Page 2 - College Degree vs. Certification, or both?

I attend a tech school, and while they don't read from a book, there isn't a great deal of teaching going on. We are able to extend ourselves though. As such, a lot of what I learn is through self-extension and through my own work at home.

I understand exactly what you're saying, I have to agree. Only a fool would take a cert/course on without proper research.

Why pay money for the courses if they're not really teaching and you're learning more on your own at home? The bad thing about the cert courses is that they teach you to pass the exam more than they teach you the material and how to apply it in the real-world. I attended a tech school for my MCSE training and had one teacher that taught a majority of my classes and he was a great teacher. I did have one teacher though for a class or two that often gave the answer: "You don't need that for the exam so don't worry about it" for quite a few questions and mostly read from the book.

The essence of modern higher education and my longstanding soap box summed up in one concise sentence....

I have yet to see an IT/IS program at college that wasn't something along the lines of:

Microsoft Windows, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Visual Studio, ASP.NET, Microsoft Exchange, etc. etc.

or the comparable competing technologies in similar fields (I.e. a ton of Novell or Cisco courses, or, just as bad, ALL open source courses). This is not well-rounded. I see higher education in the IT field as a necessary evil. You need that silly little piece of paper to "prove" you know something, but to actually know something you need to learn it on your own. Most of the time, it seems like the teacher's in this field are just IT rejects who aren't qualified to teach anyway.

That's why I personally like certs - you can focus on what you want to learn at the time without a bunch of gibberish on the side (honestly now... who gives a crap about the reproductive system of a wallaby.... I don't think that's necessary rounding out) that appears to serve no purpose but to vaccuum your pockets. Unfortunately, business doesn't see things that way. To them, the degree is all-important, because in many fields a degree actually means something (I certainly wouldn't want a doctor who didn't have a degree in medicine, for example...). Higher ed IT programs have a long way to go before they're actually respectable as a whole (I'm sure there are several individual programs out there that are very good - I just haven't found them or can't afford them ).

That's my soapbox for the day.

What higher Ed programs are you looking at CTB? I'm currently taking prereqs at UNC Charlotte so I can pursue a Masters in CS. I'm 99.9% positive that I don't have to learn any Microsoft stuff right now. I'm taking a C class and the 2 Intro to CS classes I have to take teach Java. After that I have to take some algorithm and data structures classes along with computer architecture. From what I can tell, most of my stuff with be done on Sun boxes.

Maybe community colleges are falling behind or just aren't up to par, but I don't think your rants pertain to bigger state Universities....at least not in North Carolina.

Degree vs. Cert all depends on what you will be doing. Are you going to try to solely be an independent contractor or start your own company? If so then all you really need are certifications. If you plan on being a part of another company then you will NEED a degree. I have my A+, my RHCE, my MCSE (and some other certs not worth mentioning) and also know the people working at a few companies that want me to be thier admin. Alas I cannot be considered for any job at many places without a degree. Even though they know me and my skeeelz. Thems the big companies that treat you right though, not an outsourced call center or some crizzap like that.

There's more to it than that. Remember I'm a student, still in high-school.



Because they give me the pieces of paper you're talking about (Certificate II/IV/Diploma).

The main reason we aren't spoon fed our information is because our I.T class group are bright. We move through the work quickly, and the teachers have a hard time keeping up. As such, they'll teach us the boring, pointless stuff (Office Suite (*cough*), Enterprise Skills and OH&S, anyone?), but they'll say to us: "Ok. You have access to our entire lab. You've got access to all installed OS's."

Then they'll say:

"Set up a domain with Windows 2000 Server."
"Set up a Linux Samba Server on Red Hat 7.3."
"Create an automated installation boot disk that can be used anywhere."

They'll help us when necessary, but they encourage us to research and learn for ourselves.

That's why I pay the money

You gotta be kidding me.... I was programming Hypercard on 7 year old Apples in High School as means of learning C (and this was at the 2nd high school that was far superior in resources to my first one).... sheesh... as if I wasn't already pissed off enough about the American education system....

Anyway... the reason I'm bitching about school is:

I have around 40 credits in my chosen degree program. I need to finish up the last 24 or so before I can graduate. There are 3 required courses that this damn school (Harrisburg Area Community College) hasn't offered in more than a year - one of them hasn't been offered for 2 years. I looked at Devry but they're campus is way too far away. I can do Duquesne, but they don't have the actual program I'm looking for. I could do Penn State, but they're expensive and they won't take any of my existing credits.

