India is DESPERATE!!!

[skiddriver]

Sure every company is different. In many companies unless you have an internal reference they aren't going to hire you regardless of your degree or not. What I can tell you is what is true in most cases. Most people don't care about the degree.

Bob Hoover never went to school as far as I am aware, do you think he would be a good candidate for a pilot at your company? If I had to pick somebody to fly me around he would be up near the top of my list. My suggestion is get your company to expand their interview pool, they could be missing a lot of people who would make an excellent fit on a rather arbitrary thing.

To answer the next question that I am sure to pop up. What if you have two identical candidates and one has a degree. The answer to that is there is no such thing as two identical candidates.

As I said the smart thing is get flying ASAP and work on the degree on the side. But if I had to choose between experience or the degree I am picking experience. The other thing that comes with that experience is meeting more people. And in any job process the #1 thing that helps you is contacts/references. Getting a head start on that will do more for you then anything else.

The simple answer is that we don't hire pilots to fly, we hire them to manage multi-million dollar aviation operations flown by outside contractors. We're going to spend close to $70 mil this year on aviation with over 100,000 passenger sectors. The company wants to know its aviation operations are properly overseen. If Bob Hoover never went to school, he's not qualified to hold my job.

As you'll recall, pilotyip asked for someone to vouch for the benefit of having a degree in moving from a flying job to a non-flying job when 20 to 30 years out of college. You know, the argument over having a degree to fall back on. That was me. 24 years after graduating from college, I went from second year Comair FO pay to a management position that pays senior narrow body wages. Defined benefit and retirement plan, yada-yada-yada. There are companies out there that care that their managers have degrees. We target recent grad MBAs for entry level logistics planner positions. We pay accordingly and have had no problem getting the person we want with the standards we set.

I didn't get my job because I had a degree, but I wouldn't have been invited to interview if I didn't.

If a person doesn't want my job or one like it, they don't need a degree. If you want to have maximum employability, get the credentials required. I fully understand that not every job at every company requires a degree, but I think it's a mistake to tell young folks that it will never matter down the road. Sometimes it will, and it will be hard to do anything about it at that point.

 

[pilotyip]

Management

AC 560 you are a man after my own heart, For the “College Only” crowd, there are many ways to skin a cat, you have your way that you feel is the only way anyone should do things. "The way I did it". I do not agree with you, if my grandson elected to pursue a pilots career outside of the militarty, I will recommend he not go to college full time, but follow the other time tested path where I have seen too many people succeed. That is fly full time, do your degree on the side, build time, build your resume. I will not debate the fall back value of a college degree, as I have stated many times it is nearly worthless after not being used for 20 years. Here are some of the latest Air Inc hiring stats from Kit. Percent of hires with no 4-yr degree, AirTran 12%, CAL 9%, DHL 33%, Jet Blue 18% and SWA 7%. Are those not good jobs? In addition, to take this one step further if 95% of the pilots applying have four yr degrees and those airline hiring non 4 yr degree pilots in the 7% to 33% range. It would tend to support that the degree is not all that important in getting a good airline job. Let me give you the background on the college degree thing. I do not judge a man by his degree, where he lives, or what he does for a living. I judge a man on the content of his character. I find the college degrees only crowd here, a bit arrogant, a smacking of if you do not have a degree you are not as good as me. I know too many people who are successful and fine men who do not have a degree, I know many people with degrees who will never make any impact upon anything. I know too many pilots without degrees who I consider some of the most successful people I know I admire them and the lives they have built. So I bait, about the non-importance of the college degree in this business. I think this sets off the college degree only crowd because it distorts their view of what they have done. Secondarily my pilot heroes did not have college degrees and they performed feats that would test the metal of anyone. They flew in WWII, George Bush I in the Pacific, the 10,000’s of B-17 and B-24 pilots in Europe, and the C-46 pilots over the hump in China. I meet these guys on the air show circuit, they come to see the C-47 and B-17, and I ask them about their adventures during the war. I am in awe of what they did. How can anyone say these guys without degrees were not as good as today’s degreed pilots? For skidmore, managment people should probably have a business degree background, no aurguments about that. But we were talking about pilto postions.

 

[AC560]

I didn't get my job because I had a degree, but I wouldn't have been invited to interview if I didn't.

You got your position because you were the best qualified in the pool of candidates. Had the company used a larger pool you may not have gotten the job. So it certainly benefited you, my point was it doesn't necessarily benefit the company. There are many excellent managers out there (and many excellent CEO's) who don't have a college degree, to exclude them from the process is a hiring mistake in my opinion.

but I think it's a mistake to tell young folks that it will never matter down the road. Sometimes it will, and it will be hard to do anything about it at that point.

I don't think either PilotYip or I said that. We are saying if you have to rate things in order of importance the college degree falls further down the list then a lot of other things. If you can be an Eagle Scout, Mr Universe, Congressional Medal of Honor winner, graduate from all four academy's, serve with distinction in every branch of the service, get 4 PHD's, speak 14 languages, and have 20,000 actual IFR hours inverted in a 14 engine jet you are going to be one hell of a candidate. It isn't possible to do all those things (unless you are me) though so you have to choose which things will take the least amount of time and provide the greatest amount of reward.

