Does it matter where you get your degree from? It appears not for much longer.....

[Deleted member 66701]

Today I ran a workshop helping our final year degree students apply for graduate schemes and we noticed a peculiar thing, see below:-

Nowhere in the entire application form did it ask you to state the educational institution you studied at. This was repeated across the application process for around seven other big employers (I forget but I think IBM and BAE did the same).

So, it appears in the interests of promoting equality and diversity, it will soon no longer matter where you get your degree from.

This obviously raises some important questions. Theoretically, all degrees should be of the same academic standard due to the use of mechanisms such as external course consultants and inspections by QAA. This now obviously needs to be "double downed" upon if employers are not asking what institution you studied at. It should also erase the stigma of gaining a degree at an FE institution - a stigma allocated unfairly imho as I've worked with several FE institutions whose teaching quality and standards puts many big name universities to shame.

So what say you GD - progress or political correctness gone mad?

 

[jsmoke]

Beginning of a Buck Rodgers society.

 

[robj20]

It says remove, email, phone and address. How do they get in touch to offer the job?

 

[Macky]

For subjects such as mechanical engineering it's important for the degree to be accredited by the IMechE or similar so that the graduates are able to go for chartership/Incorporated. To do this, the course must reach minimum benchmarks set by the IMechE. So for an engineering company such as BAE Systems to potentially neglect whether the degree is accredited I find difficult to believe. It is their aim for all of their graduates to become CEng/IEng and if the course is not accredited then the route to chartership becomes longer, more convoluted and ultimately more costly for the employer.

 

[Deleted member 66701]

It says remove, email, phone and address. How do they get in touch to offer the job?

Really? C'mon dude, use your noggin.

It says don't put those details in the Experience and Skills, Your CV and Personal Statement sections - not exclude them from the entire application form. Those details go in the "your details" section - the recruiters doing the paper sift don't see that part - presumably so recruiters aren't swayed by the institution you studied at.

 

[Deleted member 66701]

For subjects such as mechanical engineering it's important for the degree to be accredited by the IMechE or similar so that the graduates are able to go for chartership/Incorporated. To do this, the course must reach minimum benchmarks set by the IMechE. So for an engineering company such as BAE Systems to potentially neglect whether the degree is accredited I find difficult to believe. It is their aim for all of their graduates to become CEng/IEng and if the course is not accredited then the route to chartership becomes longer, more convoluted and ultimately more costly for the employer.

It's a fair point, but I did note that on the BAE application form it did list the requirements which included an accredited degree (not for computing disciplines though) which you had to confirm if you held or not.

I suppose you could lie but I imagine you'd have to produce your degree certificate before commencing employment.

 

[Dolph]

What a wonderful approach to drive towards mediocrity and failure.

 

[adolf hamster]

isn't this just how the government/some companies are doing the cv filtering phase?

companies that care are still going to be looking at the institution

 

[Deleted member 66701]

What a wonderful approach to drive towards mediocrity and failure.

I suppose that depends whether you subscribe to the mindset that there is a great difference in academic standards between HE institutions.

 

[Deleted member 66701]

isn't this just how the government/some companies are doing the cv filtering phase?

companies that care are still going to be looking at the institution

There were 8 companies in total doing this - including IBM and BAE (and there were some other big names as well, but I fogret) - these weren't small 2bit operations. It wasn't all graduate schemes either, some plain 'ol applications displayed the same ethos.

 

[Dolph]

I suppose that depends whether you subscribe to the mindset that there is a great difference in academic standards between HE institutions.

I live in the real world, so I have to acknowledge facts like this. Degrees are not all equal, nor are experiences, nor are schools. To pretend otherwise is to put ideology over results.

 

[adolf hamster]

There were 8 companies in total doing this - including IBM and BAE (and there were some other big names as well, but I fogret) - these weren't small 2bit operations. It wasn't all graduate schemes either, some plain 'ol applications displayed the same ethos.

well, that's up to them if they feel that the perceived quality of the institution has no bearing on the needs of their recruitment policy or the standard of the employees they'll be looking at.

it's really a non-issue, if they felt it was an issue then they wouldn't be doing this.

 

[Deleted member 66701]

well, that's up to them if they feel that the perceived quality of the institution has no bearing on the needs of their recruitment policy or the standard of the employees they'll be looking at.

it's really a non-issue, if they felt it was an issue then they wouldn't be doing this.

That was kinda my point

 

[Deleted member 66701]

I live in the real world, so I have to acknowledge facts like this. Degrees are not all equal, nor are experiences, nor are schools. To pretend otherwise is to put ideology over results.

I believe that there is an elitist mindset that over exaggerates differences for non-egalitarian purposes.

I'm guilty of it a little myself - I make a thing of having a Lancaster degree, but that's me pandering to peoples misconceptions. If I truly believed that all degrees were equal, I wouldn't do this.

 

[dowie]

Nowhere in the entire application form did it ask you to state the educational institution you studied at. This was repeated across the application process for around seven other big employers (I forget but I think IBM and BAE did the same).

