Jonah is the grips of a high octane college semester as he packs in his final class requirements and catches up on all the college experiences that he missed out during COVID, like intramural soccer, study dates with his girlfriend in the library, and a semester abroad.
It’s all good things, but managing everything is stressful, so we’re been talking Jonah through his priority list every couple days, like quiz dates and paperwork hurdles. A couple of days ago, we discussed the requirements for an application package for a spring study abroad program, including an email to a professor asking him for a letter of recommendation.
Steve and I explained that a request for a recommendation should provide the professor with all sorts of useful facts that he or she can throw into the recommendation, like GPAs, classwork, job experience, and plans for the future. You basically want to write the recommendation for the professor, we explained. (One of my grad school professors had me actually write the recommendation for her, and she just signed the letter.)
But that mini-lesson will probably never be used by Jonah in the future, because most businesses do not require letters of recommendation anymore. When Steve is hiring serious people for serious positions, he isn’t even allowed to call a former employer for a reference. After a couple of decades of legal cases around job references, HR departments, at least at large firms in New York City, have cut them out.
Instead, bosses like Steve evaluate job candidates based on their CV’s and several rounds of interviews. Theoretically, the person interviews for a job as an individual, with their own merits, skills, and accomplishments, and not because of connections with powerful people. Eliminating references from the job application process is very democratic in a way, even though the real reason they are being eliminating is to ward off lawsuits.
Jonah had trouble tracking down a reference, because his current professors didn’t want to write one for him before he took the midterms. His previous three semesters were remote, so he has no real connections with any of those professors. And then half of professors are adjuncts, who have moved on to other jobs, and Jonah has no clue where they are right now. He finally found a tenured professor to help him out, but it was quite an ordeal.
What’s an adjunct professor, you ask? They are low paid, temporary professors, who dominate higher education today. (Here are a few of my articles in The Atlantic on these poor souls.)
As Jonah finishes off his college experience, it’s very obvious to us how little of this matters. He doesn’t need a good GPA, because after he gets his first position, nobody gives a crap anymore about a GPA. He doesn’t need good grades for graduate school, because Jonah has been trained from birth to know that most graduate degrees, including Masters and PhDs, are a massive waste of time and money. We want him to do well in his classes — hard work and achievement are a good things — but we know it’s of little practical value.
The Wall Street Journal had a great article this spring on how Master’s Degrees are a scam. Here’s a piece that I wrote for the Atlantic about the horrible job market for PhDs; it’s even worse now.
A BA is still a valuable piece of paper, but it’s not terribly important to do very well or to go beyond that. That’s a really hard lesson for us Type A, driven parents to acknowledge. But, for most people going into most jobs, a B- average from a mid-level college will pretty much get you where you want to go. Keep in mind that most people do not manage to graduate from college in four years; a six-year graduate rate is considered a success by our government.
Tangent: While I do not expect that Jonah will ever need a Masters Degree, he might need extra training at a private school or community school for some sort of certificate.
The power of the gatekeepers — college professors, college degrees, former employers – is being reduced by self sabotage (adjunct professors can’t be found), by scandal (ridiculous student loan debt for worthless degrees), and by lawsuit (private businesses can’t get references). It’s the slow withering of the supposed meritocracy in our country.
Apt. 11d 
For study abroad programs, we get basically a check-off form. We don’t really have to write anything. But maybe that’s just for programs run by the university.
My students are appalled when I tell them that getting a high GPA doesn’t really matter. One day I was in class telling them this, and they didn’t believe me, so I went right into my Facebook and asked the question of my FB friends/family, and by the end of class I had 10+ responses all saying they don’t look at GPA when hiring people.
Masters degrees are not always a scam. I am teaching an advising-centered class right now, and we spent some time looking at job listings for their “dream jobs” to narrow down what kinds of requirements and skills employers are looking for, and in some areas, a masters is necessary/desired. Med school applicants often take a gap year or two and get a masters in the meantime, usually an MPH (masters of public health – these are very popular right now, which also happens to be good for my husband’s continuing employment). And an MBA is in some cases the new BA if you’re going into anything business or management related.
