When am I ever going to need to know ____ when I get into the real world?”  We don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say that virtually every student asks this question–at least silently–at some point during their studies.  The funny thing is that the question does not exactly lose its relevance in college.  With the exception of trade schools, very few college degree programs prepare a student directly for the job which that  student will eventually take after graduation.  In spite of this,  countlessentry-level jobs–many of which lack a single function that isn’t covered in the on-the-job training–require a college degree.

Why do employers make such a big deal out of college degrees?  The answer, to be brief, is information.  A person making a hiring decision faces the task of taking dozens (or, in the current economy, sometimes thousands) of applications and determining a best fit.  This job is made especially difficult when you consider that every single applicant has the ability to filter the  information that the employer gets (and the incentive to ensure that the employer gets a “positive” spin rather than an objective assesment of the applicant’s abilities).  Facing this insurmountable task, hiring managers do the most sensible thing possible: they play the averages.  Your college degree might not be in making widgets, but a person reveiewing your application knows that–holding everything else equal–a person with a college degree is more likely to be trainable, hard-working, and capable of working within the system than a person without a degree.  Given this, a hiring manager has an incentive to ALWAYS prefer a person with a college degree over a non-degree holder (provided their qualifications are otherwise similar).  Thus, your degree is valuable not merely because of what it taught you but because of the “signal” that it sends to employers

The problem is that this incentive structure has spiraled out of control faster than a political debate between Megatron and Optimus Prime In response to this action by employers, job-seekers are given an increasingly large incentive to attend (and graduate college) until, eventually, the value of a diploma’s “signal” is minimal.  When hiring managers are faced with a large pool of applicants who ALL have college degrees, they must look elsewhere for information.

The easiest source of distinguishing information for employers to use is employment history.  Even for an entry-level job–and even with work having nothing to do with the job or even the industry–work experience tells an employer that an applicant is capable of completing tasks and (at minimum) of not doing something stupid enough to warrant termination.

The problem for college students, of course, is that it’s hard to juggle work and school.  In the current economy, it’s difficult to find any job, much less a job that can be balanced with a demanding schedule of classes and homework.  The most obvious solution, if we may be so bold, is freelance work.  Freelance work allows a student to accrue work experience (and a good number of references)  without committing to a work “schedule” that may conflict with classes (or studying for exams).  It’s important to remember that freelancing isn’t just for coders, either. Our believe in the product we market goes hand-in-hand with our belief that college students have a wide variety of skills to share with the market.  Students working on Liberal Arts degrees have finely tuned writing skills that are perfect for a small business looking for somebody to maintain a blog marketing the company.  Business students may not have completed their degrees, but by their junior year many of them have the rudimentary comfort level with accounting or finance principles necessary to provide meaningful help to a small business owner who needs basic help.  Social science students are trained to understand how to avoid biasing survey results; a skill that’s more than a little valuable for a small business looking to gather information about their consumers’ needs.  Even the computer skills that some college students may consider “basic” (proficiency in Excel and Word, for example) can be extremely valuable to a small business owner who has a great product but limited tech savvy.  By putting those skills to use, students can give themselves a meaningful edge when they enter the full-time job market.