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We often discuss the merit (or necessity) of having a formal degree in technology. This story is another installment in that debate:
The Department of the Interior's computer systems played a major role in the breach of systems belonging to the Office of Personnel Management, and DOI officials were called before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Wednesday to answer questions about the over 3,000 vulnerabilities in agency systems discovered in a penetration test run by Interior's Inspector General office. But there was one unexpected revelation during the hearing: a key Interior technology official who had access to sensitive systems for over five years had lied about his education, submitting falsified college transcripts produced by an online service.
The official, Faisal Ahmed, was assistant director of the Interior's Office of Law Enforcement and Security from 2007 to 2013, heading its Technology division. He claimed to have a bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, and a master's degree in technology management from the University of Central Florida—but he never attended either of those schools. He resigned from his position at Interior when the fraudulent claim was exposed by a representative of the University of Central Florida's alumni association, who discovered he had never attended the school after Ahmed accepted and then suddenly deleted a connection with her on LinkedIn.
TFA emphasizes the falsification he did of his credentials, but there seems to be heavy insinuation that lack of degree = lack of ability.
Official Submission
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ledow on Friday July 17 2015, @12:42PM
It's nothing to do with the degree, but the dishonesty. You can't lie to an employer like that and get away with it. Notice he "resigned", not was sacked, because he may have been able to claim that he did a perfectly adequate job of it despite lying.
A degree does not prove that you have knowledge nobody else does, or are immensely skilled in a certain area. It certainly does not prove that you are able to do any particular job, no matter how relevant it appears. A degree proves that you have the capacity to learn, the will to learn, the ability to learn, and the fortitude to keep at it. In fact, it proves moreover that you are able to learn and apply lots of unrelated bollocks in order to get to the stuff you actually find interesting. It proves that you have the ability to take on something you've never done before and is out of your depth and complex, and can come away from it having been successful and learned new things outside your normal areas.
I have a Maths and Computing degree. It's literally one mark off of being a "pass" rather than a Honours degree. The Computing side is singularly useless in my IT career. How often do you actually need to calculate and prove a loop invariant outside of programming for a living? The mathematics side comes up all the time (graph theory: spanning trees, etc. coding theory: CRC, hashes, cryptography, error correction, RAID, etc.).
My first job was obtained because of my degree... not because it made me any good on a computer, but because I was ALREADY good at, and the degree proved I had the dedication, the ability to understand complex problems, the ability to learn all the boring crap that nobody wants to but you need to in order to do the complex jobs, and the fact that your intellect is above a certain level. It doesn't mean you're any good at the job, but it's an proven indicator of OTHER features that are desirable and can compensate for a lack of actual expertise in a particular area.
Something like 10% of people in developed countries have a degree. Those are the same 10% who were at the top of the school system, in general. And those are the people more likely to earn more money in the workplace than their peers. Something like 60% of London's workforce are graduates - and that's where the highest wages are paid in the UK. That's disproportionate to only 10% or so actually having a degree, so people with degrees are flocking to the highest-earning areas, usually because they have a job that earns more and which less people can reliably do.
Being anti-graduate is like being anti-education to me. Why do we teach our kids simultaneous equations when we know they'll grow up to work in McDonalds? Because we hope that they won't do that. We hope to find the 10% who can do more. It doesn't need to be a real-world skill (how many sweets in a bag, etc. ? Who gives a shit), but it has to test their capability to handle complex and abstract problems that AREN'T obvious to other people. I can safely say that, outside of maths classes, I've never used a simultaneous equation in a practical scenario. But I can imagine three or four jobs that would require it (e.g. designing RAID systems).
And, as I advise all my friends - if a job says it REQUIRES a degree, but you don't have one? Apply anyway and mention specifically why you think you can do just as well. Point out all the stuff you've self-taught, all the year-long projects you've been involved in, etc. A degree is three/four years of hard work and relevant learning - prove you have that outside a degree and see what happens. If you can do that, the actual requirements do not matter AND you've made a name for yourself just by your job application. Those people who just go "Oh, but I can't, it says I need a degree" and abandon the application process are the ones who aren't trying to better themselves, to prove themselves, to show they have what it takes. A job application is about slicing off the top 10% of candidates and inviting them to interview. Saying "you need a degree" slices off the top 10% immediately with no work required, but it doesn't mean you can't get the job without one if you can just convince them of equivalent experience.
My degree is probably the best thing I ever did. It cost a fortune, it was seriously hard work, and I'm nowhere near an academic - my girlfriends friends and family are all Dr, PhD and serious amounts of research and experience... I'm just in the 10%, right at the bottom. It's never once provided a practical skill in the subjects studied that I needed in a career, I could easily do what I do without that specific knowledge, but it proves other things way outside the scope of a mere job.
