People hire college graduates because they have demonstrated that they can be given a list of work, and a criteria for how their work will be judged, and complete the work. That's it.
I have a question about this observation. How is this different from someone with years of work experience, who demonstrated in practice that he or she was able to finish large software projects on time, on specification and on budget as a lead developer?
I'm asking this because I dropped out of college because of money constraints. I had a three hour commute each day, had a job next to my studies, and slowly but surely piled up debt in order to cover my basic expenses (food, rent, insurance, books). I had zero support from my family or the government.
I make the same observations as you, it seems to me that many doors will remain closed to me. Not all, mind you, over time you get to know people and build a network of sorts.
The doors will remain closed unless you provide an experience the guy making the hiring understands and values. Problem is that there are a lot of people involved, each with veto power.
First is that except for college, you have almost nothing in common with HR people that are filtering the CV, so they may undervaluate your experience.
Then there is the generation gap with the middle managers that have risen to their position before the big waves of outsourcing by following the now mythical career path. They will overvalue college degrees vs experience.
Then there is the prestige of the company: lot of companies only hires people with college degree as a policy, period. Other companies have implicit policy: nobody has ever been fired to hire a Stanford graduate.
Finally there is bias - if you paid a lot for your education, or are paying a lot for your kid education - you will have a positive bias toward people with education (and sometimes, negative bias against people that dropped out)
The sad conclusion is - having a degree is never perceived as something negative, at worst, it is ignored. Not having a degree is never a positive thing, at best it is ignored.
I have a question about this observation. How is this different from someone with years of work experience, who demonstrated in practice that he or she was able to finish large software projects on time, on specification and on budget as a lead developer?
I'm asking this because I dropped out of college because of money constraints. I had a three hour commute each day, had a job next to my studies, and slowly but surely piled up debt in order to cover my basic expenses (food, rent, insurance, books). I had zero support from my family or the government.
I make the same observations as you, it seems to me that many doors will remain closed to me. Not all, mind you, over time you get to know people and build a network of sorts.