Can we solve giving validation to life experience vs. a degree?
- At my employer, want to move up? You need a 4 year degree, in anything, period.
- When applying to jobs, "Bachelors required, Masters preferred" and I've even seen this for administrative assistant listings.
- Even startup at the tens of employees stage often want degrees.
It seems the only way really around this at present is to have successfully exited a startup. Since we're on YC, take Sam Altman. Sam dropped out of Stanford to focus full time on Loopt, ultimately selling Loopt. 2 years after Loopt was purchased Paul Graham handed over the keys of the castle and named Sam president of YC.
Obviously that's not a realistic scenario for 99% of the population. That's a whole lot of luck and right place right time. PG seeded Sam with Loopt, Sam was then offered a part-time partnership with YC where he probably proved himself more, then exited Loopt which gave PG plenty to look at and go "yeah, he's capable of this, let's take a chance on him" but a lot of people have mountains of life experience but get the door slammed in their face before even speaking to a human being because they don't have a 4-year degree listed on their CV (in fact, some online applications make you input your degree, university and GPA in their own fields and will not let you leave them blank).
We've got a lot of smart and talented people here on HN, and a lot of startup types and independently wealthy individuals. Who wants to take a stab at the problem, even if just in a hypothetical approach?
Do, as a society, we start a sort of staffing firm with 'counselors' that evaluate individuals and use some sort of secret-sauce formula to say "this is what we think about this individual" as a sort of professional certification/degree alternative?
What outside of the box ideas might there be that we can discover and work towards implementing?