Google is democratizing higher education

Google just announced that it is rolling out a series of six-month certificate courses that will probably cost about $300 and which it and some other employers regard as being equivalent to a four-year degree that can easily cost $100,000. 

I’m not super excited about more of higher education moving to a for-profit model, but I’m a lot happier about someone being able to land a $75,000 a year, knowledge worker job, for $300 to Google than the same job for $100,000 to a typical college or university that masquerades as a non-profit but which functions like a for-profit organization. As more and more employers hire candidates using assessments and likely productivity instead of how fancy of a school your parents could afford to send you to, more and more students will opt for the less expensive path and that will improve the diversity of those getting higher education degrees which will further bolster workplace productivity.

College Recruiter believes that every student and recent graduate deserves a great career, not just those whose parents are wealthy enough to send their kids to swanky schools or which kids were fortunate enough to land massive scholarships or who are likely to graduate with massive debt. The vast majority of employers want to hire people who are likely to do the job well. What school they happened to go to was always just a tool for helping employers better guess at which candidates were most likely to perform the best, and it was never a good tool for doing so in large part because employers have historically been terrible at determining which employees perform well, figuring out why, and then adapting their hiring efforts to bring in more of those people.