TL;DR: Employers’ focus on academic background is mostly about contending skills.

About once a month or so one of the tech forums I subscribe to is rocked by a question similar to the following one:

I am now in my twenties, and am confidently working in the industry. Should I be making a pause now to pursue higher education?

Questions of this kind serve as a validation magnet for both people who have obtained a degree and those who haven’t or couldn’t; accordingly the discussion often gets personal and defensive; my personal highlight is a person whom I’d known (indeed, liked) for 15 years calling me no less than a shill for Big Higher Ed; so much for all those years, I guess.

Is the academic bias in recruiting entirely arbitrary? While cultural settings tend to favor tradition over utility, hiring is a highly resource-consuming activity for a lot of organizations out there. Accordingly it is subject to considerable evolutionary pressure that should reshape it as time goes by. Yet it seems that the academic streak in recruitment is fairly stable - enough to stop and contemplate why.

The Gained Knowledge Hypothesis

The proclaimed goal of education is the transition from ignorance to knowledge. That knowledge could be intended, such as studying some theory that has practical applications, or it could arrive incidentally - such as gaining experience in reading and writing complex ideas.

Alas, it is commonly agreed that both types of skills gained in a degree are actually only very seldom directly useful for the vast majority of jobs out there. Typically employers select employees solely based on their their tradecraft skills, very often in the form attested by being able to design small snippets of code. Tradecraft skills are typically not taught well at schools. In the rarer cases that specific knowledge is required, it is most often about some SW framework like React, which is not taught academically at all.

The Academic Network Hypothesis

A somewhat frequent trope in “pro/con school” discussion is the statement that the school is a great place to meet like-minded friends who’d further your career down the road.

However, it seems that a candidate having a lot of school friends does not benefit an employer much at all.

While in the recruiting phase, academic networks are great for locating and accessing candidates - however that access is shared between multiple recruiters, which actually means network recruits receive more attention and thus need a higher investment per hire.

After an employee is recruited, the network does not affect that employee’s performance per se - and if anything, provides them an easy escape path when things go wrong.

Also, evidently, having any kind of network is not something employers care about. So overall, while I find having a school network immensely useful as an employee, I tend to dismiss its value as an employment signal.

The Contending Resilience and Independence (CRI) Hypothesis

School is the first phase in the lives of most people where most of the motivation for success needs to be intrinsic. Moreover, unlike prior experiences, higher education typically takes smart people to their limits a few times, which is highly enabling of growth - though also humbling and often traumatic. Some periods, especially during undergraduate studies, are like drinking from the water hose - extremely intensive in terms of needing to learn a lot of things at the same time, quickly and with some degree of quality control. Those skills are universally desirable for knowledge workers, and school serves as a signal of possessing them.

A bit of reinforcing evidence for the CRI hypothesis is the employers’ preference for schools that require hard work, regardless of the domain. In Israel, for example:

  • The Open University is open to anyone who can pay tuition, requires a high degree of discipline, and offers a relatively hands-off curriculum at medium pedagogical level. It is regarded as top-tier, or almost that.
  • Most colleges are open to anyone who can pay a similar tuition, do not require as much discipline, offer a hands-on curriculum at a relatively high pedagogical level. Colleges are regarded as second tier at best.

Caveat: cheating. That’s an easy one - a cheater is only successful in cheating, and they make themselves hard to tell from honest students.

Caveat: not having to go off track, a.k.a. the Learned Fool effect. Most undergrad study tracks these days are highly structured, meaning that study dilemmas are either trivial or ties; this discourages proactive strategizing by the student. The end result may be an individual who has the skills to take up challenges with excellent optics but fails to take up the challenges relevant for his current circumstances.

Caveat: motivational burn-out. A lot of people succeed in contending with a complex academic situation, but do so for the wrong reasons - a typical example is the typically impossible odds of getting into a tenure track position. Thus, a common failure mode of people with an impressive degree is burning out of motivation once their aspiration is discovered to be unattainable.

The Social/Soft Skills Hypothesis

Besides the most exceptional of students, a success of learning is at least partially a success in communicating and socializing. Coursework relies on complex communication, in writing for the assignments and verbally with peers.

Caveat: very little team play: the formal parts of undergrad studies only rarely involve anything resembling meaningful collaboration.

Caveat: loneliness is commonplace. A lot of students report being lonely; not all student friendships are inspiring, supportive and growth-oriented.

Caveat: lack of leadership skills: there are very few experiences in a school that require somebody to lead somebody else; indeed, the closest that comes to it are thesis advisor leadership, which is more often dysfunctional than not, and administration leadership that is designed to be mostly transparent to the students.

The Epistemological Enhancement Hypothesis

One curious aspect of personal growth that happens in academia but few other places is the understanding that the meaning of “knowledge” and indeed “truth” is highly contextual to the area of study. Thus, a good “intuitive proof” (a highly sought after beast in computer science and math) is a wholly different beast from a “formal proof” (which is what gets you a good grade in an exam), and what is considered good “proof” in history necessarily differs from “proof” in economics.

This kind of intellectual maturity is highly impactful for workplace success, especially for the category that requires multi-disciplinary collaboration and simultaneous awareness of tech and business. For me it explains the success of some philosophy graduates in tech leadership positions - even without the best tools, asking the right questions is very often the edge one needs in a world preoccupied with the wrong ones.

Tying it all up

Naturally, different combinations of employers, roles and potential employees will strike different chords out of the above.

The Israeli job market, that I know well, has a very strong tradition of military unit graduates who team up with their former comrades, often without any formal background or specific knowledge for their new organization. It would appear that for them the network is the determining factor - however it is a much stronger, closer kind of a bond than what academia can come up with.

Most recruiting processes I’ve observed, both in Israel and the US, may be seen as highly and specifically tuned to signal about contending, resilience and independence. Indeed, the common preoccupation with the arbitrary riddles in LeetCode as well as asking for candidates’ GitHub is really a way to signal the preference for employees who don’t get lost on their own. Moreover, in a lot of cases, when a hiring process exhibits redundancy, it is when testing for cheating and motivation - which are exactly the soft spots when hiring for CRI.

Circling back to the original question of whether the 20-something year old should go to school – in my opinion it reduces to the question of whether the said person can represent their contending ability to their employer in a different way than by displaying a good school certificate. For a lot of folks out there there there’s really no good alternative – one can’t just “teleport” into having overcome meaningful challenges.

In any case, writing the above helped me articulate what I should be considering when I interview others and get interviewed myself; I hope this may help you as well; as always, I’d be happy to hear your thoughts on the matter.