My degree certificate proves that I can, and did, study hard things for three years and understood them enough at the end to pass. That's it. And that's a more valuable skill that trying to teach a generation of graduates how to operate a Windows 2012 Server.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 17 2015, @12:56PM
A degree proves that you have the capacity to learn, the will to learn, the ability to learn, and the fortitude to keep at it.
Maybe if you go to a top college/university. But the standards at many schools are rather pathetic. And self-education can prove the same. But self-education shows that you have the determination to do something on your own and struggle, and that you can learn independently; you don't need others to give you assignments to egg you on. Furthermore, you can struggle to learn things you find less interesting. This is just a different means of getting an education than formal education is. You can make anything sound 'good' in this way. I don't want to insult degrees; just the magical thinking that surrounds them.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by AnonymousCowardNoMore on Friday July 17 2015, @02:31PM
But self-education shows that...
It does no such thing. The entire point ledow made by saying that a degree proves stuff is that it has been verified. Imperfectly verified, but nonetheless verified. Self-educated people can not be known to know any of the things they supposedly learned without extensive testing—basically by putting them through a degree program anyway.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 17 2015, @02:52PM
It does no such thing.
Self-education itself does show such a thing. What you're saying is that it can't be easily verified by others, but it can be verified by you. But if you could somehow verify it, it would show that.
basically by putting them through a degree program anyway.
Degree programs last for years. The specific skills a job requires is unlikely to require tests that would last for years or even days, so this is just false.
I can see why employers would take the lazy and harmful way out (rather than providing training and screening employees, which would also eliminate people who have degrees but are also idiots), but that doesn't mean it's ultimately good for society.
(Score: 1) by ledow on Monday July 20 2015, @03:55PM
If the question of standards comes up, then you have to ask what standard a self-taught person taught themselves to. And that's almost impossible to answer in a short space of time without testing them heavily. Employers don't want to do that, if someone else has done all the hard work and compared them to a standard, and found them sufficiently skilled in *learning* itself to have passed.
It hardly matters what college/university, but still we know that community college X down the road is pointless, while Oxbridge, Harvard, Yale are better. So it provides, by the fact of having passed through the institution, a standard to measure them by immediately.
My ex-father-in-law is a multi-doctorate. He did most of it with the Open University (which is a self-teaching kind of thing). His degrees and doctorates aren't considered as good a standard as my girlfriend's, which came from a London university and an Italian university, both long-running and revered for the certain subject areas in which she is qualified. Thus, it instantly means more than "I self-taught myself genetics" or similar. The degree is a standard, a scale, a benchmark. There are others. But as you state, few professional qualifications ever require several YEARS of education to pass - and, believe me, you will drop out if you can't pass because they won't just take your money and wave you through. A degree is an independently-verified record of years of consistent hard work to achieve a recognised standard, which is graded both on your result (Honours, pass, fail, whatever) and the establishment in which you did it (you need straight A's to even set foot in Oxford or Cambridge officially, I know, I shot for that when I was younger).
We're not saying self-teaching can't get you to the same standard, but you can't measure it anywhere near as easily. We're not saying that universities bestow magical qualities on people. We're not even saying that you need a degree to do any job - ANY job. But when it comes to trusting your life to a doctor, or your building to an architect, or a million dollar art project to an artist, they provide some evidence of consistent hard work and achievement under recognised standards and measured independently and verifiably. It doesn't mean you won't lose a lung, the building won't collapse or your art project won't be a laughing stock, but it provides features (even if they are checkbox exercises) that almost nothing else can.
Note: I didn't go to a top university. Mine is currently in the 30's in the league tables in my country and was lower than that when I graduated. But you can look back at that and see, which is the point.
Even in the worst universities in my country, a degree means something. If nothing else, those are usually the kids that would have had no hope normally and came from the worst schools in the country, but tried to better themselves.
There isn't a qualification in the industry that can equate to three/four years of solid hard work unless that same qualifications costs as much. And almost NOTHING costs as much as going through university. It takes chunks of your life, chunks of your social life too, huge amounts of your money and time, and shows your inadequacies in a way you never conceived. I'd be impressed at anyone over the age of 25 going back to university and getting through the first year, even if they were a millionaire. It's simply that difficult a thing to do, and has more to do with the student than their available funds, or the amount of free time they have.
How many retired people do you know with adequate funds and comfortable lives and time on their hands, and they choose to go back to university? It requires you to be at a peak of intellectual and learning ability. There is no "course" or training or vendor qualification to match that.