What do you think is most effective?

[LaraK]

One who has a lot of schooling might suggest that the question would have been properly phrased as, "What do you think is MORE effective?"

However, I personally believe that experience is the better teacher.

Where the hell is the blowing a rasberry smiley when you need it?

New question...

Why do we not consider 18 years(1-12+6) of SCHOOLING to be a "life experience"?

I wanted my daughter to dorm, for the experience not just the education.

True, I learned some really important stuff in my dorm. Out or respect for your sanity, I will not share at this point.

My degree has nothing to do with my profession at this point, but I need a degree to have my job. Just seems kinda funny to me some times.

 

[Alyssa88]

Both are important. I feel that for my age I have a good amount of life experience. I have learned important lessons to be an adult from life expereince, but I feel my education will make me a more successful adult.

I have to say that my experience has taught me more than anything. I know several graduate students, that although they are very bright, they lack a lot of the knowledge I feel I have. Some of them have had things handed to them, I used to think they were lucky but I have been realizing how much it benefits me to work.

I also have classes that will discuss specific impairments or disabilities/ disorders. I have learned way more from working with individuals with those problems than from any lecture or book.

 

[Cool-Beans]

Everyone always talks about the "college experience." I went to college, but did it all locally and was a wife and mother already. Whole different ballgame, I think.

What it is it that people gain (other than getting drunk and having sex) while away at school that makes them glad they did it?

Two of my kids are off at school, so I'm especially curious about it now.

 

[Alyssa88]

Everyone always talks about the "college experience." I went to college, but did it all locally and was a wife and mother already. Whole different ballgame, I think.

What it is it that people gain (other than getting drunk and having sex) while away at school that makes them glad they did it?

Two of my kids are off at school, so I'm especially curious about it now.

I lived in a college dorm for two years (they kick you off campus after 2 yrs.) I learned nothing from those two years that really benefits me now. I only worked one of those two years, and since my living expenses were covered there was no stress. After moving off campus, I needed to get a better job, and started working almost full time. Having rent and bills to worry about, on top of being a full time student, was what really prepared me for the real world.

 

[ROIE01581]

common sense is all that is important. So few people have common sense. Book smart and common sense stupid.

 

[Ember]

Both are important and different situations would be influenced differently. When I see a doctor, I appreciate their formal education. My Aunt Fran may think she knows the answer to every medical question, and she's even right a fair bit, but I'll still take the doctor, thanks. An experienced doctor would be even better, but then again, with the medical profession sometimes it's the just-out-of-school doctors who are the most up to date.

 

[GeorgeG]

I voted for the combination, but if I had to chose just one I would say experience over education (degree).

I had this discussion many times over the years with both well educated friends and non-degreed experienced friends. We generally agreed that a degree mostly shows a capacity for learning and real experience cultivates that capacity.

Part of my job for many years was to take young electrical engineers and show them how their education applies to real-life situations. At the same time, I had non-degree workers who performed very well because of their years of experience. Consider that years of experience often includes applicable training comparable to that specific to the job one recieves in college.

My experience in a job that typically requires a degree in electrical engineering, Id put twenty years of experience, degree or no, over someone with a degree and less than five years experience, which is largely what they're getting these days. Of course, there are exceptions in every situation.

 

[Galahad]

Name at least three jobs where 20 years of experience doing that job still doesn't make you qualified unless you got a degree 25 years ago.

Physician. Professor. Professional Classical Musician. Should I go on?

 

[DisneyBamaFan]

Physician. Professor. Professional Classical Musician. Should I go on?

I disagree with all three.

Physician - I know nurses with only training and a bare minimum of college who are better doctors than MDs. Also, PAs have much less in the way of a formal education, but tend to be very good doctors.

Professor - Anyone could be a professor if not for the elitists running the universities. In fact, many "professors" at smaller colleges don't have degrees in the field that they are teaching - if at all. They have life experience. I find that when I take classes from professors with no real world experience, I end up teaching them more than they teach me.

Classical Musician - Again, this is an elitist thought. The best musicians are gifted. They learn from practice and training - not a college education.

I am not trying to be snarky, but my life's experience has shown me first hand that college is over-rated as a way to guess whether or not a person might be good at their job or not.

 

[Galahad]

I disagree with all three.

Physician - I know nurses with only training and a bare minimum of college who are better doctors than MDs. Also, PAs have much less in the way of a formal education, but tend to be very good doctors.

I'm sorry, But this is biggest load of crap I've read in a long while. There is not even the slightest comparison between the amount of skill and knowledge a physician must have at their instant disposal and all the nursing or PA experience in the world. You have no clue what it takes to become a physician if this is what you really think.

Professor - Anyone could be a professor if not for the elitists running the universities. In fact, many "professors" at smaller colleges don't have degrees in the field that they are teaching - if at all. They have life experience. I find that when I take classes from professors with no real world experience, I end up teaching them more than they teach me.

Classical Musician - Again, this is an elitist thought. The best musicians are gifted. They learn from practice and training - not a college education.