College requires a lot of time, a lot of money, and returns very little in return. In fact if you take the $100,000 you would spend on college and invest it in a mutual fund you will statistically more then make up for the shortfall in average wage earnings between those with degrees and those without.

 

[Lear70]

I will recommend he not go to college full time, but follow the other time tested path where I have seen too many people succeed. That is fly full time, do your degree on the side, build time, build your resume.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second there, pahhhdner.

This is the first time I have EVER, EVER heard you say that someone should even BOTHER getting a degree. Now you say "do your degree on the side"?

Which is it? You need a degree, or not?

Here are some of the latest Air Inc hiring stats from Kit. Percent of hires with no 4-yr degree, AirTran 12%, CAL 9%, DHL 33%, Jet Blue 18% and SWA 7%. Are those not good jobs? In addition, to take this one step further if 95% of the pilots applying have four yr degrees and those airline hiring non 4 yr degree pilots in the 7% to 33% range. It would tend to support that the degree is not all that important in getting a good airline job.

There you go again with the contradictions.

"The degree is not all that important in getting a good airline job." is what you say.

But just before that you say that 88% of the AirTran candidates, 91% CAL, 67% DHL, 82% JBlu, and 93% of SWA candidates all have the degree. (Not to mention all the 100% airlines like FDX, etc).

So what you're saying on one hand is that an applicant WITHOUT a degree only has a 1 in 10 chance (average) coming on board with those companies, but then you say the degree isn't all that important? With only a 10% chance of getting one of those jobs?

That's a pretty big gamble in my book...

For what it's worth, if I had it to do over again, I would absolutely 100% start flying FIRST, but make sure I obtained my degree via correspondence or whatever it took to get it.

THOSE guys are the ones making RJ Captain by 23, major airline pilot by 27, major airline Captain at 30. They get a roughly 5-7 year advantage over everyone else, but they still need the degree to be COMPETITIVE for the best jobs.

1 in 10 odds to ever make it to a GREAT aviation job are just too steep for my blood.

Just my .02 cents. Your mileage may vary.

College requires a lot of time, a lot of money, and returns very little in return. In fact if you take the $100,000 you would spend on college and invest it in a mutual fund you will statistically more then make up for the shortfall in average wage earnings between those with degrees and those without.

See above for your ROI... able to even APPLY at 2 of the 3 best-paying jobs in aviation with the degree, and your odds go from 10% to a 90% chance at the rest of the Major Airline jobs.

Sure, that's a terrible return.

And who said anything about $100,000?

I made it out of college just a little over 10 years ago for $18,000 at an accredited aviation college (MTSU - #3 in the country for aviation), which also included all my ratings after PPL through CFII / MEI.

That figure is up by about 50% now, but the point is that you don't have to go to ERAU, just get the degree. ANY 4-year accredited program will do. Do it by correspondence while flying somewhere, but DO IT!

 

[skiddriver]

Obviously time to disagree and move on. I'll leave it with this thought. Someone who has done nothing but fly is going to have a difficult time moving on to a management job without a degree. Yip can say a 20 year old degree isn't worth anything, but it was worth a considerable amount to me when the time came.

Also, to be completely transparent, I didn't pay for my degree in dollars. I went to USNA and paid it back over 22 years of military service. So I probably got more credit for that than if I'd just gone to college and then started flying commercially.

 

[AC560]

and your odds go from 10% to a 90% chance at the rest of the Major Airline jobs.

Those statistics just show that the majority of people applying have degrees it doesn't show that the degree itself was a factor in the hiring. Spin the numbers the other way and 90% of the people who got rejected probably had a degree. You would need to know % of applicants with and without degrees and their respective acceptance/failure rates to determine if it was a factor.

Not saying it isn't important but it is less important then other things in my book.

I went to USNA and paid it back over 22 years of military service.

Thanks for your service.

 

[pilotyip]

AC560 I love it you are probably correct, 90% of the those being turned down have college degrees, which means you have only a 10% change of being turned down without a college degree. It is reality, but this is a pilot board you are not suppose to deal in reality. From our company six pilots have interviewed at JB, three had degrees, three did not, 3 pilots were hired, one a degree two did not have a degrees. Two of the three hired had been 121 Check Airman. All of them had less than 10 years flying experience, less than 5 years in jets. Average age 35. These facts do not match your statement.

 

[Lear70]

So let me get this straight: you're saying that somehow the fact that 90% of the pilots hired by majors have degrees and 10% do not somehow isn't representative of whether the degree is a help or hindrance?

Did you actually GO to college and take a statistics course?

You can't possibly overlook the correlation between a 90% interview failure rate without the degree. I'd be willing to bet a c-note that, if we could possibly get the data, there would be less than a 10% variation between those numbers and the people who were even called for an interview.

 

[AC560]

So let me get this straight: you're saying that somehow the fact that 90% of the pilots hired by majors have degrees and 10% do not somehow isn't representative of whether the degree is a help or hindrance?

Statistically it doesn't prove anything it just says a lot of pilots have college degrees, not that it hurts or helps them in getting a job.

 

[Lear70]

*snicker*

OK... From a TECHNICAL standpoint, you're absolutely correct, it's not PROOF.

Statistically speaking, however, 90% is pretty difficult to ignore.

If you're an aspiring airline pilot, you'd be VERY foolish to ignore that high of a statistical probability that the degree makes a difference in getting the job.