College Degree or Work Experience?

Depends on the job, the experience, the education, and the person.

College graduates are more educated, that is a fact. They may or may not be best for the job though.

When interviewing, I just throw one of these out on the table and see how it goes.

I mean unless the resume says LSU for some common ground small talk, I don’t get caught up on college. I look for skill/personality fit.

I can tell you from personal experience, I had 10 years worth of warehouse experience, which put me at the top of the line for warehouse supervisor positions and/or top forklift operator pay grades at larger companies. With the last company I worked for a while and could have moved into different roles that also didn't necessarily require a degree, like CAD, Inventory Planning, Project Management, etc.

The thing is those roles didn't pay that much more than what I was making working in the trenches, I'd start out less than those who were hired directly with a degree, and they required a lot more responsibility.

With all that experience, the most I could have hoped for was a role somewhere in the $45-50k range. And anything above I'd always be seen as someone with no degree.

Now I'm about to do grunt work at a small public accounting firm and I'll start at $55k and 6 weeks off. Once I get a busy season the wage increase is usually around 12% for this company, and then probably a lot more when I get my CPA license.

Just one man's experience, but frick what the blue collar Mitsubishi foreman says. Degree is certainly trumping experience right now.

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College Degree or Work Experience?

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the only thing a college degree stands for today is to say you are a lazy bum who doesnt want to work at any real job, you hate america, and would rather waste your time on political activism and pretending men have vaginas

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At the beginning of the movie “Cocktail,” starring Tom Cruise, he’s fresh out of the Army. He is looking for jobs in the corporate world but keeps getting rejected due to no minimum requirement of a college degree.

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Doesn't the Army pay for your college?

As others have said, more than just those two simple criteria go into a decision to hire someone. I can tell you from personal experience that not having a degree basically puts a cap on where you can go upwardly in most companies unless you really know someone. Gone are the days of you being able to go to work someplace and work your way up to middle management just on your work ethic and ability to know the business. Now they just hire someone with a degree to fill that position that they can train to run the peons how upper management thinks the peons should be handled.

College degree with five years of experience.