College degrees have been considered ‘meal tickets’ in society for as long as there were higher learning institutions, so much so that the idea of degrees becoming ‘obsolete’ is a bit of a culture shock. ‘Get a Degree= Guaranteed Job’ is the belief still held by a lot of people today. It’s an idea that was fed by corporations who used to deny people employment solely based on their lack of a thinly sliced, polished tree carcass; regardless if they actually possessed the skills to do the job.  So is it a surprise that it’s begun to blow up in their face by producing a generation of college graduates who were more focused on getting the degree rather than honing the skills required to do the job?

The article “How to Get a Job” by Thomas L. Friedman describes how companies are becoming less interested in the degrees a candidate has and more interested on who has the skills to do the job. “A degree document is no longer a proxy for the competency employers need.”  It never should have been in the first place, yet that’s how they made it. Whether they intended to or not, they made it so that the degree became more important than the skills required to do the job.  Maybe it was easier—- quicker to look on a resume and see “Bachelor’s of ———” and use that rather than sitting down to discern the skills of each individual candidate. Either way, I guess it’s a good thing for them to start looking more at the candidate’s skills vs. credentials; yet I wonder if this means that they’d give Mark, the high-school dropout with an uncanny business sense a chance.