EY does too, I posted about them doing this a few years ago, though they don't require you to have a degree anyway (which tbh.. if you're going to accept *any* degree then you might as well also accept non-grads too and just focus on the aptitude tests from which they've probably been able to better identify people who will succeed).

https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/threads/accountancy-firm-scraps-education-barrier.18685280/

So, it appears in the interests of promoting equality and diversity, it will soon no longer matter where you get your degree from.

I'm not sure it is necessarily about that - in the case of the civil service it might well be, presumably they've got an overrepresentation of Oxbridge grads at the moment. In the case of EY I believe it was just that they didn't find it a good indicator of success... I guess as they are in the position of then getting their new employees to all start from scratch and sit a bunch of standard professional exams over the next 3 years as part of their accountancy training then if they've got a better way of selecting people for this with their own aptitude tests then that is preferable.

This obviously raises some important questions. Theoretically, all degrees should be of the same academic standard due to the use of mechanisms such as external course consultants and inspections by QAA. This now obviously needs to be "double downed" upon if employers are not asking what institution you studied at. It should also erase the stigma of gaining a degree at an FE institution - a stigma allocated unfairly imho as I've worked with several FE institutions whose teaching quality and standards puts many big name universities to shame.

So what say you GD - progress or political correctness gone mad?

Nah it is just some fairly generic grad schemes that presumably have their own assessment methods and don't require specific skills. If anything it is the variability in standards that could drive this sort of thing - that is certainly what I'd expect re: the accountancy firms - I mean since different universities have different standards then stating a requirement for a "2:1" could be meaningless - I'd wager someone with a 2:2 in Maths from Cambridge would have a better understanding of the subject than someone with a 2:1 from London Met for example so it would be silly to exclude them.


Plenty of places can be fairly agnostic with regards to your education background providing you have some relevant experience. There are non-grads working at places like google simply because they are great programmers... obviously most of their colleagues have gone to top universities but it isn't a hard requirement. Presumably someone saw their contributions to some open source projects and they landed an interview etc..

I know one guy who only has a few GCSEs who makes a silly amount of money working at a fairly large well known bank... he makes more than a fair few of the traders. He's been there for a few years now and keeps getting his contract rolled over/renewed and has been told it will carry on getting renewed for the foreseeable future. Basically he's a bit of an autistic/rain-man type who is highly skilled in certain tech areas...

It says remove, email, phone and address. How do they get in touch to offer the job?

its an online application portal, you'll fill out those details you'll just not put them on your CV - most of that list is the sort of stuff that recruiters and HR will edit out anyway at large firms before forwarding CVs to hiring managers, well the academic bits aren't standard to edit out but I guess that is what the thread is about

 

[Mason-]

I don't really care. They'll still be able to choose who they want from the interview process and separate the wheat from the chaff there. As for BAE, a lot of the graduates were people who came on the IP year and were offered roles on the GDF, so they knew whether they were good/bad before the interview process anyway.

 

[Pawnless Endgame]

My dad did B(Eng.) electronic engineering in the 1970s. When he graduated, he was just 1 out of 20 people that got degrees. He was very much sought after and ended up in a career in engineering for a large UK defence company.

Then my parents told me in the 1990s that the country is crying out for electronic engineers. So I studied B(Eng.) electronic engineering as well, but because Tony Blair's gov't over-sold degrees, I ended up in a generation where 1 out of every 2 people had degrees. We're common as muck. End result is that the vast majority of us got irrelevant jobs in e.g. retail or in an office doing admin and all we have to show for it is a £20k student loan.

So the crux of this thread is: not only it's irrelevant which university you went to, but it's also irrelevant whether you actually have a degree at all!

 

[Deleted member 66701]

My dad did B(Eng.) electronic engineering in the 1970s. When he graduated, he was just 1 out of 20 people that got degrees. He was very much sought after and ended up in a career in engineering for a large UK defence company.

Then my parents told me in the 1990s that the country is crying out for electronic engineers. So I studied B(Eng.) electronic engineering as well, but because Tony Blair's gov't over-sold degrees, I ended up in a generation where 1 out of every 2 people had degrees. We're common as muck. End result is that the vast majority of us got irrelevant jobs in e.g. retail or in an office doing admin and all we have to show for it is a £20k student loan.

So the crux of this thread is: not only it's irrelevant which university you went to, but it's also irrelevant whether you actually have a degree at all!

But did they fill all the engineering roles? Did oversupply of graduates mean they got to pick the absolute best and most competent, rather than having to settle for anyone that had a relevant degree?

Put it this way, I don't know many people with first class engineering degrees that aren't currently engineers.

Also, I'm confused at the statement "it's also irrelevant whether you actually have a degree at all!" - how exactly is one supposed to get on a graduate scheme (or even a career that demands a degree such as teaching) without a degree? How do you even get past the paper sift for such a job?

 

[AndyT]

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[AndyT]

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