WhineFest by a woman suing her career college for not living up to its promises in helping her to find a job after graduation … or so says Jerry Coyne from the picturesque window of his ivory tower, backed up by one of his commenters:
[I]t is nothing but anti-intellectualism to view your education as a means to get a job.
Well, the only reason I did my diploma in software development at a private college back in 2001 was to have that piece of paper to be able to show to a company I was already working for, to transfer into their I.T. department, i.e., I did it only as a means to get a job. I’d call that “practical,” not “anti-intellectual.”
Likewise, the only reason anyone does an I.T. program at a career college like Monroe is to get a job at the end of it … and even back when I did that, it was a naïve hope, given the I.T. job market. (It still is, though three months isn’t enough for the suing girl to know that—she should have waited six, as that’s the standard number for evaluating what percentage of grads have found related work.) Plus, with a mere 2.7 GPA even just in the hands-on, applied technology (rather than Comp. Sci. theory) courses she will have taken, she’s no smart cookie, i.e., even if she did manage to get interviews, her prospective employers would have been wiser to take a pass on hiring her. (Seriously, the place I did my diploma was founded by Honeywell, and I finished with a 96% overall average; but anyone who couldn’t score at least a B+ average there literally wasn’t competent, and wouldn’t have been able to keep up in the real world.)
It you want to know the ivory-towered theory, you do a B.Sc. in Computer Science; if you just want a job, you do an I.T. diploma at a business college. It’s a completely valid approach, and has nothing whatsoever to do with “anti-intellectualism.” Duh. It’s just the shortest path to a goal; and in I.T. it’s actually a smarter path, since there’s no wage-advantage to having a bachelor’s degree over a diploma.
A different commenter nailed it:
It doesn’t seem she is suing because her degree failed to get her employment, but because the advertised post-degree help from the organization did not materialize. Seems reasonable to me; if a school does not have the resources to find graduates employment in the real world, they should not use that claim to make themselves attractive to potential students in their advertising materials.
I occasionally bump into a juggler/musician who’s doing his Ph.D. at the U of Toronto, in applying robotics to puppetry. The last time I saw him, he told me he had just taken a bartending course, to be able to pick up some extra money (on top of his grant, etc.) doing that. I told him that I was making $50 an hour on a government contract, and $75 for the CRM customizations I do. He said that if I ever had more work than I could keep up with, that I should let him know, and he’d be (understandably) happy to take some of it on.
What an “anti-intellectual”! First the bartending course, just to get a job, and now this!
I didn’t tell him, but unfortunately, even if I had work to give away there, he doesn’t have the specialized, practical background to do it. (When I was down in California in 1999, I worked with a wet-behind-the-ears, recent U of T grad who had never even seen a spreadsheet before. Since we were doing a lot of work in Excel, that was a bit of a problem.) Of course he could have learned it on the job, as any competent I.T. professional can; but you don’t get hired for that ability. (You should, and would if serious programmers were running the I.T. world, ’cause they know that half the fun is learning things as you go along; but still, you don’t get hired for your ability to learn.) What makes me employable, even after a decade of working in I.T., is my niche knowledge of CRM apps.
Plus, I spent a decade bartending over the summers.
There is a “WhineFest” going on there … but it’s being led by Jerry and the Academics, not by the middling girl who, if my own experience after grad is any indication, probably has a good case against Monroe. (My old for-profit school—The Institute for Computer Studies, a.k.a. “Harvard of the North”—closed most of their campuses [along with their career-advancement offices] after the dot-com crash, and then got sold [to Everest]. In that process, they lost the database containing my records. So I actually have no proof that I even completed that diploma! That was $17K in tuition, by the way; but hey, I’ve still got all the knowledge I gained from taking those courses, so why should I complain? And yes, I’ve checked with lawyers on this; but they weren’t interested in the case, unless there were a lot of other people in the same boat, for a class-action suit.)
That evaporated diploma actually prevents me from working in the States under NAFTA: you need a B.Sc. to do that, and a diploma-which-I-don’t-have plus three years of experience is equivalent to a bachelor’s degree. Also, if I had the diploma, I could use that toward two years of credit in the Athabasca University distance-education Computing and Information Systems B.Sc. As it stands, however, I’d have to literally start over, with no transfer credit at all, for my bachelor’s.
Oddly, I actually occasionally think of doing exactly that, via the University of Phoenix, even though the four-year tuition there is the equivalent of a year’s worth of income, as opposed to the $28K for four years at Athabasca. (Doing Athabasca also would let me finance that with Canadian government student loans, which IIRC aren’t an option for Phoenix.) On the flip side, though, there’s a much better chance that the NAFTA officers would take the U of Phoenix degree seriously, than Athabasca. It shouldn’t make a difference, but they started clamping down on B.Sc. grads (e.g., from Waterloo) working in the States soon after the dot-com crash, so I’d just feel better about having the degree from a U.S. university than a Canadian one, even though it costs twice as much. Both degrees are mickey-mouse compared to a real Comp. Sci., but since I’m not at a position in my forty-something life where I can afford to take fore years off to go back to kollej….
