These days we are living in a society where grades usually define a person’s intelligence. We beat ourselves over good grades. Even many of my friends in university study just for the sake of getting good marks. Means they would cover the topics which are most likely to come in exams so that they could achieve good grades. The idea of education for gaining knowledge is kind of diminishing now with increasing competition among students.

Now a days more and more students are getting enrolled in college for their bachelor’s degree, even getting a masters degree has become easier target for students. There were few people in past with PHD and now so many people are taking their education level up to Doctorate level.

In this race of trying to achieve the highest qualification, many big companies like Google, Apple, Starbucks, Costco etc have decided to drop the obligation of having a college degree for getting most of the jobs.

With the college tuition soaring high, many don’t have time and money to get themselves a degree but this does not mean that they should not have right to the well paying jobs.

The idea behind this initiative:

The basic idea is to hire people with skills and who are good for the job whether they have a four year bachelor’s degree or not. While hiring the person’s capability and efficiency will be the first priority rather than the fact that he has been to college or not. Means recent graduate jobs can be yours even without a degree if you have particular set of skills that are required for the job.

In the tech sector, it has been proved that people who have done vocational courses and have on-the-job-experience are better trained for the jobs than the one with the degree.

It does not mean that your degree will become totally useless. Most of the employees are still the one with degrees but by removing the obligation, the talented people with the exceptional set of skills will get equal opportunity of getting a nice job. Hence some successful candidates will have degrees and some will not.

“Academic qualifications will still be taken into account and indeed remain an important consideration when assessing candidates as a whole, but will no longer act as a barrier to getting a foot in the door,” Maggie Stilwell, Ernst and Young’s managing partner for talent, told the Huffington Post when that company dropped the requirement.

It is possible to get a job in google without a college degree:

After looking into data, google realized that GPA has nothing to do with the work performance and is almost worthless while hiring. Hence it is one of the companies which have decided to drop the degree requirement. Most of Google company jobs can be landed by anyone with capability.

“What’s interesting is the proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time as well,” Bock said. “So we have teams where you have 14 percent of the team made up of people who’ve never gone to college.”

Is GPA all you need for ensuring a good job?

All this just proves that what you should be focusing during your college years is learning and gaining knowledge. Try to study in a way that you retain what you study and could use it later in life when needed.

If your only focus will be grades, you might get them in your college years but in practical life no one will hire you without proper understanding and basic knowledge of your subject.

Sometimes GPA and grading system goes over my head because for getting good GPA, you do need to learn but more than the learning part you need an understanding of what professor is looking for in the answer. As long as you understand your professor, you would know what to learn for the test and how to answer his questions.

The real world does not work like this. At work place you will have to figure out problems with no obvious answers. Here what you learn in your college years will come in handy.

I’m doing my bachelors in medicines and one of my senior professor, who is also a member of interview committee of a renowned pharmaceutical company, asked us to focus more on learning part of our education rather than the grading part. He said that while conducting an interview his team never bother with GPA, they ask basic questions related to medicine and the one who can answer their questions is selected.

It can be said that for new graduate employment opportunities, focus on knowledge is more important.

Apart from all this, college degree is equally important for advance studies in subjects like medicine and engineering. It kinds of provide guarantee of intelligence and college graduates definitely earn more than those who have not been to college.