At a previous job I had I had to hire an employee to help in our art department in production. One lady had by far the best resume she had just graduated from a state college with a degree in commercial art. Her first day I handed her a photograph of a object and the background needed to be dropped out, all in analog world before computers. All that was needed was a simple frisket. She had a puzzled look and asked me what a frisket was. I handed it to another employee that only had a high school education and he did it in short order. We ended up using her at the front counter because she was attractive and a good people person. Her degree was a total waste of money.

The non-accredited education business finds new suckers all the time.

Profile of Corinthian student Michael Adorno - Business Insider
The government is starting to do something about it, but it cannot be soon enough.

These people are victims of fraud.

The contracts they enter into should be made illegal.

Do you blame the sucker or the con-man?

Anyone want to see my NetWare certificate?

No.

It's a title.

Like "Headmaster".

:cool:

Baz I wasn't attempting to correct you just making a joke to how I read it. It gave me a laugh.

Like a lot of folks here, I've been in tech for 25+ years, I remember back in the day there were kids graduating HS, going to MCSE bootcamp, getting certified and walking into jobs making more than college grads at the time. Early days of the first tech bubble. That was funny to watch those kids start trying to manage environments and build servers.

Lots of these roles, even a number of the advanced ones don't require degrees, still. Again, it's a value add, but the certifications and practical/years of experience, and most importantly personality are what I look for when interviewing candidates.

You can't substitute book smarts for practical hands on knowledge. It is most definitely a value add and you need to have the ability to problem solve and think logically, as well as learn and adapt and apply the experiential knowledge you've acquired. Nothing teaches you better than a 30 hour nonstop recovery from a storage array implosion.

Anyway, what bothers me is multifold: - the for-profits are going to be motivated for the wrong reasons and are not far in business practice (IMH experience only...) from the predatory mortgage lenders of 7-10 years ago. These 'students' need also to understand that they should act like 'clients' and do some due diligence on what they're spending money on, even if it's gov't money - the only person who's going to look out for your best interests is you; which leads me to the final point - take some GD responsibility.

End of the day, if this guy were sitting in front of me I wouldn't really care if he slung pizzas with a goal of becoming a CCIE. If he's got the personality, work ethic, character traits, a technical aptitude and a willingness to start at the bottom, I'd be willing to give him a shot.

There's something more to this and I get the sense he's using this as his crutch.

U. of Phoenix has a very popular nursing degree program ..... I find that scary.

Uh yeah. He waited until age 28 to decide to get out of the fast food business. Good on him for wanting to do better, but someone who takes until that age to even start thinking about getting a real job is (I'm going out on a limb here) probably gonna be a slow learner and doer. I was once asked about a one year gap in my resume between college graduation and my first real job and I was kind of worried that the interviewer had caught that. No one had before or has since. I told him it was because my band was doing real well at the time and I had to see it through for another year before cutting my hair and getting serious. He was a drummer, so he totally respected that.

I can't imagine what I could say at age 28 or 33 if asked why I had nothing to show on my resume but having been the subject of an article about student loan debt and for-profit universities.

The issue is that there is a constant need to be careful what you sign up for. People try to sell you things every day that are not a good deal or even a flat out scam. If you live in the US, you have to be able to figure out what a good deal is and what isn't. It has become extremely easy to do some basic checks online to get guidance.

If you are a moron, you can't navigate the jungle and you get suckered in. Reminds me of the crowdfunding 944 guy who thought he needed to go to UTI to become a mechanic.

Finally, yes, he should have taken the call center job! Those centers have computers at every desk and they are bound to need work. There would be opportunity to offer to help, I am sure. Work your way in / up. It definitely beats being back at a restaurant where they have a couple cashier machines. :rolleyes:

G

I know people in this field that have no business being in this field. Like the guy that wanted to set up all his servers with a RAM Disk as his boot drive so the servers could boot really fast.

Maybe I'm being a bit too judgmental, but looking at the pic of that guy in the article and all I see is a wise guy. Would not interview, much less hire.

Counterpoint:

One guy on my last team did just that. Now he was the manager of a fast-food establishment, but he found himself at 28 with two young kids and a highly stressful job that he hated.

He got himself enrolled in a program that my employer sponsored at the time to retool people in other careers into IT developers. He had to interview, but once accepted got paid to do a 7-month high-intensity training program. He is one of the hardest workers I know, and I think it is largely because he has no desire to go back into the fast-food industry.

There's always a card they pull that makes it not their fault or some reason, or we find them one somehow. When are we going to start taking responsibility for ourselves. There are many that have legit degrees from big school who has't found a job, so should they start to sue or default on loans. Loan forgiveness, this and that forgiveness. Crazy thoughts. So what are the choices here? Suck it up and move on and make something of yourself or mope, btich, complain, and default on the loan have a screwed up record and complain about bad credit score, can't qualify for a loan on the needed auto to get to work or loan for house purchase. But no one told them that, that they should be forgiven and get the loan due to their lack ability to be aware of these lift lessons. rant over, sorry

I flipped burgers at Wendy's and knew some pretty bright mgr. who were probably in their 20s or 30s. But I also worked in restaurants where there were guys in the 40s washing dishes and busing tables for min. wage with a wife and/or kid to support.

I would think the very first thing someone needs to ask themselves when deciding whether to go into debt for a(nother) degree is whether that degree will get them an income that will easily repay that debt while also affording them a better lifestyle. Doesn't seem like too crazy a question to me, but a lot of folks seem to not ask it or ignore the answer. I have never had a job where my degree mattered and certainly not one where an advanced degree would matter. Well, my current boss went to the same school and we know some of the same professors. But I still don't think he knows or cares what my degree is in.

Cal State Northridge supposedly has a pretty well regarded Industrial Hygiene program (I'm a Certified Industrial Hygienist), which is workplace chemical, noise, etc. exposure assessment and control in a nutshell. As far as I can tell, they don't offer any field instrumentation and testing/exposure monitoring classes. Which is sort of the core of Industrial Hygiene. You can't quantify worker exposure if you don't know how to measure the exposure.

I went to Cal State LA and went through their Industrial Tech program. By the time I got done with it, almost 40-50% of their hands on classes were already done. They want theory everything to think then to actually understand how things really work in the field. Seem that everything has moved that way. No body wants to do the hands-on dirty work. we were told that was dirty work in the plant and our job is to manage, not produce, and there was a salary scale that was posted, by the university of course. What a bunch of crap but that my stupid, dumb opinion.

My BSEE and MSEE were/are extremely important to the jobs I've held throughout my career. But YMMV.

I'm not saying degrees aren't important, but mine turned out not to be. Once I had decided I didn't want to be in the Foreign Service or work on the Hill (anymore), my degree ceased to matter. Specialty fields are totally different.

Yep. That's why I said YMMV.