. But I’ve had a fair amount of success as business manager, dance educator and now writer, all without benefit of sheepskin. It can be done. Perhaps it may not be as easy now as it was 30 or so years ago, but if one is dedicated and makes his or her own opportunities, achievement is not impossible.
At 17, I’d no clue what I really wanted to make of my life. Going to work and a few night school classes at that age seemed a compromise until I knew what I wanted. Fortunately, my results spoke for me; doors opened, and I became a manager at age 22. With a lot of corporate-provided education, and years of hands-on experience, I was able to quit years later with the highest possible rating and salary. What I garnered could never have been learned from a book, and seeing some of the college graduates right out of school convinced me that book learning is light-years away from reality.
Just the fact that a person has passed tests for 4 years in college does not mean they’ve yet to realize common sense, professionalism or plain old work ethic. Luckily for me, every boss I’ve worked for has also held this opinion.
As a dance educator with only 5 semesters of college, I was hired for the intangibles of maturity, enthusiasm, flexibility and people-skills. You can’t learn those skills from any book, even if you can memorize facts and figures to beat the band.
And, when it comes to writing, a person can have every grammatical and punctuation rule down pat, but if they have nothing of interest to say in the first place, what’s the point? A degree in journalism does not guarantee that they still won’t bore readers to death.
Therefore, my soap-box tirade for today deals with the stigma of degrees. As Calvin Coolidge said, “The world is full of educated derelicts”. There are millions of us whose lives did not work in the normal way of high school and then college; we were too busy or financially strapped or taking care of families or whatever to commit 4 more years to school. Then we found we were able to do without it quite well. That does not mean we are lazy or stupid-just that our lives followed different paths.
I will never go back for a degree. If someone disregards me because I don’t meet their idea of having credentials, they’ve bought into something I have not, and the relationship would never be mutually respectful. What can I say but, “Once a rebel, always a rebel.”
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