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Steve never took one business or economic or law class in college. He’s an expert on Nazi’s. Nobody cares, as long as you are smart.
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MBA’s only have value if they are from a fairly well ranked program, either nationally or regionally. Otherwise a lot of them are just cash cows for the school. When I was a manager pre my MBA I had a few team members with MBAs from low ranked programs and no one cared about their degrees. For the people with MBAs from well ranked schools, the real benefit was in getting that first job in whatever field they were pursuing. After that the resume and network was what counted. A number of my co workers started in consulting via MBAs.
People looking to start their own businesses are often prey to MBA programs. Unless you want to create a finance or tech startup, you are better off taking business classes at your community college, or college extension.
The GMAT seems to carry a pretty strong weight in admissions so strong verbal and math skills are useful. If Jonah ever decides to go this route, taking time to get a good score is worth it. I know a lot of people who spent 6 months intensively prepping and got into some good schools.
Of course things change constantly, so by the time Jonah considers this option my experience may have less value.
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He doesn’t need a good GPA, because after he gets his first position, nobody gives a crap anymore about a GPA.
Like the letters of recommendation, this is not universally true. For early career STEM-type positions (not just first positions) we have a strict 3.0 cutoff when triaging applicants. (Actually, the 3.0 is 3.0 in the core STEM classes. We don’t care about that D in that history survey…) We do not ever hire B- or below students within a few years of school (where “few” is a nebulous quantity).
I think the correct conclusion to draw is not that grades don’t matter or that nobody checks references anymore is that you can get away sometimes (but not always) with bad grades or no recommendations. But this is not universal and it would be reckless to assume that it is. The more serious and desirable the job, the more likely it is that there will be a boutique hiring process and criteria that are irrelevant to one employer could be crucial to another.
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Press on this report has been earworming me (I think I heard more than one NPR report): https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/collegepayoff2021/
“The College Payoff: More Education Doesn’t Always Mean More Earnings explores how lifetime earnings vary by education level, field of study, occupation, industry, gender, race and ethnicity, and location. The lifetime earnings of a full-time full-year worker with a high school diploma are $1.6 million, while workers with an associate’s degree earn $2 million. However, at least one quarter of high school graduates earn more than an associate’s degree holder. Bachelor’s degree holders earn a median of $2.8 million during their career, 75% more than if they had only a high school diploma. Master’s degree holders earn a median of $3.2 million over their lifetimes, while doctoral degree holders earn $4 million and professional degree holders earn $4.7 million. However, one quarter of workers with a bachelor’s degree earn more than half of workers with a master’s or a doctoral degree.”
Haven’t read the report, so don’t have real comments yet, but my thought on the NPR reports was that they were making a big deal of variability.
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bj said, “Haven’t read the report, so don’t have real comments yet, but my thought on the NPR reports was that they were making a big deal of variability.”
Yeah, it’s SO specific to field.
From what I hear, travel nurses are raking it in right now.
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In the NPR report, they were profiling a young woman who got “some college” and drifted until she joined an electrician program. She said, she wired a light bulb and her eyes lit up (I presume, along with the light bulb) and was enchanted by the path forward. At her current stage she was earning 80K and hoped for 100K once she finished the training.
I think the advice really does depend on the individual, not the least of which is how much they enjoy the structure of school. I recently stumbled on my lab notebooks from my PhD when I was deciding my thesis topic. And I was clearly in heaven. I was getting to think about grandiose schemes while living a life I found entirely acceptable (yes, a 3rd floor walk up one bedroom in a mildly sketchy area, but it was fine for a 20 something).
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bj said, “At her current stage she was earning 80K and hoped for 100K once she finished the training.”
Wow!
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Here’s the report: http://archive.kuow.org/post/you-dont-need-bachelors-degree-land-high-paying-job
I note that the 80K number is if one annualized her hourly rate for full time work for a year, which is misleading.
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bj wrote, “I note that the 80K number is if one annualized her hourly rate for full time work for a year, which is misleading.”
