College Degrees and Job Requirements

cobracars

I was reading through another recent thread about college degrees and I was impressed with the number of people who have multiple degrees.
I also know there has been a debate over the current high cost of higher education versus the availability of jobs in the chosen field, as well as the return on investment.
That got me thinking about the number of people who have degrees in one area but their life has gone in a completely opposite direction.

As someone who has attended some four-year college and a few years of various two-year college I became intrigued with learning about successful people who for whatever reason never obtained a college degree.

Imagine as a closed-minded HR department of a major corporation the high-caliber people you would be missing by only considering applicants with a college degree. I'm not talking about medical, legal, engineering, or accounting. But for other positions sometimes life experience would surpass a university education.

Again, imagine as a corporation that you never considered any of the following people worthy of applying to work for your company:

Winston Churchill
Abraham Lincoln
Harry Truman
Zachary Taylor
Andrew Jackson
Martin Van Buren
Zachary Taylor
William Randolph Hurst
John D Rockefeller Sr
William Shakespeare
Jack London
Mark Twain a.k.a. Samuel Clemens
Ring Lardner
Walt Disney
Stanley Kubrick
Robert Redford
Tom Hanks
Steve Martin
Billy Joel
Quincy Jones
Heidi Klum
Harriet Tubman
Jillian Michaels
Florence Nightingale
Annie Leibovitz
Barbara Lynch ($10 million group of restaurants)
Col. Harlan Sanders of KFC
Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald's
Mark Zuckerberg, creator of Facebook
Steve Jobs
Bill Gates
Steve Wozniak
Frank Lloyd Wright
Wilbur and Orville Wright

Birdie

My best friend got an art degee. Ended up in a minnimum wage bank job and never produced any art again. Waste of an education I say.

I also used to work for a large well known department store. A few years back they came up with a new policy that anyone in management who didn't have a degree was out. Then they hired a bunch of 22 year old graduates with no actual experience. They lost a lot of good people who worked their way up through the company and had been loyal. Bad policy. I think they should have grandfathered them in. Make the policy for new hires.

As with anything I think they should go on a case by case basis. I recently applied and interviewed for an entry level hospital position. They said they had no problem with me or my experience, but their policy is that they can not hire anyone who hasn't worked in the last year. I had stayed home with my child until she was school age so that automatically made me ineligible for hire. Rediculous.