re: The ROI on college investment

It depends. These are still people that make hiring decisions, not robots. They have biases.

College isn't about determining if you can do the work these days. Unless you have experience, that's not going to be known until you're actually doing the job. But I think it absolutely helps you to *get* the job. College, recommendations that come from the relationships formed in college are almost like pre-approval with a loan or credit card. Do you need college? No, but college won't hurt you, and it can help significantly because the company simply has more information to go on.

HR doesn't feel like they have to devote as much time to background checks on those types of candidates. They don't want to do more work than they have to do if they're vetting a bunch of candidates that have around the same amount of experience or none at all.