Yeah.
But it’s still nice!
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My dad’s very persistent advice was to never view college as career preparation but to study what you want to learn. Also that he would pay for it, which made the advice practical. It was not the advice the other kids were getting from the guidance counselor. His point was to maximize the chances we’d find fulfilling work and to be sure we were socialized into a professional or middle class world (which was a concern because the place we grew up was very isolated).
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My advice to younger people has a two-step process. First, figure out what you are good at. What you are good at is not a content area (science, history, etc) but a skill. For example, I am good at knowing things. My brain craves information And I also am good at telling people what I know. Second, figure out what you love. That’s the content area. I love stories.
So my job is English/media professor. I give students information about stories. (I also have a secondary skill which is solving problems. I also love working with students. This is why I am doing more and more advising lately.)
Laura is also a good example. Laura is also good at knowing things and writing, and her passion is education Therefore, she is/has been an education writer.
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That’s good advice
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Like the advice. I think the next part is to know how those skills and interests can be deployed in different fields. An example: a life sciences “professor” is usually primarily a researcher in a medical adjacent department or institute. That job requires not mad skills patch clamping cells or running assays, but lots and lots of writing and telling clear stories about ideas you generate and training and supervising people.
And lawyers do not, mostly, spend their time in court.
And politicians spend most of their time raising money (everyone, in the beginning), not making policy.
I find it fascinating to hear how people spend their time in different jobs and remain frustrated by what little I know about most jobs. I know law & academic science pretty well and am starting to get a glimpse of a a variety of jobs at a small not-for-profit, but otherwise I know nothing and can offer my children no advice.
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Somebody needs to be checking that these people actually went to the schools they claim to have gone to and actually worked at the places that they claimed to.
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Well, most businesses will verify dates of employment but won’t give references. At my big national bank we can give references for internal hires but we can’t give references to other companies who might be hiring someone who worked for us.
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A potential book pitch: Jonah and Laura (and maybe Ian, but that might need a few years) test out the job market? I would be fascinated. But I’m always thinking of books for Laura to write.
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Ha. Well, I will definitely keep y’all in the loop once he graduates. I will say that he is hopelessly behind other students who are going for high-flyer finance jobs. That isn’t Jonah’s style, so there’s no worries there. Talked with one parent last night who said that the internships for those jobs are already gone. She was a little annoyed, because apparently the kids are being told up front that they will only accept women and POC. White dudes aren’t even considered for those positions apparently, and are being told that by internship programs.
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“apparently the kids are being told up front that they will only accept women and POC. White dudes aren’t even considered for those positions apparently, and are being told that by internship programs.”
I would be shocked if that didn’t refer to the “post-insider” internship positions only. IOW, half are probably already given away to the nephews, grandsons, and friends’ sons.
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I wonder if the no-rec thing will last, and how much it will expand. Are all skills so easy to measure and test? Can employers really assess potential employees in a couple of interviews? If you work, say, a year somewhere and leave, isn’t it a big risk for an employer to take you on, just on your word that you did a good job (or even did the job you’re claiming you did)?
I can see this shifting to different kinds of gatekeeping – you can’t get an official reference, so it will become all about unofficial ones. Or it will make job mobility harder, since – as in Marianne’s case – you can expect frank, trustworthy references about internal candidates, but no information about other ones.
I like bj’s idea for Laura and Jonah’s book about the job search.
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Its already about unofficial references. Recently a bunch of younger coworkers just left my large national bank and are all at a different slightly smaller national bank. I’m planning to retire soon so am going to stay put.
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I can see this shifting to different kinds of gatekeeping – you can’t get an official reference, so it will become all about unofficial ones.
Yes. Connections and pedigree and family will matter even more. What I find most risible about the whole thing is not that this exists, but that we have to pretend that it doesn’t.
So you get that job in the lab because daddy has a connection there or that internship with the congressman because mommy knows his chief of staff or that position at the bank because a family friend puts in a word or that book contract because your parents are established in the industry. It’s not enough that this happens, but to top it all off we have to pretend that Junior or Snookums got the gig because of their talent and hard work and it is the height of gauche behavior to do otherwise.
