There's an Opinion piece in Friday's Bermuda Sun entitled "How the Cabinet Office jump-started my career", written by Cabinet Office intern Kenneth Minors which is worth addressing.
I'd suggest you read it in full here and then come back to my comments below if you're interested.
In short, Mr. Minors returned to Bermuda with a Masters degree at age 22 and was unsuccessful in finding employment in the private sector and was subsequently accepted as a Cabinet Office intern.
Before I get into the meat of this, I want to preface this by saying that this is not a political issue, despite the connection to the Cabinet Office, and the PLP's promotion of the article on their website on Friday.
It is precisely Government's role to fill in gaps in the private sector and a program like the Jump-Start program is absolutely worthwhile.
But, as I'll demonstrate below, the claim that the 'capitalistic system is corrupt' and the 'anger and disgust' that Mr. Minors now holds against the private sector is completely misplaced. The problem isn't the private sector discriminating or claiming they wanted experience over education which Mr. Minors had, the problem I would suggest is the degree he was holding.
When I read the piece I immediately thought that something didn't add up. Despite Mr. Minors not identifying the kind and level of position he was applying for, I found it odd that a 22 year old with an MBA would receive such a poor reception in the private sector as he says:
The truth is I was about to get a major wake-up call about how cruel and corrupt the capitalistic system in which I was forced to live can be.A few weeks before I graduated, one of my business professors told me what to really expect. He said if your MBA is from Harvard, Yale, or Princeton (the Good Boys Network), you would start out at $100,000 a year with no experience. However, since my MBA was not from these schools he said I would be lucky to make $50,000 a year fresh out of school with no experience.
Well he was right. For a while I was looking in the private sector for a job.
Interview after interview I was told, "You have the education but not the experience, therefore, we can't hire you. You're overqualified." I started to get angry and disgusted at the private sector.
It turns out employers wanted experience first and education second. It was sad this was not stressed in my college and university education. I was misled over and over again by teachers who did not teach about the real world.
Literally seconds of googling answered the question.
The cruel and corrupt capitalistic system he should be attacking isn't Bermuda's, but the capitalistic owners of the for profit American Intercontinental University.
Here's the Wikipedia entry, well sourced and referenced, on American Intercontinental University:
AIU's parent company has grown rapidly and had become increasingly controversial. CEC has been investigated by the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Allegations specific to AIU include reports that the school misrepresented its programs and classes, made a practice of admitting students who had not graduated from high school, and included in its enrollment numbers students who had never attended class.[1]
....
SACS placed the university on probation in December 2005.[3] AIU had come under scrutiny for its student recruiting practices. AIU is an open-enrollment institution, where nearly everyone who applies is admitted. AIU argues that these open standards help create educational opportunities for low-income and minority students who might not otherwise be able to attend college. Others, including current and former AIU employees, have countered that enrolling students who lack adequate preparation and qualification does not actually help them. One anonymous professor stated: "If you can breathe and walk, you can get into the school."[4] In 2006, SACS reported that AIU did not comply with eight of their Principles of Accreditation, including integrity, program content, and faculty.[5] On December 11, 2007, CEC announced that SACS has removed AIU's probation and that the university's accreditation remains in good standing.[3] However, an unresolved problem facing AIU is still current Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) in the United Kingdom's audit of the London campus, which concluded that it "identified fundamental concerns regarding the academic standards being achieved ... which included the identification of 'alarmingly low standards of student achievement'"[6]]. A further audit has been postponed. AIU London continues to be the only UK university to have failed a QAA audit. [8]
...
AIU continues to be dogged by issues relating to its quality assurance problems, including several class action suits against it and its parent company CEC. On March 19, 2008, Wargo & French filed the attached Complaint against American Intercontinental University and its parent company, Career Education Corporation (collectively "Defendants"). The Complaint alleges that Defendants defrauded current and former AIU students by advertising false employment rates for its graduates, failing to disclose to students that it was on the verge of losing accreditation, and falsely telling students that an AIU education was worth the significant financial investment. The Complaint is a putative class action, with the Plaintiff seeking to represent all other students of AIU who have been defrauded by AIU.
Read the footnoted story entitled "The student trap: As American InterContinental University fights to keep its accreditation, students on the Buckhead campus wonder if they've received the education they paid for"
Unfortunately for Mr. Minors, and I imagine through no malicious intent of his own, he is the holder of an MBA degree which is simply not credible.
The potential employers who were telling him that he was overqualified and lacked experience were being polite, not wanting to tell him what they really thought: his degree lacked legitimacy.
I'd never heard of AIU, so I can guarantee you that any employer would research the university, particularly for a 22 year old with an MBA, and have concluded that it was at best an inferior degree.
Again, this is not a criticism of Mr. Minors. He's the victim in this, but he is not a victim of Bermuda's private sector. His anger should be directed at AIU. I'd suggest he try and join the class action suit.
But it's a tale all too often told in Bermuda.
The private sector gets labeled as discriminatory when Bermudians are not being discriminating enough, selective enough in what schools they attend.
All universities are not created equal. Pick wisely.
Even among accredited, credible schools there is a lot of brand value to going to a Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, McGill, Oxford etc., even if you think there is a lot of mystique and not a lot of substance around that.
The professor who warned Mr. Minors in the last week of class that he wasn't going to be on equal footing with other university graduates should have told him that in the first week, not the last week.
I feel for Mr. Minors. I really do. The Jump-Start program will be invaluable for him over the coming years to build up experience which will prove more important than his MBA; the MBA from AIU is for all intents and purposes useless.
Bermuda's is a competitive job market with lots of people with degrees, BAs, MBAs, PhDs etc.. The Institution at the top of that piece of paper counts - a lot. It signals credibility, a proven history, a track record of producing well educated, highly trained, highly educated graduates.
This is an unfortunate story. But it's not the story Mr. Minors thinks it is. And I'd hope the Cabinet Office aren't validating his perception that he was unfairly treated by Bermuda's private sector.
His letter was intended to promote the Jump-Start program, but it is first and foremost a cautionary tale to all young Bermudians to pick your university wisely; research, research, research the schools well; don't discount name value; and please don't think that a degree is a degree is a degree.
Finally, I think it is important to raise this as a failing of the public education sector as well, which needs to do a far better job in helping students make better choices about post-secondary education (setting aside the problems with the education the public sector itself provides).
A lot of Bermudians are paying a lot of money for an education that is not recognised as in the top tiers, and in an employment market that is teaming with recent graduates with a lot of impressive education credentials, that's a problem.
Posted by Christian S. Dunleavy