25 years old and deep in debt

[Berkut]

Shy shouldn't employer require degrees though, even when the job clearly doesn't specifically require the education of a degree?

If you have vastly more applicants than openings, and no specific way to narrow them down (or those specifics have already been used), then is is not at all unreasonable to discard those without degrees, other factors being equal.

Employment market is probably a poster boy for situations where individually rational decisions wind up being irrational in the aggregate.  For example, it may be rational to only consider candidates that are currently employed.  After all, people who stay employed tend to be better workers than people who got fired or laid off.  But there is an obvious problem when everyone is doing it.

There are also secondary effects.  The market reacts to the individual employer requirements, and often in ways that are again irrational in the aggregate.

Right, I was specifically commenting on the guy looking to hire someone - I agree that this behavior can be sub optimal overall.

A person looking to hire people though cannot be expected to discard such criteria, especially when they are not given any other criteria to use in its place.

[Berkut]

"Why shouldn't male peacocks have the most outrageous and overgrown tail feather displays?  After all, it helps attract female peacocks, who can know, with some degree of certainty, that their progeny will also have awkward, expensive, and otherwise-useless tail feather displays.  And if the display is stamped 'Stanford,' all the better."

Presumably having a degree is not useless though, even if it is not specifically applicable to the job in question.

I imagine there could be some jobs where having a degree could be seen as being actively a negative, but those are not the norm.

All things being equal, some random guy with a degree is probably a better statistical candidate for being a more productive employee than someone without one.

[DGuller]

Right, I was specifically commenting on the guy looking to hire someone - I agree that this behavior can be sub optimal overall.

A person looking to hire people though cannot be expected to discard such criteria, especially when they are not given any other criteria to use in its place.

Agreed.  The worst part about such situations is that nothing can be done about it on the individual level, at least not without some unique insight.  If you can look inside the person's soul and find out exactly how well they'll perform at the job, then obviously you would be very dumb to follow the same strategy when you can find unwanted excellent workers on the cheap, but developing unique insights is hard.

[Ideologue]

My aim was an evocation of the problem, not a meticulous cartography directly linking every feature of runaway sexual selection in nature and the credential treadmill Western civilization has found itself on.

[Berkut]

I do think pat of the problem is lazy people making hiring decisions.

Maybe this is just my personal experience speaking, but it seems to me that there is a lot of attempts to substitute check off criteria for actual evaluation, which requires actual work.

[CountDeMoney]

Employment market is probably a poster boy for situations where individually rational decisions wind up being irrational in the aggregate.  For example, it may be rational to only consider candidates that are currently employed.  After all, people who stay employed tend to be better workers than people who got fired or laid off.  But there is an obvious problem when everyone is doing it.

I blame HR retards.  And Yiconomists.

[Baron von Schtinkenbutt]

First, computer science != IT.

Explain.

Computer science is the study of the theory of computation.  It's heavily mathematical.  In industry, computer science grads typically take jobs as software engineers.  IT is the architecture and management of computing systems.  There may be some programming involved, but the primary responsibility is to the systems.  Sometimes referred to as systems engineers[1].

It also frequently involves scope.  At companies like Google, where the systems are the product (essentially), the people who architect and maintain them are not IT.  At companies like Coca-Cola, where the systems are there to support the core business, they are IT.

[1] Thus causing no end of headaches for me, since I was a different kind of systems engineer.

Second, there are plenty of software developers who have non-technical degrees, or even no degree.  Not a good field to use as an example.

So in other words, and as Brazen as opined, a liberal arts undergraduate degree has not been a barrier to employment, now has it?

No, it isn't.  I never said it was.

[Baron von Schtinkenbutt]

I do think pat of the problem is lazy people making hiring decisions.

Maybe this is just my personal experience speaking, but it seems to me that there is a lot of attempts to substitute check off criteria for actual evaluation, which requires actual work.

That is also caused by HR trying to force themselves into the hiring process at points where they do not belong.

[Berkut]

I do think pat of the problem is lazy people making hiring decisions.

Maybe this is just my personal experience speaking, but it seems to me that there is a lot of attempts to substitute check off criteria for actual evaluation, which requires actual work.

That is also caused by HR trying to force themselves into the hiring process at points where they do not belong.

Yeah, that is certainly true as well. HR is not just useless in the hiring process, they are mostly actively detrimental to it, in my experience.

[DGuller]

I do think pat of the problem is lazy people making hiring decisions.

Maybe this is just my personal experience speaking, but it seems to me that there is a lot of attempts to substitute check off criteria for actual evaluation, which requires actual work.

That may be a rational decision in its own right.  Evaluating hundreds of candidates very carefully takes time, and time is valuable.  Maybe there is an efficient market solution waiting for this, but I can't think of one.

[CountDeMoney]

So in other words, and as Brazen as opined, a liberal arts undergraduate degree has not been a barrier to employment, now has it?

No, it isn't.  I never said it was.

It wasn't directed at you, Captain Nuance. 

[DGuller]

I do think pat of the problem is lazy people making hiring decisions.

Maybe this is just my personal experience speaking, but it seems to me that there is a lot of attempts to substitute check off criteria for actual evaluation, which requires actual work.

That is also caused by HR trying to force themselves into the hiring process at points where they do not belong.

Yeah, that is certainly true as well. HR is not just useless in the hiring process, they are mostly actively detrimental to it, in my experience.

I guess it depends on the company.  I've been part of the hiring process in my company for a while, and there HR is very useful and helpful.  I guess the crucial part is how much HR truly understands the needs of the departments doing the hiring, and whether they have people specializing in one area doing the work.

[CountDeMoney]

I do think pat of the problem is lazy people making hiring decisions.

Maybe this is just my personal experience speaking, but it seems to me that there is a lot of attempts to substitute check off criteria for actual evaluation, which requires actual work.

That may be a rational decision in its own right.  Evaluating hundreds of candidates very carefully takes time, and time is valuable.  Maybe there is an efficient market solution waiting for this, but I can't think of one.

Federal agencies set job applicant limits

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bs-md-federal-job-application-limits-20140816,0,6907747.story

Some agencies have begun to limit the number of applications they accept per vacancy. Instead of setting a deadline for applications, some job announcements stay open only until the limit — in some cases as few as 25 resumes — is reached.

[Martinus]

I do think pat of the problem is lazy people making hiring decisions.

Maybe this is just my personal experience speaking, but it seems to me that there is a lot of attempts to substitute check off criteria for actual evaluation, which requires actual work.

That is also caused by HR trying to force themselves into the hiring process at points where they do not belong.

Yeah, that is certainly true as well. HR is not just useless in the hiring process, they are mostly actively detrimental to it, in my experience.

It doesn't help that noone who is ambitious and capable ends up in HR.

It's a part of a broader problem - those who end up tasked with the creation of the elite are themselves generally quite mediocre. Same is true for educators.

[grumbler]

Newest university rankings

I used that in my economics classroom.  Biggest laugh was the USMA fun fact.