As underemployment continues to increase, more and more talented people are turning to the classified sections of their newspapers. At ISI this fact was impressively demonstrated a few weeks ago, when a single advertisement brought more than 300 responses from all over the United States----and a few from as far away as Germany and the Netherlands.

With so much interest focused on the Help Wanted columns, I’d like to comment on two words often included in job advertisements: Degree Required The frequent absurdity of these two words first struck me when, not long ago, I paused in front of a company bulletin board at ISI. One notice announced an opening within ISI.

“Degree Required” is a lazy, sloppy way of describing what we want of an employee. Perhaps ads should instead read, “Evidence of Potential Required.”

I saw that the hiring supervisor had specified Degree Required. I could not understand from the job description why a degree was required. It irritated me, in any case, that the hiring supervisor had not allowed the option of equivalent experience acceptable.

I don’t underestimate what a degree may signify; in fact, I’ve worked for several myself. But far too often the requirement is used as a crutch in the screening process. The academic accomplishment to which a degree testifies frequently has nothing at all to do with potential for performance in the job advertised.

Many creative, dynamic people are stifled in academic environments, but flourish in jobs where their creativity and dynamism can be channeled towards tangible accomplishment. On the other hand, people who ‘breeze’ through college and graduate school may be unequipped to cope with the practical necessities of the workaday world.

“Requiring” a degree is not the same as asking for ability, talent, honesty, knowledge, skill, or creativity. Asking for a degree may simply be asking for a label.

The degree indicates one may have been suitably “processed by” some educational institution for the job in question. But we should remember that labels are often highly undependable approximations of reality, and often obscure as much as they explain.

Unfortunately, too many employers do specify irrelevant formal educational requirements, and thus eliminate and lose a large percentage of their potential applicants. Actually, both lose neither employer nor potential employee benefits.

Given its dubious value, why is the degree requirement so commonplace? Perhaps it is used as a subtle, even unconscious method of discrimination.

With discrimination by race, nationality, sex, and age now illegal (or otherwise hazardous), discrimination by certification may be a last resort. After all, the words Degree Require still rule out more women than men, more blacks than whites, more oldsters than youngsters.

Or perhaps the job description is just sloppy, bearing little relation to the actual work to be performed, with the “Degree Required” thrown in to make up for the ad writer’s laziness or inability to get specific information about the job.

Inaccurate or incomplete job descriptions often lead to “overtiring’’—hiring someone whose education far exceeds that required to do the job. It’s easy for employers to succumb to over hiring during times of high unemployment. They do not realize that over hiring constitutes an additional form of discrimination, because it excludes those who have been unable to get (or pay for) a higher education.

It also makes for bored, restless employees. I can sympathize with the plight of so many recent college graduates now looking for jobs. They were often led to believe that the skills and certifying degrees they were getting would guarantee job opportunities. Today their expectations are exceeded only by their disillusionment when they fail not only to find a job in their field, but any job at all.

Like any employer, we at 1S1 want to hire people with a combination of training, experience, attitude, talent, ability, and potential appropriate to the job. I stress potential Too many talented people are ignored solely on the basis of inexperience, while in many cases inexperience is exactly what you’re looking for—a lack of the kind of experience that dulls insight, inhibits creative suggestions, discourages innovation, or breeds arrogance.

“Degree Required” is a lazy, sloppy way of describing what we want of an employee. Perhaps ads should instead read, “Evidence of Potential Required.”

This article was orginally published in Current Contents on March 17, 1975 and reprinted in vol 2 in Essays of an Information Scientist. Original article can be found - http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v2p238y1974-76.pdf

See also Irrational or Rational? To a meaningless degree  http://www.hirecentrix.com/irrational-or-rational-to-a-meaningless-degree.html

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BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Eugene Garfield is the founder of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and a pioneer in the field of citation analysis. Garfield studied at the University of Colorado and Berkeley before getting a degree in chemistry from Columbia University in 1948. During the early 1950s he worked on the Welch Library indexing project at the John Hopkins University School of Medicine, sorting and indexing documents from medical papers and journals. With a graduate degree in library sciences from Columbia University. Garfield went into business as a "documentation consultant" while working on his doctorate in structural linguistics.

He founded the ISI in 1960 and developed an indexing system for science literature, based on the analysis of citations used within a given work. Works earn an "impact factor," a measure of citations to other science journals that serves as an indicator of their importance in the field. The more citations in reputable journals, the higher the impact factor. The ISI sold subscriptions to their publication the Science Citation Index, and over time grew to include the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI). These databases now form the foundation of the online research tool called the Web of Knowledge. Garfield also served as an adjunct professor of computer and information science at University of Pennsylvania during his career, and in 1986 launched The Scientist, a magazine for science researchers. His Essays of an Information Scientist (1977) collects columns published as Current Comments between 1962 and 1976, and is considered a classic in the field of information science. The ISI was acquired by Thomson Scientific in 1992.

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