All the time online I see people without college degrees trying to knock people with college degrees down a peg even though the college-educated crowd hasn’t said anything about their lack of college degree.
All the time online I see people without college degrees trying to knock people with college degrees down a peg even though the college-educated crowd hasn’t said anything about their lack of college degree.
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Probably because public schools in America for a very long time talked down to all jobs that don’t require a degree. Schools would tell children “unless you want to be a goddamn LOSER in life. A BROKE, worthless, UNHAPPY, so-called man who can’t even provide for your family and will probably end up in jail one day, GO TO COLLEGE! Get a degree, literally any degree, it doesn’t matter, but for God’s sake Billy GET A DEGREE!!“
Those kinds of lies that they told kids breeds a lifetime of resentment. Add in how newgrads at their places of work can also have large chips on their shoulder about how they’re degreed, and you end up with a kind of tribalism
I guess because a lot of people look down on people without degrees so they retaliate
I sort of have an answer to this question, but it might not be what you’re looking for.
I don’t have a college degree, and I don’t think I have a chip on my shoulder for it, BUT I work in a position where I have many opportunities to help people get jobs, and when people without a degree want a job that requires a degree and they qualify for it in every other way, I do tend to fight for that person to get an interview because I’ve seen people who get a job exclusively because they have a degree before and they tend to do way more poorly than the people who have experience.
So I don’t personally think I’m better than anyone who has a degree. I fully accept that there are some jobs that you just can’t get without a degree, such as engineering, the sciences, medical, law, etc., and I think that’s fine. However, when there’s a job that anyone can grow into by just being good at something, like how people can get into IT by working at a company doing something else and then showing their manager that they’re good with computers (doesn’t happen all the time, but it happens), then yes I get annoyed when the degree is seen as more valuable than an equal or greater amount of experience.
I disagree with your premise. Lots of people with degrees mock those without.
It goes both ways.
Insecurities
Some people in every societal grouping are rsoles, what’s new
I feel like you’ve got it backwards. I do have a degree but from what I’ve seen it is usually people that spent tens of thousands of $$ (or more) to get a degree that get pissy about non-degreed people that have achieved higher success levels.
They (degreed ppl) seem to think they are entitled to more than someone that chose not to spend that $$ on college yet they (non-degreed) still managed to succeed in life.
I experienced something like that. I worked in a job where were were a number of old timers who did not have a college degree, while I did, and they had a bit of a bad attitude toward me because of it. This one guy, he often tried to tell me why I would never be suitable for a higher position. I don’t think I looked down on those people without college degrees. Why did this happen? Perhaps the old timers thought that I had more opportunities on the job, or was more appreciated.
People who argue and personally attack others online could benefit from trying to get to the root of why they are fighting with strangers on their computer in the first place.
I work with some extremely smart engineers, but I’ve also seen many people with a college degree (even engineering degrees) that would have a difficult time pouring piss out of a boot with the directions written on the bottom. And yet they are given higher paying jobs than very intelligent people without a degree just because they went to college, and it’s almost always the dumb ones that think they’re better than people without a degree. I literally had an engineer once angrily tell me nobody without an engineering degree is smart enough to figure out the circumference of a circle (after he did it wrong and I corrected his mistake on the print). Shit like that is why.
Normally, the ones that act like that are the ones that went to college for like two years, dropped out and have like $30,000 in student loan debt
People without degrees who succeed want to let everybody know that they made it and didn’t even need to go to college. Which is honestly great – I love to see hard work pay off – but people with degrees just have a better chance of making it, as they are starting off with a higher floor for potential.
It’s just part of the greater culture war narrative.
The goal of culture wars is not to convince you to hate or fear others, but to convince you that others hate and fear YOU and want to destroy your way of life. It puts people on defense, even when there is nothing to be defensive about. And in some ways it creates a self fulfilling prophecy.
People without degrees are told that people with degrees look down on them, so that makes them defensive (chip on shoulder). So when sometimes if they encounter someone with a degree (generally someone weaker/less well off than them) they don’t see it as being OFFENSIVE by putting them down, they view it as PRE-defensive – because they have been told over and over again what these “college educated” folks think of them. Even though that might not be true, and even though this interaction might MAKE it true.
You see this played out again and again. People are easily manipulated by this narrative over so many different culture war issues.
Because taking debt you can’t pay for a useless degree should be shamed more
Because, generally, people with no life skills to help humanity go to college. Those of us who have been working since we were 15 have contributed 10xs what the others do. Can they build a house? Can they plant crops? Can they survive if the grid goes down? No? That’s ok. The rest of us will babysit them like we have done for centuries.
I’ve seen numerous folks look down on folks who went to worse universities or had lower levels of degree. Harvest grads being the worse. People who are dicks often get called out more on their mistakes.
I’ve been guilty of this in the past, and it’s something I’m not proud of, and trying to not do.
For me, it has come from meeting and sometimes working with people who are trained/educated in the subject matter (in my case mainly graphic design and/or coding), but really don’t seem to understand even the basics of the job.
But it’s a shitty mindset, and I realize from experience that because I’m self -taught, I sometimes will know how to do certain stuff (OOP springs to mind), but since I don’t know the specific terms (“polymorphism” is one example) I couldn’t communicate properly with people I worked with.
