[easy2012]

http://www.telegraph...op-degrees.html

Quote

Companies told: stop prioritising job applicants with top degrees

Major corporations risk discriminating against thousands of students by prioritising job applicants with good degree grades from elite universities, a Government-commissioned review warns today.

More silly PC..

[interestrateripoff]

When are they going to stop discriminating against those without degrees?

Also they should stop giving jobs based on experience, clearly that discriminates against those without it.

[the_duke_of_hazzard]

Oh FFS.

Having interviewed for the last 10 years I don't bother with 2:1s from certain universities anymore unless there's evidence of ability outside the degree.

Some university courses are so bad we even tried to contact them to tell why their candidates were failing. Of course, they didn't respond.

Of course, the idea of ensuring consistency of standards across universities is not an option. If they did that, there would be no need for such filters.

What are we supposed to do? Spend all day interviewing every possible candidate?

[easy2012]

interestrateripoff, on 28 February 2012 - 10:30 AM, said:

When are they going to stop discriminating against those without degrees?

Also they should stop giving jobs based on experience, clearly that discriminates against those without it.

Think next will be that making ability to speak English a requirement will be deemed discriminatory..

[CrashedOutAndBurned]

I attained there As at A Level but was predicted rather lower and went to the middle of the middle rank non-elite two-Bs-and-a-C Uni to which I'd applied.

People with the exact same grades in the same sort of subjects went to Oxbridge.

And this was years ago.

With piss-easy exams nowadays I bet there are some rather dim 'coursework grafters' that aren't the sort of dynamic individuals likely to set the world on fire turning up for work.

So it makes sense on some level.

To succeed in the modern workplace seems you either need to be a true whizkid or a breathless yes-man with no ability for critical thought. The latter I'm sure you can find in most educational establishments.

[Traktion]

That isn't baseless discrimination. Finding people with the right skills is what recruitment is all about.

TBH, the whole idea of policy to stop discrimination is daft anyway. If a company foolishly ignores people because of their colour, background etc, other more encompassing companies will get to employ them gainfully instead. The former's loss, is the latter's gain. In the long run, that will make the latter more competitive, encouraging other companies to be more open minded too.

The state should just retract its neck and let people trade freely.

[porca misèria]

I hope the authors of such reports don't expect their doctors to be limited to that elite who have been through medical school. That would be terrible discrimination!

[Nationalist]

The real nonsense is the pretense that a degree in English or *ology has some sort of equivalence to a degree in Maths or Physics. Your typical Oxbridge double-starred first in English wouldn't stand a hope in hell of getting a 3rd in Maths from a former Poly. The UK is dominated by arts grads determined that the shallowness of their education should be for ever masked by the poshness of their alma mater. The country is run (badly) by PPE grads who don't know how many zeros there are on a billion.

This post has been edited by Nationalist: 28 February 2012 - 11:14 AM

[georgia o'keeffe]

Nationalist, on 28 February 2012 - 11:13 AM, said:

The real nonsense is the pretense that a degree in English or *ology has some sort of equivalence to a degree in Maths or Physics. Your typical Oxbridge double-starred first in English wouldn't stand a hope in hell of getting a 3rd in Maths from a former Poly. The UK is dominated by arts grads determined that the shallowness of their education should be for ever masked by the poshness of their alma mater. The country is run (badly) by PPE grads who don't know how many zeros there are on a billion.

Here have one for your other shoulder

[Nationalist]

Tamara De Lempicka, on 28 February 2012 - 11:17 AM, said:

Here have one for your other shoulder

- I think I've flushed out an arts grad!

[interestrateripoff]

Nationalist, on 28 February 2012 - 11:13 AM, said:

The country is run (badly) by PPE grads who don't know how many zeros there are on a billion.

To be fair there are 2 answers.

Although these people do tend to like getting deficit/debt mixed up, however I do think that is done deliberately to confuse people. But I'm also open to the idea they also have a reality distortion field which allows them to believe what they are saying.

[ccc]

Discrimination is natural - it is what the human species - and for that matter probably every other species - does every day.

[fluffy666]

the_duke_of_hazzard, on 28 February 2012 - 10:32 AM, said:

Oh FFS.

Having interviewed for the last 10 years I don't bother with 2:1s from certain universities anymore unless there's evidence of ability outside the degree.

Some university courses are so bad we even tried to contact them to tell why their candidates were failing. Of course, they didn't respond.

Of course, the idea of ensuring consistency of standards across universities is not an option. If they did that, there would be no need for such filters.

What are we supposed to do? Spend all day interviewing every possible candidate?

One of the problems with 'Marketising' higher education is that people who have just spent £lots on a degree course tend to moan if they get failed for the mere detail of not having a clue. With industrial sponsors it can be worse.. you need the revenue, so if you start failing people you are cutting your nose off. I can attest to that pressure..

[Executive Sadman]

I would have thought it would have been more PC to prioritize top degrees...i bet for example its easier to get a first class degree at Luton University than it is from Cambridge/Oxford.

[frozen_out]

We recruit for some pretty niche jobs (the kind of stuff they never teach on degrees)and we never solely discriminate on either University or degree classification. One of our best engineers did his 1st degree at Teesside. Although being foreign I'm not quite sure he fully understood the implications of this when he did the course.

We look for particular competencies evident in the CVs (90% go straight in the bin) then do telephone interviews for the ones we're not sure about (this flushes out the 90% of no hopers that are good at writing CVs) then the rest get a face to face interview.

The latest job we recruited for had about 150 applicants and we've whittled it down to 4 for interview. Within that 4 we've got a pretty big spread of academic achievement (Cambridge 1st in Nat Sci and PhD to 2.1 in materials science from Liverpool).

One of our key strategies in interviews (both telephone and face to face) is asking them technical questions that we know they're not going to vbe able to answer from prior knowledge then seeing how they attempt to work out the answer on the hoof. The ones that do well in this exercise tend to make decent scientists, regardless of their degree classification or alma mater.