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?

 

[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.

 

[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.

 

[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.

 

[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?

 

[Deleted member 66701]

So would you be happy to hand over your log-ins and passwords for other sites too if they asked you?

"What logins?" would be my response.