Almost every student believes that getting a four-year degree and going under debt during the process is a must if you want to land a high-paying job in companies such as Google, Netflix, and Apple. However, that is not always the case!
Business leaders, including Siemens USA CEO Barbara Humpton and Apple CEO Tim Cook, have already raised questions about the need for four-year degrees. In fact, Tim Cook recently said that almost half of US employees of Apple last year had people who didn’t have four-year degrees. Tim Cook reasoned that a lot of the colleges do not teach the skills required that leaders are looking for in their employees.
Barbara Humpton has also spoken against the idea that a four-year degree guarantees the career-readiness of a person. Humpton recently said, ‘All too often, job requisitions will say they require a four-year degree, when in fact there’s nothing about the job that truly requires a four-year degree — it merely helped our hiring managers sort of weed through the crowd and got a smaller qualified candidate group,’ Humpton was speaking at the White House during the first American Workforce Policy Advisory Board meeting.
Companies, including the likes of Google and Apple, are now focusing on hiring employees that possess the skills needed for getting tasks done, with or without a degree. LinkedIn has also determined that most of today’s hottest companies to work for do not ask their employees for a degree as a prerequisite for applying. By analyzing even further, LinkedIn was able to determine that certain positions are more likely to be filled by non-college graduates such as electronic technicians, mechanical designers, and marketing representatives.
Having said that, college degrees do tend to pay off. Workers that hold at least a bachelor’s degree were able to earn more than $932 median weekly earnings for all workers in 2018 as per a recent report that was published by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Tim Cook, while speaking at the White House panel, said, ‘Our company, as you know, was founded by a college drop-out. So we’ve never really thought that a college degree was the thing that you had to have to do well. We’ve always tried to expand our horizons.’