After a year as a php developer, i still have to check books to see how complex arrays and stuff like that work. Id imagine that wouldnt be the case had I done a real degree in Computer Science.

Between the day job and catch up the changes…

Thanks for posting this great article. It makes me think…~~

If I still had a very expensive education to pay off and discovered this, I’d be a bit miffed. ;-)

I think a degree will always matter to larger companies – and it depends a lot on the specific work, but in my experience it matters a lot more to keep up with trends and technology and to easily adapt to constant and rapid change.

Great discussion!

For designers, yes, it’s essential to have a formal art education. Don’t underestimate the importance of that.

If you’re only interested in freelancing or contract work, it couldn’t matter less. Clients only care about your portfolio and how quickly you can turn out a quality project.

But if you plan on landing a high-income salaried position somewhere, remember that 95% of the time you’ll be competing with and working for marketing and business managers that hang their hat on that MBA. If you don’t even have a bachelor’s degree, you’re just going to have to work that much harder to prove that you’re worth being paid more than a meager hourly wage.

But of course a degree isn’t the be-all and end-all.

For designers, a solid foundation in visual art is extremely helpful. Being able to draw well, to articulate ones ideas clearly and back them up, is a tremendous asset.

Having said this, clearly there are talented people out there who are able to do good work without formal training. However, I think this was more true in the early days of the Web, when everything was so new, and few people understood what good Web design was. The “wild west” days of the Web are drawing to a close, and good web design practices are becoming more codified and more “teachable”. I hope the art departments out there are doing a decent job of preparing students for a career in web design.

I’ve decided to make a career change into something I actually enjoy, so I’ve been working on my BSIT. Ideally, I want to develop web applications, and my thirteen years of real world experience are not going to directly help me get that. Not saying a degree is giving me any of the necessary skills either, but at least it shows I’m serious about making the change and can start out on a solid foundation when I begin interviewing.

I completely understand that any real skill or talent is going to be developed in the real world, not while following a typically outdated school curriculum. The benefit of my particular degree is the more than eight industry certifications that are built in, including most of Sun’s entry level Java exams. That’s worth the cost of the tuition for me. And I may just happen to be an academic masochist.

http://www.woot.com/Jobs.aspx#Designer

Personally, I haven’t even been asked at my last two jobs over the last four years.

In coding jobs, perhaps experience is more important; but if one is working on investor advice, involving quant modelling and/ or qualitative but deep assessments, the clients look for assurance in many forms. Relevant experience is of course one of them but being adequately and appropriately qualified also helps. New clients particularly pay attention to both; existing clients come to rely on experience and demonstrated knowledge.

What I find interesting is the wholesale trend in the US to suggest that college degrees do not matter. If we are to compete with India and China in the future – both countries where formal education is valued highly – perhaps it will be worth holding on to ‘old fashioned’ views on education for just that little bit longer.

I also find it distressing to see that older people with degrees tend to advise youngsters that degrees do not matter.

Hopefully, the tide is turning and employers are becoming more like 37 Signals.

PS – I have 3 degrees, I’m not a disgruntled non-college graduate :)

But with experience, the degree becomes less and less important since you can demonstrate your knowledge in a form that other people have actually paid for. The education can still be valuable in that you might have formal knowledge that helps, but most of that can be obtained without formal education.