I could have told you this.

After years of looking at the data, Google has found that things like college GPAs and transcripts are almost worthless in hiring. Following these revelations, the company is hiring more and more people who never even went to college.

In some fields like my own and related, I’ve noticed that college graduates are usually at a distinct disadvantage. Not because they are dumber, but because their education is usually 10-20 years out of date and it takes them a long long time to get caught up.

For instance, if you emerge from your matriculation having learned about routers/switches and networking concepts from the mid-90s, you will be rather useless in a modern job and will be far exceeded by people doing this for a living rather than reading some musty old textbook.

Some concepts in networking and computing never change, naturally. But many do, or become more complex.

This isn’t true of every field, of course. I’d much rather go to a doctor who went to college. But in most workaday fields, college probably doesn’t matter much.

In some, like mine, it’s actively harmful to most.