I’ve been in my line of work for 17 years. I’ve been passed over for promotion twice in the past 2 years, because, instead of getting some bogus college degree for underwater basket weaving, I spent 4 years in the Army training for war and fighting terrorists in Iraq as a young man. Going to college was a privilege I didn’t have, and I feel I’ve been punished by society for not having a piece of paper that says how smart I am. IMHO, I know more about my job than any of my managers and more about life than most college educated people, so yeah, I have at least a small chip on my shoulder.
Because many humanities degrees and faculties have become little more than ideology farms pumping out people with few useful skills beyond barista.
There is a big difference between being educated and having a college degree. These days, a Liberal Arts degree is not worth the paper it is printed on. How many Liberals Arts degree holders are now Baristas at Starbucks?
Simply put… because many jobs require a degree, and then you find out that a trained monkey can do it. Then you meet many people, usually in higher positions, who have a degree and they’re absolute idiots.
I believe specialized degrees are a good thing, for instance, aeronautical engineering. But why are you passing people up for a home depot manager position unless they have a bachelor’s, which can be in dance choreography, but at least they fulfill the requirement.
I’ve always found it to be the other way around.
This is it. I didn’t get my degree until I was in my 40’s. I had a huge chip on my shoulder about not having a degree and being intentionally held back in my career because people with degrees didn’t want to advance me, even though I could perform equally to them due to my skill set I acquired on the job. It’s a whole thing.
I don’t think the premise of your question is sound, just based on my personal experience.
The only person I’ve ever seen engaging in this kind of “class war” BS was someone with a university degree. Sure, there’s some tension between those with higher education and those without. But it goes both ways and isn’t something that any reasonable adult engages in with any seriousness.
Also, if you honestly believe that university graduates don’t engage in the exact same thing just as much or perhaps even more than people without degrees then I don’t think it’s worth discussing things further because we’d disagree on basic facts.
Again, this is just my opinion, and based on anecdotal evidence.
As a young geologist, I took a lot of unwarranted abuse from drillers who did know a lot more about drilling than I did. I came to realize that they did it because they’d been pushed around by “college boy” geologists their whole life career and they weren’t respected. I always treated them with respect and they stopped giving me shit and I learned a lot from them and I taught them some things to. I
My wife is the opposite of this. She does not have a college degree but is an amazing accountant (she has blown past everyone with college degrees at every company she has worked at). However, she lives in constant fear she will be “found out” as a fraud and says she has “imposter syndrome” where she basically, despite getting top ratings and promotions constantly, feels like she is always failing at her job.
So as a late in life degree holder, I got my batchrelors at 38 and my masters at 40. It comes to be when it’s kind of a litness test to get higher and the people with degrees are ineffectual and or plain ignorant.
What’s a ‘college’ degree? You mean a bachelor from an accredited college or what is now becoming normalized like Strayer and other online degrees?
I haven’t personally witnessed anyone without a college education of any kind have a problem with anyone, with or without a degree. Maybe they are out there, I’ve not run into any.
I have absolutely witnessed people with degrees from accredited USA colleges and from abroad hold back people who were extremely qualified to do a job but were told sorry, you don’t have a bachelor in (enter some hr made up bs), so TBNT.
When I was a hiring manager, I could have given 2 shits about your degree, your skin color, or who your mommy or daddy was, I hired based solely on were you qualified for the position as in, could you do or with proper training be made to perform the tasks and duties required to be successful.
Shutting people down because of their education or perceived lack of is oppression and until, at least corporate America is held accountable for this essentially, financial form of discrimination, you can expect butt hurt people on both sides.
When you breed it, expect it. When you stop feeding it, it will die.
I run into this a lot and it causes real problems for me in the workplace, including losing my job once because my boss had a serious problem with anyone with any form of college education and he thought i was going to steal his job because of it, even though he was far more qualified than me.
I just use my degree to get the job but I never tell my reports or coworkers that I went to college anymore. I work in a law firm as a non lawyer contracted manager. To my knowledge nobody knows I have a degree. Some of the lawyers treat me poorly because they have a superiority complex but the people i work with directly and who report to me are more comfortable with me thinking I don’t have a degree, so I try to keep it that way.
The degree doesn’t make the person, a person makes the degree. Realistically speaking, most degrees are not the same either.
People who get degrees typically have a holier than though attitude against people who don’t. On top of that, because of decisions to get said degrees and being stuck with massive debt, ask for relief for their own poor financial decisions.
In many aspects of life, people are beating us mercilessly anytime we accomplish anything 😂
Their parents kept telling them to go to college and become doctors, and that because they didn’t they don’t have a real job. They got sick of it, they know they never had the money for college, couldn’t find all the scholarships they were told existed, and maybe took a few night classes, but had to drop out for life reasons and their parents never let them live it down.
Despite all that, they make decent money, and have an OK life. When they see someone witb a degree, they automatically assume this person had more financial and emotional support from their parents, but aren’t actually doing much better financially. So to them, the college degree represents resources and support they never got from mommy or daddy, and they asdumr such a person was coddled, and wasted opportunities they could never access.