Do Degrees Maketh Man?

After the post, I wrote last week about Dyslexia I got thinking about degrees. How important have they become and do they actually make you better at your job? 

Going back to the early 2000s as my second attempt at an education came to an end I had every intention of upgrading my HNC to a degree, but after a significant amount of deliberation (mostly, could we make the mortgage payments?) and talking to many friends and family it wasn’t to be. At the time the general consensus seemed to be that I could spend another two years achieving the holy grail but it wouldn’t necessarily land me with a better job than if I jumped back into the real world immediately. Back then the majority of people I discussed it with were of the opinion that the degree lands you the job or at least gets people to look at your CV rather than gives you the skills to do said job. 

I think we all know people who gained a job with their degree but have never used many of the skills they studied, with the surefire exception of the work ethic required to gain the degree, almost always universal in my opinion. So my first question is, have times changed? It certainly seems so to me and it does feel that the need to have a degree has become significantly more important to gain many roles. I wondered if the UK governments 2013 legislation to make 16-18 education compulsory had an impact on this but a quick Google failed to reveal conclusive evidence other than this study https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/860135/Destinations_main_text_2020_REV.pdf  Which basically says what we already know in that the higher your level of qualification the more likely you are to end up in a good job. I’d be really interested to hear the opinions of some hiring managers on this one and whilst I am not one for guesswork, I wouldn’t mind betting opinions will sway based on the route hiring managers took themselves.

I myself have varied opinions, for example, I wouldn’t want a doctor who hadn’t proven their knowledge working on me yet the only way they can get that proof (in the UK) as far as I’m aware is via a degree, however, I also believe the same doctor could probably get the same knowledge from shadowing another experienced doctor and a far more vocational approach which they have to do alongside the degree anyway, an extreme example I know. 

A less extreme example is that I wouldn’t hesitate to employ a field sales exec who had done their time in an office environment whether they had a degree or not if indeed they had the right attitudes and other skills attributed to that sort of role. 

For me education itself is probably the most pointed example, in Leicestershire, the starting wage of a teaching assistant is circa ￡12.5 k per annum pro-rata, yet a degree is a desirable qualification, and why not? After all, they are fundamentally being asked to teach, under the guise of a Higher Level Teaching Assistant. But can a Teaching Assistant be equally as effective without a degree and can they potentially be better at their job with several years of experience and life skills, a degree earned at the school of life to use a term my Nan would have used?

The question is, have we become more risk-averse and more likely to discard a CV simply because it lacks a degree in a time when the proportion of young people in England going to university has surpassed 50%?