Kamala Harris must have heard about my summer temp job

Speaking yesterday in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Kamala Harris declared, "As president, I will get rid of the unnecessary degree requirements for federal jobs to increase jobs for folks without a four-year degree." She added, "And I will challenge the private sector to do the same."

You often hear the phrase, "It's about time." This time, at least, Harris' initiative is also worthy of another cliché you hear: "Truer words were never spoken." A college degree is far from the identifier of a person's abilities and skills, she said, noting the value of apprenticeships and technical programs. 

I have no doubt that someone imparted to Kamala the tale of my working a summer temp job to earn some cash for grad school. My employment was by the university I'd be attending, and its personnel office rang me up with an assignment that I was all too pleased to grab.

The only problem, I figured, was that the position was in the university's accounting department. And what I knew of accounting was akin to my woefully insufficient knowledge of Guatemalan lesbian charwomen. (I'm still working on that.)

But personnel said no problem, just scurry on over and take a seat. I then figured, or suspected, hell the way this outfit's upper management performs, my woefully insufficient knowledge of accounting really will be no problem. So off I went.

When personnel called, they said they were glad to see on my application that I had a college degree. Because this position required one. (The U.S. Census Bureau reported years later that more than 62% of Americans who were 25 or older had no such paper, a statistic that gave personnel distress years before when trying to fill demanding temp jobs.)

I was particularly glad to take the gig because it paid a buck or two more an hour than other temp work — what with my having demonstrated that I could drink my way through an undergraduate program.

I arrived at my destiny. And when I arrived, (not I in the photo), just a trifle angsty because of my general-ledger ignorance, I discovered how I'd be spending eight hours a day, five days a week, for roughly two months.

And it was this. I'd spend half of each weekday stapling some sort of maybe invoices(?) together and the other half I'd spend unstapling similarly mysterious documents. That was it, my sole raison d'être at the imposing University Accounting Department. For this the institution mandated a college degree. 

My seat was but temporary because the university was in the process of filling it permanently. And yet the poor wretches who hadn't bothered drinking their way through 120 higher-education credit hours would be thwarted anon, sniffishly and with prejudice.  

The sheer absurdity of the whole degree thing, as you can see, has never left me. And so Kamala, I, the proletariat and indeed all American workers who have only their binding chains to lose, thank you. 

Comments

[ssdd]

Oh don’t get me started about my college work-study job, aka slave to the department secretary for two hours a day at $3 an hour. It involved staples in a way that still traumatizes me to this day. The horror, the horror…

[Anne J]

I am so happy that there is finally a backlash against the discriminatory practice of "credentialism".

For years I worked in the body shop business and the people who wrote the damage estimates on the vehicles would not be able to do the same job for an insurance company. To be an insurance adjuster required a bachelor's degree. And sometimes some of those college educated adjusters would be dismissive of the body shop adjusters who may not have had a college degree, but years of experience. It didn't even matter what they got their degree in. It could have been underwater basket weaving and they would be a more attractive candidate to an insurance company than someone with 10 years experience doing the actual work.

So thank goodness that she wants to address this issue.

What's the point of going tens of thousands of dollars in debt to get a degree in a field that may be obsolete in a few years?