The Importance Of A Diploma/Degree

Post date: Nov 11, 2012 4:55:26 PM

Today I am dismayed by the news that so many children are dropping out of school before getting a diploma. The other thing that saddens me is so many who do graduate with a diploma, have very little skills for the real world. I seen many who can not make change without a computerized cash register telling them what the change is. Many if not most wouldn't know a fraction if it jumped up and bit them. Many others can't even string together sentences without it looking like cobbled together text messages. Today many colleges are not helping but are enabling them in the worst way. I read the other day that one college is now allowing students to send text messages in place of essays. But these are topics entirely for another blog on another day. So it is obvious that a high school diploma today doesn't mean that much when it comes to proclaiming a person's knowledge.

In days long gone a person could get hired on his word. After he proved he could do the work, he would advance. An example would have to be my grandfather. He was a self-taught man who never got a chance to attend any school. I believe his mother may have gave him a start by teaching him to read. The rest of his life he was constantly reading and learning. His father died when he was young and because of the depression, he had to go to work at the age of ten at a sawmill watching the pressure gauge on the steam engine boiler. When the pressure gauge climbed, he would open a valve and relieved pressure. For adults to trust him to be their safety valve speaks volumes for his maturity at the age of ten. At the age of twelve he upgraded his pay to fifty cents a day by chopping wood from sunrise to sunset. Many days they was unable to pay him the money, instead they would give him food to take home. Later in life as a young man he got hired as a mechanic for the DOT in his state. He was asked numerous times to do other jobs outside of his job description such as plumbing and wiring. At the time it bothered him, because he thought they was taking advantage of him. But he bit his tongue and didn't complain. What he didn't know was that they was testing him. One day they called him in to tell him he was being promoted to being the shop boss. Then over the years he kept being promoted till he had a nice office job with a secretary that had a college education. Years later a person could still find my grandfather in a shop helping a mechanic who was short handed.

One day an engineer who was in his office observed the secretary come in with a spreadsheet with rows of numbers. He was obviously was upset because there was no descriptions as what the items were. My grandfather told him to leave the paper on his desk and he would write in what each item was. As he was writing down each description from memory the engineer asked him "How far did you go in school?" To which my grandfather replied: "Not far enough."

As for the secretary, one day he overheard my grandfather interview a man with a fifth grade education for a job. Afterwards he told my grandfather that he shouldn't hire him because he was a dummy. Little did he know that his own boss had no formal education.

This raises the question: So why even bother to get a deploma?

It is important because long gone are the days when a man/woman can expect to be given a chance to prove themselves only on the merit of their word. Today a diploma is the foot in the door of employment. For example, I know of one carpet mill in GA (one of the largest in the world) that will not even issue an application if the person does not have a high school diploma. In other words, if you do not have high school diploma, you couldn't even get a job washing their toilets. Most employers today dictate to their gatekeepers to only allow those with a diplomas/degrees to pass. It very well may mean that they are overlooking some great talent out there but this is today's reality. One person who I know who was applying for a position with an major aircraft manufacturer was turned down. He told his interviewer to test him on what he knows and he was told "I'm sorry, we only screen applicants by the degrees they hold." This person already been working for many years building many skills that would have been proven to a great asset to them.

There two other ways I can think of how a person may overcome this today. One is to go on to work as an apprentice (if he is lucky to get hired) and after years of proving himself, he may then be promoted to where he can earn a good wage. The other is to go to a trade school and then try to convince an employer to overlook his lack of a high school diploma and hire him on the basis of his certificate.