Diploma Mills

[dfrecore]

Interesting point jsh1138. It took me 5 years as an adult to earn my black belt and it took my son 6 years to earn his. I know many kids, some as young as 8 or 9 that got a black belt from other schools in a year. It kind of makes me mad, because it devalues what I earned because so many are given out so easily. I can see how a ton of meaningless BA degrees may devalue them in general, yet employers can look at transcripts to see details of the degree too.

well exactly, we all know an 8 year old walking around with a black belt is devaluing the belt. We used to say that you'd rather be the best green belt anyone had ever seen vs being the worst black belt that anyone had ever seen. at the end of the day, the belt only means anything because of the people who hold it, not the other way around

its the same thing with degrees. i'd rather be the smartest guy with no degree than the dumbest guy with 10 degrees. you can hand degrees out like candy but at the end of the day it doesn't mean anything or change anything if you don't know the material. the degree is a *symbol* of the learning that you did to get the degree, that's the point of it. if you skip the learning then the symbol is meaningless because people will get in 5 minutes that you have no idea what you're talking about even though you have 5 IT degrees, if you can't fix the router issue or whatever. So then where are you? At the end of the day people are going to see you for what you are, whatever that is or isn't. 

So the idea is a transformational journey, to improve what you are, not just to slap some degrees on the wall and call it a day. I mean whatever people want to do, like I said before, I'm not here to police anyone's learning experience. Just saying you aren't going to be fooling anyone when you get out there in the world so if you want them to be impressed when they see that degree you need to do a little bit of work to go with it

I guess I'm looking at it from another angle.  I know people (myself included) with many years of experience in an industry - 10, 20, 30+ years.  Then all of a sudden, someone decides that you need a degree, and that all those years of experience are basically invalid without a piece of paper showing that you took 120 credits, many of them completely randomly chosen.  Someone at a school created a "degree" that said that you had to take Art History and World Civilizations and Statistics and Speech and World Religion to work as an HR Analyst.  Why?  What makes those particular courses important?  Why do you need those to do well in HR?  What do they have to do with HR anyway?

I think courses in the AOS/Core MAY be important, but they certainly all aren't.  I don't need to know the slightest thing about bonds (Finance) or social media (marketing) or supply-side economics (Microecon) to be good at my HR job!  The courses I DO need to be good at HR aren't even offered in most business degrees (compensation, training, project management), but for some reason, someone said that this was necessary, and now I have to jump through stupid hoops that mean nothing for my 10+ years of HR experience to have meaning.

I just think a lot of it is silly.  And I decided that if I didn't want to learn a bunch about Microeconomics because it's required for my degree, but I will not use a single bit of the information for the rest of my life, then I don't really feel bad for not working hard to get an A on that course.  Sure, I learned some (and already knew a bunch), but it really isn't necessary for what I want to do with my life.  Same with Stats, and Finance, and Managerial Accounting.  They mean virtually nothing to me in my line of work.  They are just classes picked by someone who thinks I should know them.

And just because I got a B in Microecon does not mean that I don't know anything, or that my degree is worthless.  It just means that I didn't work my hardest to learn information that isn't relevant to me.

Obviously, I am not talking about someone who has zero work experience AND got a degree in 6 months without learning anything.  That kind of person will have a hard time in the real world finding a job, because they have nothing to offer.  But for many of us here, that's not the position we are in.  We have the experience, and now we need a piece of paper to "prove" that all that experience is worth something.  A silly notion, but there it is.