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Essay on The Value of a College Education
College education shows a statistically significant relationship with promotions and supervisory ratings of job knowledge. College education is relevant to many aspects of work but should not be assumed to predict all areas of job performance. The value of college education to effective work performance is accepted among many human resource practitioners. Recently, the importance of college education to law enforcement jobs has also gained attention, with some jurisdictions requiring college education as a prerequisite to hiring. Such requirements are purported to lead to improvements in police job performance such as decreased corruption. However, published research results of the relationship between education and job performance often conflicts. Furthermore, little recent, published research has explored this relationship in police work, an issue of particular relevance with changes in law enforcement such as community policing.
For example, in a study of executives, it was found that certain education measures (e.g., possession of a law degree) were predictors of executive salary.(Timothy, Cable, Boudreau, & Bretz, 1995) Other research also found that certain measures of education (e.g., college grades, possession of a college degree, major) were related to specific performance criteria for managers (e.g., advancement, interpersonal ability). One conclusion of this study was that future research should relate measures of college experience to specific performance dimensions relevant to the particular job in question.
Although empirical relationships have been found between education and police job performance, these relationships have generally been weak.However, the nature of most work has changed in recent years; further exploration within this job family with a more current sample could lead to greater understanding of the meaning and relevance of education constructs to this particular job.
A college education may be useful not only as a predictor variable at the time of hire, but also may play a role in employee development..............