Maybe the absolute worst aspect of this is the same people who benefit from this or whose kids benefit from this are among the ones who scream the loudest about diversity hires for underrepresented groups.
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Related–my husband has a colleague who says he never writes two recommendation letters for the same gig.
So you don’t have to read the tea leaves, trying to figure out which person he likes better. A big time saver, too!
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Interesting trick, but, as an example, when I was applying for faculty positions, nearly everyone in my post-doc lab was applying for the same faculty positions (the field is small, positions appear sporadically). If our advisor only wrote one letter, it would mean he was anointing one person, and, more broadly, would decrease the probability that his people would win out over other competitors, which would not be in his interest. Labs do try to mitigate the intra-lab competition by having people at different stages, but the process is imperfect.
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I’ve been thinking about this “fall of the gatekeepers” in the bigger sense. Kiddo’s class (seniors) discussed school at length this Friday, after a poorly administered in school SAT. A classmate is the teacher’s child, and apparently started off the discussion with “I hate school” (Dad interrupted her to say that he was going to say he was a 7/10 in the check in, but now, is dropping to a 4). The kids talked about how they were bad test takers who felt their tests didn’t reflect what they knew, or, that they were good test takers who have lost the ability to learn when they aren’t tested.
So pair these complaints about standardized tests with tests in general and with grades (a number of folks on my twitter feed don’t offer grades in college — I don’t get it, but they give some kind of narrative feedback), a private school consortium tried to start an anti-grade initiative a few years ago, because they hate giving grades, too. Now, no rec letters? and, grad school profs saying they don’t read or respond to email inquiries about their program because it privileges the knowledgeable, and the consistent data that CVs are less likely to receive call backs when they are associated with URM names.
What’s left? I think we could judge skills on the job — might be a benefit of the utter lack of job protections in most states. If you can hire and fire at will, you can hire someone and just see if they can do the job. But I still feel that there can be all kinds of bias in evaluation (the classic, if Emily doesn’t catch the ball, girls can’t catch balls). Makes me worry that connections will become even more important.
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“…grad school profs saying they don’t read or respond to email inquiries about their program because it privileges the knowledgeable…”
Isn’t there a big strategic dance in the territory between “wanting to display interest” but also “not being a time-sucking pest”?
My husband encounters a lot of eager beavers who perhaps think that they can get a leg up on competitors by coming and visiting the department before applying to grad school. My husband tells them to apply (it’s less trouble and less expensive than flying out and staying on your own dime), and then come do the free campus visit when accepted, and get all their questions answered then. It’s more economical in times of time and money investment, and I think you meet more peopla dn genuinely learn a lot more.
I suspect that part of the problem is that the etiquette and strategies differ a lot. Apparently, in the sciences, you often are supposed to do the individual outreach thing to professors. It’s seen as pushy and pointless in my husband’s field, though.
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“My husband encounters a lot of eager beavers who perhaps think that they can get a leg up on competitors by coming and visiting the department before applying to grad school. ”
That is because of undergrad admissions, which factors in applicant engagement as measured through things like visits and phone calls and clicking on links in emails.
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Wendy said, “That is because of undergrad admissions, which factors in applicant engagement as measured through things like visits and phone calls and clicking on links in emails.”
Yeah.
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If the colleges care about equity, they should stop doing that. It privileges the knowledgeable. At one college application weekend at our kids’ private school, parents were informed about “demonstrated interest.” So, we encouraged our kids to set up anodyne email addresses for college applications, shared with a parent, who would open the d*mn things to make sure they didn’t send the wrong signals to colleges.
I mean, really, a teenage boy is not going to open emails from a college he knows he’s applying to. He’s also not going to open emails from a college he’s not applying to.
And there’s only so much brochure spam any thinking person can consume.
It’s a misapplication of “big data,” to assume that the signals you receive (visits, email opening) correspond with actual interest.