It may be elitist - but there are elite things in the world. You can't get "trained" in legitimate music "on the job". You wouldn't last a week. Practice without guidance is useless. You just practice errors - and get very good at the errors.

I am not trying to be snarky, but my life's experience has shown me first hand that college is over-rated as a way to guess whether or not a person might be good at their job or not.

I'm also an I.T. director. I used to think, rather strongly, that experience was always better than education. I've hired dozens if not hundreds of programmers and software developers in the last 25 years. What I found is that very often, the person with "20 years" experience simply had 1 year of experience 20 times. Also, just as often, they might be very good at certain things but usually lack the ability to see the big picture or relate to anything beyond their own world. I still maintain, that in I.T., an I.T. degree is not necessarily the best. Liberal Arts degrees are usually better. I can teach a monkey to write programs . I can't teach a programmer that "learned on the job" how to think. The kid fresh out of college often thinks he knows it all, but 20 years later he knows better and is no longer a know-it-all. They develop that attitude quickly while they are young and shed it. The "school of hard knocks guy" develops his know-it-all attitude over time and never let go of it.

 

[barkley]

if you're talking employment wise-i think it can depend greatly on the field. just because a person has lots of professional experience doing a job does'nt mean any of that experience was in doing it correctly.

this was one of the things that ticked me off working a civil service job. the way many promotional opportunites are structured, much more able and qualified candidates can't even get an interview because staff with more "experience" (seniority) are given preference. in the gov. agency i worked for, many of the promotional jobs waived education requirements for year to year trade offs of "experience" and since there were only so many people permitted to interview for a given opportunity-unless you had been there for years and years you were'nt even considered.

this whole issue became a hot topic when a couple of promotional opportunites opened up and it was decided that a test would be given. those who met the criteria by virtue of education could take it along with those who met it by virtue of experience. those with experience were also given extra points (based on their years of employment) on top of whatever they scored on the test to supposedly make up for this change in hiring policy. when the test results were released there were people like myself who had'nt been there for very long (a few years vs a dozens of years for my co-workers) who topped out on the list. a review of the test and interviews with the oral board members who conducted them found that when it came down to demonstrating oraly and in writing the real skills needed to do the job-the staff that had taken the time to avail themselves of training and educational opportunities in the field were much more accurate and correct in doing the job. despite receiving as much as a 5% increase in their overall test scores by virtue of their "experience" time on the job-the experienced staff who had'nt availed themselves of the constant free training and education opportunities our employer offered during work hours/on the job-paid, scored much lower (the oral interviewers commented-"they told us over and over that they had done x, y, and z and all their experience doing it-but when it came down to telling us HOW they did it, the right way to do it, reccognizing someone had done it wrong when given an example-they just could'nt do it".


on the flip side-dh is from the i.t. field. he has an education in it but the best education he received was from his experience in working with the systems he was in charge of. one of his greatest frustrations at his former job was the managments decision that they wanted to hire only recent college grads ("because they have the best, most up to date knowledge"). the new hires would come in with no concept of the practicalities of what the job entailed and would waste countless man hours "reinventing the wheel" (and god forbid if a senior staff member tried to help them out- "new is better, old does'nt know" was the mantra among these "kids" ).

 

[DisneyBamaFan]

...It may be elitist

May be?

but there are elite things in the world.

Only to elitists...

You sound just like most of my peers, and my teams outperform them all, and almost none of my employees have a degree. I have turned around a number of IT programs by eliminating this mindset.

A degree is not a bad thing (remember, it indicates a desire to improve one's self), but it is not an indicator of ability or the likelihood of success in a job - any job...

 

[DisneyBamaFan]

...this was one of the things that ticked me off working a civil service job. the way many promotional opportunites are structured, much more able and qualified candidates can't even get an interview because staff with more "experience" (seniority) are given preference. in the gov. agency i worked for, many of the promotional jobs waived education requirements for year to year trade offs of "experience" and since there were only so many people permitted to interview for a given opportunity-unless you had been there for years and years you were'nt even considered.

this whole issue became a hot topic when a couple of promotional opportunites opened up and it was decided that a test would be given. those who met the criteria by virtue of education could take it along with those who met it by virtue of experience. those with experience were also given extra points (based on their years of employment) on top of whatever they scored on the test to supposedly make up for this change in hiring policy. when the test results were released there were people like myself who had'nt been there for very long (a few years vs a dozens of years for my co-workers) who topped out on the list. a review of the test and interviews with the oral board members who conducted them found that when it came down to demonstrating oraly and in writing the real skills needed to do the job-the staff that had taken the time to avail themselves of training and educational opportunities in the field were much more accurate and correct in doing the job. despite receiving as much as a 5% increase in their overall test scores by virtue of their "experience" time on the job-the experienced staff who had'nt availed themselves of the constant free training and education opportunities our employer offered during work hours/on the job-paid, scored much lower (the oral interviewers commented-"they told us over and over that they had done x, y, and z and all their experience doing it-but when it came down to telling us HOW they did it, the right way to do it, reccognizing someone had done it wrong when given an example-they just could'nt do it".

