That’s my experience in almost every field. It’s been a long-running punchline amongst management and the willfully uneducated that a college degree often isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on and there are loads of people with PhDs flipping burgers (though the rest of the sentiment usually missing is, good luck even getting a job flipping burgers without one). As an employer, I’ve seen 25 years of top of their class designers and architects interview who don’t know the first thing about how buildings are constructed, how to use CAD, how building approval processes work, or how a business makes money and limits risk. And when we do hire one, they’re frustrated in six weeks, because they realize they’ll never do anything that resembles what they did in school. It’s an industry-wide problem.
...It’s a nationwide problem that post-war, the US retooled education itself as job-skills training programs, and thus set an expectation. Consider the sizable and continual investments made by decent companies in their employees worker training programs 2 generations ago, which has all but disappeared. ...employers were able to cheap out and rely on colleges to train their employers, so that’s what we now expect.
I’m back at the university now, pursuing another degree, and every time I ask about getting into anything beyond the most basic skill set, it’s explained that an undergrad degree doesn’t qualify or prepare you for professional work like that. You have to continue to grad school if you want to get into anything serious. It’s a convenient way of upselling your students, but I sat down with the program counselor and looked ahead through the degree’s courses, and they’re right. A few years ago, I went to a 2yr tech school to learn a rare discipline, and we learned and practiced more (& held to a much higher standard) in one semester than I will even touch on in all 4 years at this state university. And yet the 2yr degree is considered not worth mentioning, and 4 year degree is considered essential. I don’t know where these perceptions in HR departments is coming from at this point, but it’s pure nonsense. Universities are cranking out a fresh batch of graduates every year with essentially long high-school level educations, and their employers aren’t spending squat on their further training, & just replacing them as fast as we can. Meanwhile, tech colleges are actually offering in-depth quality education people should be getting, but it’s minimized to specialties.
It’s pure dysfunction.
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