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Cranberry said, “If the colleges care about equity, they should stop doing that. It privileges the knowledgeable. At one college application weekend at our kids’ private school, parents were informed about “demonstrated interest.” So, we encouraged our kids to set up anodyne email addresses for college applications, shared with a parent, who would open the d*mn things to make sure they didn’t send the wrong signals to colleges.”
“It’s a misapplication of “big data,” to assume that the signals you receive (visits, email opening) correspond with actual interest.”
Yep.
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I’m now receiving emails from colleges my youngest visited years ago. I can only assume they think there are students thinking of transferring. I’ve heard through the grapevine (namely, relatives), that there are quite a few mothers fed up with whatever college experience their children have experienced during this pandemic.
It would be grimly fun to witness the Great Cross-College Transfer of 2022, as everyone transfers to a different college.
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That is very funny!
Anecdotally, Hometown U. wound up with so many 2021-2022 freshman that they were frantically making arrangements for what to do with all of them: an early summer start for some, a late spring start for others, and the leftovers got stuffed into a newish downtown hotel that served as a quarantine hotel for Hometown U. last year. (My cleaning lady works there as one of her jobs, and she says that the students who live at the hotel are constantly bringing friends over to show off their swanky digs.) Hometown U. is financially compensating freshmen who did alternative starts, although I don’t know how much.
It sounds like Hometown U. will be doing classroom and lab masking until at least Christmas, but it’s not required in the cafeterias or the gym and very few students do it there. I don’t have exact info, but I suspect that Hometown U. has mostly given up trying to police the dorm hallways. There is no campus vaccine mandate, but over 3/4 of the campus community is vaccinated now and unvaccinated students and employees are supposed to test twice a week. There is some talk of reducing that to once a week, if things continue to go well–campus positivity has plummeted since the beginning of the year. I believe campus now has the lowest number of positives that we’ve had during normal term times–current numbers are less than 1/4 the number of daily positives that Hometown U. had exactly a year ago.
Fingers crossed, but so far this year, Hometown U. has done well with a very light touch. Of course, if you’re unvaccinated and you don’t show up for your testing, you lose your campus wifi and your gym privileges, but the vaccinated kids have a pretty normal life, aside from needing to mask for class and labs.
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I was talking to a mom friend who has a daughter going to college in the big city (about two hours away), and even though the college was not as restrictive as some last year, it was uncomfortable enough that the daughter and her college roommate would come and spend as much time at my mom friend’s home as they could.
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This is also due in part to the fact that there have been changes to admissions processes over the last two years. In 2019, the DoJ went after colleges and universities for non-compete pacts they had, one of which was not recruiting students from other institutions unless they had indicated an intent to transfer. Now, all bets are off as universities got rid of those agreements in order to avoid the ongoing litigation.
https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2019/12/16/justice-department-sues-and-settles-college-admissions-group
Given that many institutions have seen declining enrollments over the pandemic, attempts to poach students who applied or showed interest are increasing. On the one hand, this is good as more students will know they have options. On the other hand, I worry it will hit kids who are going through normal adjustment periods, who will transfer rather than sticking out what is run of the mill home-sickness. Time will tell I guess.
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Just watching a super interesting webinar about how COVID colleges. Of course, it follows the patterns of everything else in society. Small, rich, elite colleges did fantastic, because their endowments, which are majorly invested in the stock market, sky rocketed in value. Smaller schools saw huge drops in enrollment. Community colleges were hit very hard, and their state aid is pegged to admission numbers, so that’s super bad for them.
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In the legal world grades are still very important. Most big law firms have grade cutoffs for all except a couple of the top schools, and the requirement goes up as the law school rank goes down. References are also still at least somewhat prevalent. Written ones have never been a thing in my experience, and although they’re not required most of the time, it is definitely easier to get a new job – especially a good one – if you have a former boss who will at least answer a phone call and speak favorably about you.
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Oh yes. For students who need a law, medical, business, or PhD for their future profession, grades and recommendations are still very important. Of course, that’s a small fraction of all college students.
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