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Schooling might not work so well as qualification, but take care not to trivialize the problem. You can't really figure out how good someone is until you've worked with them, unless they have a long string of accomplishments. Schooling might be a little above noise, but at least it functions as a fairly reliable minimum bar.

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Based on the deluge of resumes I've seen coming into tech shops lately, the bar set by college degrees is so low that you need to dig to find it.

That is why there is the notion of league tables for colleges. My friends with MBAs say quite plainly that unless an MBA is from a "top 25" school, it simply isn't worth doing or having.

That leads me to believe it is a bullshit field of study altogether, if the only metric of worth is the school name.

CS graduate from MIT or Podunk U?

Well, can they code or not?

You've got a pile of a hundred CVs to sort through.

Then you've got other problems.

I disagree. I work with a brilliant coder who dropped out of high school.

I dropped out of highschool too; my point is that a degree in a technical discipline, from a tough school, will filter out many people who are incapable. It's the low bar to jump over. But by no means will all of the brilliant people have degrees, nor even decent looking credentials, on paper.

(A ⇒ B) ⇏ (¬A ⇒ ¬B)

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