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Does College Matter

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Does College Matter in HRM? Dennis Keritsis

Imagine a man dressed up in a three thousand dollar business suit by Zegna, a pair of black polished men’s oxford dress shoes, and cleanly shaven. He is walking into an bleak empty interview room. Oddly, instead of seeing a panel of interviewers, he is given a laptop and told to write a computer program. This person was me. Taking the day off work, I drove up to Atlanta for a job interview for a software engineering position. Nearing my graduation in the Mercer MBA program, I am trying to take my career to the next level and find a better job. As I advanced in my career, I am starting to question how much of a competitive edge does as degree give. The whole interview was the programming project. …show more content…

It is important to understand how individual make decisions psychologically. For very “involving” tasks and “complex” tasks, much time is needed to make a prudent decision. However, under situational influences, individuals have to make a decisions quickly without researching the topic in depth. When this happens, people use something called heuristics to make decisions. For example, people use “appeal to authority.” This is when individuals trust others like police officers, doctors, and other dividuals who have been through some form of qualification process that “signals” to them they can trust their judgement. Instead of the making very “complex” and “involving” decisions themselves, they trust experts who should know more about the topic than they do. The same process is true when hiring a new employee. Situational influences, like a tight budget, in the work environment do not always allow for the most in depth interview process. Thus, employers use heuristics to simplify the process in the decision making process. The heuristic discussed is called signaling, and specifically when discussing a diploma is called the Sheepskin effect (degrees use to be printed on sheep skins). Employers have a lot of applications to go through and they need a quick and easy way to filter through all the clutter. Using the heuristic process, they put applicants through a GPA filter and where (if they went at all) they went to school. A …show more content…

The videos in Mr. University note that there is a pay differential for the different types of degrees out there with Engineering taking the top spots and Art history and other humanities at the bottom. If college didn’t provide students with valuable skills, why is there a pay differential? Looking at Art History yearly salaries and comparing these to individual who have no college education, there is only a slightly higher pay for Art History graduates. This might be the Sheepskin effects which are practically negligible. Engineering graduates earn up to 60,000 (I have heard at most 140,000 starting off) starting off. Engineers take a completely different set of courses from Humanities majors with a minimal amount of electives. This means that the skills that engineers are developing are needed for the job market. In the vein of Adam Smith’s economic theory, engineering taking a narrow set of math,science, and engineering courses is representative of the division of labor needed in a capitalistic market. If individuals are to command higher salaries, the skills are to be narrowed such that all individuals in a society are to perform work in module roles. The engineering curriculums being narrowed in this way does not seem to be coincidental. Lastly, it is worth noting that engineers make more than other professions and if other

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