Ahhh, this is a result of poor succession planning and development within the company. If you really want to promote from within, you have to provide mentor training for those who you identify as future management candidates. Lacking this type of mentoring, you will have no choice but to promote those with formal training over those who can offer the company even more had they been prepared. This is especially true in manufacturing.

...on the flip side-dh is from the i.t. field. he has an education in it but the best education he received was from his experience in working with the systems he was in charge of. one of his greatest frustrations at his former job was the managments decision that they wanted to hire only recent college grads ("because they have the best, most up to date knowledge"). the new hires would come in with no concept of the practicalities of what the job entailed and would waste countless man hours "reinventing the wheel" (and god forbid if a senior staff member tried to help them out- "new is better, old does'nt know" was the mantra among these "kids" ).

Yep...

 

[barkley]

Ahhh, this is a result of poor succession planning and development within the company. If you really want to promote from within, you have to provide mentor training for those who you identify as future management candidates. Lacking this type of mentoring, you will have no choice but to promote those with formal training over those who can offer the company even more had they been prepared. This is especially true in manufacturing.
Yep...

practicaly speaking they did offer mentor training-it was the training and education opportunities that all of the staff had equal access to. i can't count the number of staff members i counseled as a supervisor who would complain about not getting promoted that repeatedly said "but i have years more experience doing it than the person they hired does", i would repeatedly advise them that just because a job announcement read "x years of experience will be accepted in exchange for x years of college" did'nt mean because they had 3 times as many years of experience as the person who had the degree it was going to carry anymore weight in the interview. it came down (at least in our testing/interviewing process) to who provided the most accurate answers. if the 'newbie' with a degree and 2 years on the job could answer the questions more accuratly than one of my folks with 15 years and no college, well that was how it was. 9 times out of 10 the ones that complained about this were also the ones that declined time after time when i would make a point of showing them upcoming o.t.j. trainings that would be reviewing exactly what would be asked in an upcoming test for a promotional opportunity

i have to say though-for all the people who had experience i interviewed for jobs that could'nt get specific about how to do certain things, i interviewed probably more recent college grads with no experience who seemed to have the mindset that they did'nt have to demonstrate their knowledge but wave that diploma in front of us figuring it was proof enough that they had the skills/knowledge to do the job (i felt like saying "i was'nt your professor, did'nt grade your assignments/tests-don't know how many times you flunked a class before you squeeked through and finaly passed it so DEMONSTRATE to me what you've learned, what you know and what you don't").

 

[smartestnumber5]

Professor - Anyone could be a professor if not for the elitists running the universities. In fact, many "professors" at smaller colleges don't have degrees in the field that they are teaching - if at all. They have life experience. I find that when I take classes from professors with no real world experience, I end up teaching them more than they teach me.

How does one teach things like metaphysics or meta-logic based on life experience? What life experience could possibly give one knowledge about these subjects?

Maybe you have more practical disciplines in mind (engineering, computer science, etc), but many, many academic fields are purely academic--there is no real world employment counterpart. In the humanities, for instance, (I do philosophy) there is virtually no way for someone who has not undertaken graduate study in the field to be as informed about the field as someone who has. There just isn't any kind of real-world counterpart for many fields--there is no job where they pay you to do meta-ethics or to prove Godel's incompleteness theorem.

Now I do agree that it isn't the actual degree--the piece of paper--that matters. If one was independently wealthy and could afford to dedicate years of one's life to studying these disciplines full-time (like Descartes did), then yes one could be equally qualified as anyone with a PhD to be a professor. But I don't consider spending years studying an abstract academic field "life-experience."

So while I agree that professors learn a lot from teaching (there is a common adage that you don't really know something until you know it well enough to teach it) the idea that general "life-experience" can lead one to know more about things like metaethics, Godel's incompleteness theorem, or Coptic art than a PhD in those areas seems pretty doubtful.



Regarding the OP's question, given what I said above I think the education/experience distinction is in some ways a false dichotomy in some contexts. So I think the answer is that it just depends. If you're hiring a philosophy professor and someone comes in with no degree in philosophy but says, "but I've got 20 years experience"--well, I don't even know what that means. Does that mean they spent 20 years thinking really hard? (as my brother would describe what my discipline is about ) Does that mean they spent 20 years publishing articles in top journals and just happened not to have gotten a degree?

My dad is the type who never did any formal higher ed, but is very handy, very mechanical, and learns how things work by trial and error. He works with a lot of college educated engineers at work--many of whom are right out of college (my alma mater actually). So my dad likes to tell me stories of how these 21 year old kids come to work with their $40,000 a year engineering degree in hand, but with no practical experience; and then the factory workers like my dad who are lucky to make $40,000 a year end up teaching the engineers how to do their jobs. In that kind of case I totally see the idea that experience might matter more than the degree (or at least that the degree alone won't teach one how to do an actual job). But then again, I'm sure there are things that the engineers are expected to do/know that my dad can't do/doesn't know, so I wouldn't say that education is completely useless either even in practical disciplines.

So I think it all depends.

 

[Anewman]

My Grandmother is 86 and has lived all over the world, I guess she is qualified for any profession in the world.