John Scalzi on getting out of poverty

John Scalzi, in another of his reader-suggested articles, discusses the ways and means of escaping from poverty:

The second anecdote involves my wife — who to be sure is not in poverty, but bear with me. When Krissy and I met, she had her high school diploma and that was it. Anyone who knows me knows I think my wife is smarter, more sensible and better organized than I am, because she is — I have met very few people who are as flat-out competent as my wife. But because she had only a high school diploma, she was locked into a series of jobs that were, to put it mildly, wildly below her abilities, and wildly below what should have been earning. It didn't matter that she was clearly capable enough and intelligent enough for other jobs; those jobs weren't open to her because employers listed a college diploma as a criterion. Fortunately, her current employer recognized her brains and paid for her to complete her college education, so they could put her in a job that required a BA. Now she has a quite nice job with a perfectly good salary. What has changed about Krissy? Not her intelligence, her competence or her abilities. What's changed is now she has a piece of parchment that says "bachelor of arts" on it.

It sucks that by and large smart, capable people are locked out of good jobs because some HR dweeb has decided to use a college degree as a filtering device. In perfect world this wouldn't be done. This is not that world. Getting a college degree does not assure one will lift out of poverty — I know lots of starving post-grads — but does mean one's options are much wider. Poverty in the United States is very often about a lack of options, and a lack of good choices. Giving one's self the ability to have more options in one's life matters. Beyond the simple fact of the college degree, the process of education can offer other useful things — placement services, access to internships, the implicit task and time management training that comes from attending classes on a schedule, etc — all of which will come in handy in the real world. But at the end of the day it's really simple. Education provides options.

Excellent advice, and remarkably close to what we've been telling Victor: a university degree isn't a guarantee of wealth, but the lack of one is a big handicap to overcome. Nowadays, with so many companies doing their recruiting on the web, if you don't have a degree, your application never even makes it to a living human being. The kinder ones at least let you know that you don't meet their requirements, but others just silently send your application to /dev/null. They get enough applicants who do meet their initial criteria that they don't even worry about those that don't. They don't have time or resources to do additional intelligent filtering on applicants who might otherwise be suitable, but who don't have a degree.