College Matters Very Little In Information Security
By Daniel Miessler on January 21st, 2006: Tagged as College | Education | Information Security | University
According to this article, those in information security with a bachelors degree get paid little (if any) more than those with just a high school diploma.
This doesn’t suprise me.
Many are saying that this means that college doesn’t matter — that it’s worthless, etc., but they’re way off. The problem is the quality of education. Overall, the standards for someone with a 4-year degree are way down from where they were 10 or 20 years ago. The difference between a high-school graduate and a college-educated person back then were quite significant.
Today, however, we have people graduating with Bachelors degress that can’t do basic multiplication and division in their heads, don’t have basic problem solving skills, and have a horrible grasp of English.
Because of this, there are a TON of people who only have high school under their belts that compare to or surpass those with these degrees.
But make no mistake — someone with a degree from Cal Tech, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, etc. is going to blow away all but the most talented high-school graduates.
Bottom line — don’t confuse most college education with a good college education. The first is essentially what high school should have been. The second is truly an exercise in how to expand one’s abilities.
As for information security, the reason there is so attention paid to whether or not you have a degree is because being successful in the field requires talent and intelligence. If you have these things you’ll go far. If you don’t, you won’t. Ultimately, certifications and degrees are peripheral to this fundamental rule.
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Its all about standards. The word of the day is mediocrity.
Your comments apply to many fields, not just information security. A piece of paper may be a ticket in the door, but what you do once you are in is up to you. A college education should prepare you to think, and learn, and adapt, and develop vision, in order to position yourself to change. We all know that very few educations do that anymore.
An organization that is foolish enough to use that piece of paper as the sole criteria for keeping people on, rather than actual work performance, must have some pretty mediocre managers at the helm, most likely the result of some mediocre training from some mediocre educational institutions. I see so much mediocrity and lack of vision in business and government, while all the while the key decision makers keep drinking the mediocrity kool-aid.
Comment by Rob — 1/22/2006 @ 1:53 pm