So.... I'm... screwed. Now, I'm griping in general because:

A year and a half ago I knew squat about programming. My skills peaked in 12th grade when I made an menu driven DOS game that let you walk from one place to another. You couldn't actually do anything else.... it sucked. With the help of the Camel book, some free time, and the nice folks in the Perl forum (Esp. Hero, Scorpions, and that guy that Hero used to talk with all the time who hasn't been around for awhile) I've learned enough on my own to earn a spot modding the Perl forum and developing perl apps for a living. Same goes for JavaScript (except the mod thing) and Linux. Learned all three on my own in the last 2 years. No school. Nada. Zip. None.

Now take my buddy Rafael. He's a really bright guy, but he's getting screwed. He can't program, he doesn't understand RDBMSs or Operating Systems, and, frankly, he's just not a whiz at computers. Not because he CAN'T be - oh no. He definitely has the drive and personality for it - he just got screwed by schools. They're teaching him step by step how to use apps and specific (usually Microsoft) tools. He's not being taught to think critically about problems and all that.

However, I'd be willing to wager that with a degree, he'll still get a better job than I could even though he's far less equipped for it. I just don't think that in the tech field, some silly diploma proves squat. Granted, if you have an MBA or whatever, then that makes you valuable in other parts of the business, but from pure tech standpoint - it's not that big a deal. There are lots of people who've graduated with BS or Master's that don't know what a DSN is or don't know anything about any non-microsoft OS. There are lots of people graduating who can't explain what a reference in code is. There are lots of people with pretty paper diplomas who couldn't debug someone else's clear, documented code. The paper, in this field at least, is often deceiving from what I've seen.....

I don't think that applies only to the IT industry, there are people in all industries that slip through the cracks and have jobs that they definitely shouldn't have. I think this goes back to some people making the hiring decisions about these tech positions aren't in the tech positions and don't know squat about what the position entails.

The non-microsoft comment could probably be applied to CIS, MIS, and other degrees that are more business oriented and not necassarily CS classes. Not from what I can tell when I was researching CS degrees. When I was doing my undergrad in CIS we used VB, Access, ASP, and Oracle as our apps/languages so your rants are basically right on target. Most CS programs teach the core of Computer Science and I don't think that includes Microsoft. It teaches C, C++, Java, Algorithms, Computer Arch, OS Designs, and other topics that are non-vendor related which is a good thing.

I swear people should be put through some kind of test before being hired...an aptitude test to determine how able you are to "think outside the square". But over here that would probably provoke the Equal Opportunity Commission.

I guess it would be arrogant to say that all pieces of paper are rubbish...they both teach you certain things. The degree courses may make you well rounded, but sometimes you need to specialise in an area. The degree courses give you knowledge in a broad range of areas, but if you need to specialise that's where the Certs come in. A healthy mix of the two sounds like a deal to me.

My 0.02. Again.

I couldn't agree with you more.

I haven't found a school in the general area that does that (although, Java is vendor specific to nitpick), unfortunately. Two that I've looked at are currently in the process of phasing out those kinds of courses (including the school I'm at now) and changing over to something resembling training courses. The biggest offending vendors are Cisco, Oracle, and Microsoft from what I've seen, but I've also heard of schools that will only teach Linux or Open Source. None of this can be a good thing, since all of these things exist in the industry together.

Ahhhh, you got me there. Didn't even think of Java == Sun when writing that.



That's complete and utter crap if these schools are phasing out the foundations of computers and computer science and replacing them with vendor specific 'training course' type classes. I'm sorry you're having to put up with that type of mess. Are these community colleges or state/private Universities that are changing their curriculum? Here's the description of the computing facilities at UNCC.



It's hard to teach some of this stuff without using some vendor-specific stuff but overall it sounds like UNCC has a pretty good program. I'll find out soon enough I suppose.

I get the feeling that it comes down to that it’s the community colleges and a very small group of people who have all the control give a lot of us the run around. I live in a town of about 20,000 people; everybody knows everyone so little cliques are formed (our IT department). The main IT guy used to be pure Microsoft and Novell. So naturally everyone he worked with got on the bandwagon. So what happened? Microsoft and Novell certification came to be and even a new degree offered. Colleges treat there tech programs like fashion, you have to have the latest fashion to be in. Now our MS/Novell guy has his own Linux box and the majority of the web servers on campus are Linux. But the administration won’t let him go all the way to open source products because it’s not what they are used to. Trouble is the IT dept. sees it as a novelty, something that they can play with just to brag to there friends that they have a open source system running. They don’t realize the power of it, nor of what they have already.

So it seems like the problem with the “trendy” certs is based around smaller colleges?