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Jeremiah Long
1,532 PointsCollege Degree or not?
I am on the cusp of enrolling in a for profit university (Devry) to get a BS in Informational Systems with an emphasis on Website Development. This is a three year commitment with a hefty price tag. Do I really need a degree to be competitive in this field? I've been looking over job listings and every single one of them lists a degree as a "preference", but none as a requirement and my research points to them wanting real world experience over a degree, which I have.
That being said, why do they still post degrees as requirements or preferences if it doesn't matter? Can I get a job without a degree? I've only been to one interview so far, for a web development position and it turned out they were looking for a website designer, not a developer. I would really like to work in an amazing startup type of workplace, but am complately intimidated by their college requirements.
There are no startups in my city, and most of the Website Developers here are treated like total crappy IT basement dwellers. So to land my dream job I have to move and that requires interviewing out of the city I live in. This is really my dream, to land a job at an amazing startup, and go from there with a reputation.
Should I pay $50k to have that piece of paper? I think I can pay it off in a couple of years since I can live very comfortably on 40k a year, but still, it's like 3 years and a bunch of money and am I really going to be better off for having it? Should I just start spamming my resume everywhere without it? Gaaah! It's so much money. I would just really appreciate feedback, especially from the treehouse staff who are obviously doing exactly what I want to do.
4 Answers
Jeremiah Long
1,532 PointsThank you for your reply. I kind of lost my billion dollar idea a couple years ago. I had an idea for a mobile app and didn't know how to code it. I tried to learn it at the time and didn't have a solid enough foundation. 2 months later, a company released my idea on the android market and sold over 1 million copies of my app at four bucks a pop. That's four million dollars in one month! SO yes, I understand how that type of success would draw anyone. What I'm wondering is if I'm just an average guy, with an average portfolio would I get hired? It seems like the answer to that is maybe. LOL, so much like my question. Should I pay a fortune to possibly rise to the upper middle class? "maybe".
James Barnett
39,199 PointsIf you are looking for a cheaper alternative, check out a bootcamp at 3 months and 10k.
Nick Pettit
Treehouse TeacherPersonally, I wouldn't bother. I have a degree in Digital Media and I think the most helpful thing about those 4 years was just me becoming a more mature person. The most valuable thing about college was that I was able to have a legit reason to spend time in the university library learning about technology. In other words, I side stepped the social stigma of being "unemployed" because I was busy at school "learning."
Just grab some books, use Treehouse, build some cool stuff, and you'll be there in no time. Here's a blog post I wrote on the subject: http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/web-designers-dont-need-college-degrees
Jeremiah Long
1,532 PointsAwesome! Thanks for the feedback Nick. Can you tell me how many, if any, of the treehouse staff do not have college degrees? I can totally appreciate everything you said in your post here and your blog post, but as someone who has a degree, you may not be the most qualified to judge it's overall importance. You won't be getting automatically passed up by busy HR reps going through the applications as a degree holder.
Mike Baxter
4,442 PointsMike Baxter
4,442 PointsMy friend and former coworker is the lead web developer at a very successful Seattle area company, and he doesn't have a college degree. I've never got the impression that he doesn't know what he's doing, so I would say that being knowledgeable goes a long way. I've heard it said that several years of solid industry experience is seen as better than a college degree. I'm kind of in the same boat as you though; I think I want to finish up my college degree, but I wouldn't be upset if I was able to make it without one either. From an employer's standpoint, I think it's preferable to find someone with a degree because you can reasonably assume they know a decent amount of things; you have a ballpark idea of what they know. It's a lot harder to figure out if someone without a degree knows what you expect them to know. But then there are quite a number of people who've done remarkably well without degrees that the tech industry can't quite seem to reason making degrees a hard requirement. (I recently heard that the original Facebook iOS app developer left college to work freelance; and he's certainly no exception.) Anyway, good luck with your decision!