bachelor's degree versus master's degree versus common sense...your thoughts?

Discussion in 'The Guru's Pub' started by airbud7, Jun 17, 2019.

  1. airbud7

    airbud7 Guest

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    Grrrrr!.....your thoughts on the subject and the actual ability to make it through life...I know depends on where you live....

    what is it like where you live?....would a poor man with a lot of common sense out do a stupid privileged person?
     
  2. Clawedge

    Clawedge Guest

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    isnt a degree a field specific thing?

    i know of a student who is doing engineering, who cannot grasp basic stuff.

    they may have the scores on paper, but when it comes to real world, it does not carry them all the way.
     
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  3. Yakk

    Yakk Guest

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    A master's degree without real work experience is not very useful IMO. People with common sense will usually outdo degrees in most fields.

    However common sense can rarely equate to privileged work positions obtained through patronage.
     
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  4. jbscotchman

    jbscotchman Guest

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    Personally I think vocational schools are much more valuable. They allow students to hone their natural skills.
     
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  5. anticupidon

    anticupidon Ancient Guru

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    The old debate.
    When I was younger, I emigrated and naturally I was looking for a job in my new adoptive country.
    While I was a quick learner and lots of common sense and willingness to adapt, almost everyone asked for certification.
    After a while, while working I got myself back to school and got my diploma and certification.
    But that's another level of frustration, because for getting higher jobs with better payment you need even more certification.

    The way I see it:
    If you went to college/university and get certified, that means that you invested time and money into your skills and knowledge in your specific field.
    That certification has a value to you first and to others when it comes to get a job.
    Now, there are always people who attend school to get certified, but without common sense and no experience in the field. But they'll get the job, not you.

    Certification means a LOT in some places - Germany as an real example. No certification- no job. Even that you can outdo every task and able to get everything done with minimal effort and all, you will not get the chance to be invited to an interview for a certain position.

    In some places/ countries/companies it's WHO you know and who can vouch for your knowledge in the field gets you the job, not the certificate

    In a nutshell, master's degree or certification is better to have it. Or know someone inside a company who can get you an interview or a job there.
     
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  6. user1

    user1 Ancient Guru

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    its a tough sell . So many people these days get degrees inorder to get a good job, and not because they have aptitude or care for the field of study.

    Personally sticking with just a bachelors should probably be more than enough for most people, A masters should be for those who want to further specialize for their field of work or study.

    but it seems these days the dilution of degrees has lead to companies listing requirements with greater and greater levels of education for entry level or even unpaid internship positions, which then feeds-back to people thinking they need a masters just to get work.

    A person with a Bachelors and 4 years in the field work experience is far more valuable than a person with masters and 0 experience, getting a masters for most people is a waste of 4 years imo.
     
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  7. anticupidon

    anticupidon Ancient Guru

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    ^^ valid point.
    While job hunting, my head hurts of how many companies ask for unrealistic requirements and while being clueless about those.
     
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  8. Loobyluggs

    Loobyluggs Ancient Guru

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    It's the difference between being smart & clever, and being wise. I would not wish to be remembered as a clever person, but a wise soul.

    As Spock once said "Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end".
     
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  9. fantaskarsef

    fantaskarsef Ancient Guru

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    There is no definitive answer to your very general question. Sorry @airbud7 mate, you need to have the right question before you get the right answers :D
     
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  10. airbud7

    airbud7 Guest

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    you need a master's degree to understand the question....apparently you don't have one.

    still love you though brother! :D
     
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  11. fantaskarsef

    fantaskarsef Ancient Guru

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    You are right, I don't have a master's degree - I don't need it for my job either. I have to mention though, that in Austria, there's forms of higher education which where here before the general UK-US system was adapted in the rest of the world. But I still understand the nature of your question. Only that you water down any precise formulations in "depends on X" in the first sentence, and the poor man with common sense and the stupid privileged person... that's not necessary two opposites you know.
    Of course it depends on where you live, and more so, what you ask about. In general life money always wins, so the prevalence for "privileged" wins, statistically. In specific cases there's always "wins" to others contradicting a statistic.
    Have you seen the movie "Good Will Hunting"? Poor guy outsmarts all the privileged ones, but that's a movie, not necessarily true life :D

    A poor man doesn't need to not have a bachelor's or master's degree but can have lots of debt for various reasons which makes him poor, a big family (which costs a lot to feed), gambling debt, his spouse is very ill and he has to pay lots for medication and medical treatment, or a simply a shitty job that doesn't pay well. Common sense or not.

