>I'd say that you do not need a degree to be successful in any
>field......but a good degree will probably get you an interview. And,
>exceptional people will not stop at a degree, anyway, they will go on to a
>PhD.........

I did an electronics apprenticeship in NZ starting over 30 years ago. My
boss at that stage told us a situation one of his old lecturers had at that
stage. He had given the class a simple project to design and build a
preamplifier suitable for use with a dynamic microphone, specs to be 60dB
s/n ratio with 1mV input, I forget the required gain. This is not an onerous
specification, even then with suitable low noise transistors. I am not sure
of the class size, but there were a handful who did about 10dB better than
s/n spec, about 1/3 to half of the class reached spec, and the rest were
hopeless, and not within the ballpark.

30 years later I applied for a position in the space science department of a
research institute in the UK, without a degree apart from a polytech
qualification, and beat various university graduates including at least one
with a masters degree. I was asked various questions by the interview panel
including things like drawing the basic circuit of an inverting op amp,
which was no problem, and some questions on doing things like balanced line
use, and identifying problems in transmission lines using TDR. None of these
were a problem to me, but apparently were big problems to the graduates.

Having said that I had been round employment gatherings, and found that I
was very much in the minority, not having any sort of degree qualification,
and it was very hard to get any interview.

I worked at the DSIR in NZ for a couple of years, and one of the guys there
who had a doctorate quite freely acknowledged the practical aspects that a
couple of other technicians there had used to keep him on the "straight and
narrow" practical way of doing things and kept his projects out of trouble.

This guy was no dummy, he was just happy to acknowledge that his degree gave
him no practical experience in the necessary ways of the real world, and
this is where the university training lacks.

I had dealings with a young guy here where I am currently working who was
doing a year's work in what is known in the UK as a gap year before doing
the final year of his degree. This seems to be done to endeavour to get
round the lack of experience problem. He did not have any idea about simple
things like the necessity for bypass capacitors on power supply lines.

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