Is there too much emphasis on college degrees?
Walmart's (WMT) chief spokesman, David Tovar, resigned recently after the retail giant discovered that he lied on his resume. Tovar said he had graduated from the University of Delware in 1996, when in reality he had not finished his coursework for the degree.
Tovar is out of a job because he lied. I have no problem with that. Lying is a bad thing. You should never, ever lie on your resume, or any other area of your life. If you're embarrassed about something in your past, better to just bring it into the open instead of waiting in fear that someone will find out.
Walmart was stupid because they didn't run a background check that included degree verification, when they hired him in 2006. If lying on the resume will result in firing, then you should do the work to verify the information. Degree verifications are pretty easy, as companies and universities do them all the time. It doesn't involve numerous phone calls and time consuming communication. Everyone is already set up to do this type of check.
However, as much as lying is a horrible thing, what bothers me even more is that everyone agrees Tovar was doing a great job. In fact, the reason the lie was discovered was that they were doing a background check on him in preparation for a promotion. This is 100 percent Tovar's fault. He lied. He knew he lied. End of story. But I doubt he would have even been interviewed for the position without a degree back in 2006.
Now, I'd be perfectly happy to eat my words if I found out that Mr. Tovar would have been hired anyway, without the degree. But, even if Walmart would have hired him sans degree, because of his experience, it's doubtful he could have gained his experience without claiming to have the degree in the first place.
I believe in education. Absolutely. I have two degrees (bachelor's and master's) which you can verify, if you desire. But, do those degrees automatically make me more capable than someone else? Sure, they indicate that I have a certain level of intelligence, stick-to-itiveness and am capable of filling in Scantron bubbles with a high degree of accuracy, but does it doesn't automatically mean I'll be better at doing a job than someone without the matching degrees.
A degree is what we call a "proxy." It's very difficult to determine if someone is actually going to be able to do a given job, so we use a lot of substitutes to help us determine that. The degree is usually the first check box on a professional job. Then we check job history, and we interview by asking questions such as, "What would you do if....?" which are supposed to help us make a good guess as to how well someone would do in a particular job. It's not necessarily a bad thing. Having a degree allows a hiring manager to rest assured that a person is generally capable and competent in the type of thing colleges teach, but people with degrees aren't the only people who are.
Education is becoming more and more expensive. College costs 12 times more than it did 35 years ago, which means it becomes more and more restrictive. College enrollments are down. Do you really think it's the rich kids that are opting out? Sure, you don't need a college degree for success, but lack of one locks you out of many jobs, regardless of whether or not you have the skills. With computers doing the initial resume screening in many jobs, a human won't even have the option to see your resume without that degree box checked. Is that good for your business?
Now, a smart company would snap up Tovar, because he's good at what he does, even though he doesn't have a piece of paper saying he does. He did deserve a hand slap for the lie, but I'm sure he thought it was the only way to get a job that he was capable of doing and doing well. It shouldn't be that way. We need to focus more on can the person do the job and less on what they did as young people.