    The "stupid" person, what's stupid? Stupid itself is not opposed to common sense depending on how you define it. Stupidity can be not able to memorize lots of text, depending on how you see it, but that doesn't mean he can't find the best way to build a dog house for my cherrished doggos. Somebody that never forgets a single word of a conversation can still be too "stupid" to find the right way to manage his own household's chores. Hell, Einstein was said to not be able to handle his own clothing to be clean and at hand on a daily basis.

    And privileged people also always win... that's why they're privileged. If you refer to privileged in terms of "who has a university's degree" there's also a lot of people going for scholarships, poor gals & guys that really dig in and earn their tuitions. Some even have to work lots to do so during their studies and might fail at tests while others, without the need to finance themselves, pass, just by the amount of time they have to study.


    So, with all due friendship and respect, I don't need a master's degree to understand that your method, or wording, of question, is faulty, and thus would not work with the standard such a question would require to find a proper answer. Such a question is so general that any university paper about it would probably have to spend dozens of pages just clarifying what they really ask for, with specific metrics and describing what they even want to find out, let alone to answer such a question and find a tendency to a general idea and questioning. And to answer your question, thus, one might have to interpret your question with your cultural, educational, and economic background to understand what you want to know.


    I'll try to answer that way: It depends.

    If you're asking because of a job interview, the degree usually prevails just because you don't have to prove you know something right on spot, that's why you get that piece of paper and three letters.

    When it comes to working, things might very well turn the other way, especially in young people. With construction engineering, the field I am proficient in and indeed having a degree, a young guy working in the field for 5 years at the age of 25 knows loads more as a guy just coming from college at 25, even though the former does not, the latter have a degree. Might change later in life, where they probably know the same amount.

    The more specific the field of work is, like metallurgy, the higher education might do better. Medicine and pharamaceuticals, lab work basically too. Somebody being a lawyer's secretary or helper for 30 years still might now more than a young girl or guy just finishing college, degree aside, simply because they had decades to soak up all the little and dirty tricks down the road.

    We all know privileged "kids" sometimes making it through university because of money (anybody recall the recent "scandal" about being accepted into elite schools just for a nice name on your degree?), yet they don't necessarily do anything better or worse than other students, who might have grown up in the mud. Being lazy doesn't make you stupid or not stupid, it just makes you lazy, and that as well might earn you bad grades and mess up your plans of getting a degree. Drugs, or becoming a parent surprisingly (well, usually it's not "that" surprising since they don't come from Santa or the Baba Yaga) can mess with your life's plans.

    Generally speaking, get the degree if you want to work jobs that require it to apply. Doesn't say you're good in your field of work, just that you have a degree for that job.


    Hope that's what you meant my friend @airbud7 :)
     
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  12. airbud7

    airbud7 Guest

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    how you answered my complicated question with such accuracy and finesse I will never know?

    you are truly brilliant my friend!.....you should write a book.

    PS: downloading Good Will Hunting now....Thanks!
     
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  13. fantaskarsef

    fantaskarsef Ancient Guru

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    No I'm not brilliant... the only thing that I know is that I know nothing :D
    It's a valid question, but you can make it complicated if you're a silly guy like me :D
    Let's have a beer and watch Good Will Hunting my friend
     
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  14. airbud7

    airbud7 Guest

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    [​IMG]
     
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  15. Clouseau

    Clouseau Ancient Guru

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    It reminds me of this guy my father told me about. If no one in the office could mathematically solve the situation, they would all go this same one person. Could solve anything. Inept as a bag of hammers for practically anything that involved common sense. The individual literally struggled on how to get a paper airplane to fly. Unfortunately this all took place while he was at McDonald-Douglas.

    Also to reinforce what some others have said, New CPAs now have to have at least a Masters. They even need to have some graduate class hours in before they are even allowed to sit for the CPA exam. The reason was because of the over abundance of Masters degrees in business. These arrogant snobs felt insulted by the picture of a person with a BA telling a person with an MBA how to run their business. Even having those three letters after one's name is meaningless. I have literally run circles around so many CPAs. I see it in the auditor's faces that it pains them that after they raise a stink and say they have to check with their senior partners if the way the transactions were recoded was done correctly to come back and admit I was correct from square one. It was rare, I actually got my foot in the door because someone was willing to take a risk with me. There are doors that remain closed because I do not have those three letters after my name. So as said before, sometimes it is who one knows that is more important than what one knows. Those that do not know anyone, that is what those certifications and degrees are for. It is a form of insurance/reassurance that the individual being considered knows at least the basics (book smart).
     
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  16. Phragmeister

    Phragmeister Guest

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    A farmer hired a handyman to help with a few jobs around the farm. The farmer found the man to be an extraordinary worker because the first day he put him on sawing logs, and he sawed more logs than anybody had ever seen, it was fantastic. It was all done in one day.
    So the next day he put him onto mending fences and there were all kinds of broken fences around the farm, and in one day he had the whole thing done.
    The farmer thought "what am I gonna' do with this guy?"

    So he took him into a storage basement and said: "look, here are all the potatoes that have come in from this harvest and I want you to sort them into three groups; those that we sell, those that we use for seeding, and those that we throw away."
    The farmer left him at that and at the end of the day the labourer came back and said: "well, that's enough mister, I quit."
    "No." the farmer said, "you can't quit, I've never had such an excellent worker. I'll raise your salary! I'll do anything to keep you around here."
    "Ahhh" the labourer replied, "no, it's alright mending fences and chopping wood but this potato business is decision after decision after decision."

    ~ Alan Watts.
     
    Last edited: Jun 17, 2019
  17. HeavyHemi

    HeavyHemi Guest

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    Hmm...is a smart disadvantaged person as likely to succeed as a stupid wealthy person...Gosh...let me see...should go there? Nah...
    I don't know how you would define any of this. In general, being poor is a disadvantage, a severe one compared to being born to comfort and opportunity and education. Most folks forget, wealth also brings along the network of other wealth..and so on and so on. As far as a degree, about the only things I need to know are your grades, and how long you took. I want to see smarts and motivation. If they have the basics, the fundies of the 3Rs, I can work with the rest.
     
  18. D3M1G0D

    D3M1G0D Guest

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    This reminds me of my thread on the value of higher education.

    Basically, employers need some kind of certified document as a baseline to make hiring decisions. It's always possible that some random person without a degree/diploma can succeed but businesses aren't going to take such chances. Of course hiring a person with the necessary qualifications don't always pan out either - I've seen plenty of people come and go, some with less than stellar reputations at the end.

    I'm also aware of the movement towards masters degrees. With so many people having a bachelor's degree, you need something to set yourself apart. I too thought about pursuing a masters degree after graduating but I ultimately decided against it and joined the workforce instead. No telling what my life would be like if I had followed through.
     
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  19. 386SX

    386SX Ancient Guru

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    Yep, that''s why I took my Network+ certification. Because I got no chance without any certification, even with some "letters of recommendation"and a German job training as system integrator (main focus was about network administration). I worked as a one man show for two companies, each produced for "critical" clients like a valve company for nuclear plants (not only) and one automotive company which made stuff for the big OEMs like VW, Daimler and others. Each company with hundreds of terminals, computers of all kind, mobile phones, printers, etc. ... I managed them all, cut costs by half and my kind of service and support brought a smile on each ones face ...

    Still no one seems to want me ... currently I am unemployed again ... :(

    So I would say common sense gets you so far so you do certifications if your common sense tells you that is necessary.
     
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  20. Coolerking

    Coolerking Master Guru

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    I sailed many tens of thousands of open ocean miles before I took the masters test, once I sat for it, all the coasties in the exam room wondered, after looking at my resume, what took me so long to get in and get the ticket, I told them all that they need to go and see what's over the horizon to know the answer....there is zero replacement for experience.
     
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