No College Degree for Cert Generals or Residential Appraisers

[Fernando]

View attachment 105208

Are you talking about current politics?

 

[Bobby Bucks]

I’ve heard it said a degree is just a piece a paper and I’m inclined to agree. I have the 4 year one, but realized after graduation it is only a piece of paper. I’ve had too many bosses and coworkers with no degree who did very well. When I got into appraising from the sales area of RE, the huge fee shop I went to was interesting to say the least. Most, but not all had degrees. About 1/3 had degrees from prestigious schools, a couple had their MBAs and they hung out together and loved to make snide comments about the firm’s owner who was a cert Gen, but in their minds he was several levels beneath them because he went to a college that the elites snickered about. He majored in Elementary Education, even taught school a couple years. After getting into appraising, he started a small fee shop, it grew and grew, on the side he invested and built on a huge level, developed shopping centers, built hotels, office buildings, large subdivisions, etc. He became filthy rich, but even so, to those guys he will always be the Elementary Ed major who went to cow college. Envy is the vice that gives you no pleasure.

 

[George Hatch]

Minimums are minimums. The fact that many clients don't care about additional skills and experience and therefore won't pay for additional skills is apparent. It's as if those minimums delineate the point of diminishing returns.

Denis DeSaix was not an incompetent CR prior to working toward his CG and earning his college degree. Greg Boyd was not an incompetent CR. Etc., etc.

 

[djd09]

Are you talking about current politics?

 

[Fernando]

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Always wondered who Thomas Sowell is?
At least I know how he looks.

 

[Overimprovement]

But you will find people who have high test scores who are unproductive in their professional lives. So, you need to look mostly at actual, real achievements and experience. Recent proctored exams are also important and meaningful.

I have found most people with high IQs, especially Mensans, do not typically achieve high success in their careers--I am generalizing here, we can both share many exceptions. I opine that is because of a quite below average social intelligence, as well as a general disconnect with the masses. I have seen many good ideas and products go nowhere because the link between product and sales volume is often marketing, not quality. Likewise, the link between knowledge/ability and income is often who you know, not what you know.

 

[Overimprovement]

I also think our education system in this country is completely broken. It's about aligning students to the prevailing group-thought of the day, not teaching them how to think critically. I have a Master's in Finance and Real Estate, and used precious little of that in appraising.

For me, the degrees did nothing but open doors that would otherwise have remained shut. I still had to prove I could do the work, and that was mostly through job experience.

 

[IlliniApp]

It doesn't matter. People are shunning college and for good reasons. Secondly, as I have long argued, the fact we place all "real property" in one box divided into Res and Cert gen speaks volumes about the stupidity of the requirement.

Mineral rights are real property and USPAP ignored that fact for a full decade plus claiming mineral rights were intangibles?? WTF??? So, your underwater basketweaving degree qualifies you to be a mineral appraiser? A forestland appraiser? A water rights appraiser? You are qualified to value high rise apartments, mega-warehouses, airports, and golf courses just by passing the test.

Design a curriculum for residential valuation and you might do that. I know several universities with Real Estate and Insurance degrees. But the broad category of certified general work isn't going to be "one size fits all". And how do you vet industry experience? Just because you worked for the Farm Services Administration doesn't make you a competent appraiser. I know. I turned one in, and he surrendered his license and cannot come back to this state until he faces the board, not even on a temporary license.

If you have some generic degree requirement, then you are excluding people that are truly experienced in valuing and assessing particular property types. Do you think a city dweller with an English degree should be valuing poultry farms? Do you think an agri appraiser from the panhandle should be valuing hospitals? Airports? Refineries? I will trust a single engine qualified pilot to know more about a municipal airport than the appraiser who has never even sit foot on a small airport.

It never really made sense to have a degree requirement if it didn't matter if the degree wasn't even tangentially related to appraisal.

 

[chad hampton]

What's next, removal of a HS degree requirement? Maybe some of you can bring up the farmers from 100 years ago that only went to 8th grade and ended up wealthy as an example of why that isn't needed. Yeah, we all know bill gates and zuckerburg dropped out. Fighting for the lowering of your professional standards is something you have to be galactically stupid to do.

There's plenty of out of work folks with college degrees, I guess those people even expect too much money for the AMC appraisal firms running the show.

I wonder if the GSE's hire anyone w/o a degree to head up their valuation departments? I wonder why?

I mean, even a basic 2 year degree is a very low barrier of entry.

 

[RCA]

I have found most people with high IQs, especially Mensans, do not typically achieve high success in their careers--I am generalizing here, we can both share many exceptions. I opine that is because of a quite below average social intelligence, as well as a general disconnect with the masses. I have seen many good ideas and products go nowhere because the link between product and sales volume is often marketing, not quality. Likewise, the link between knowledge/ability and income is often who you know, not what you know.

I would speculate that many people with high IQs are more motivated by curiosity and intellectual challenges than acquiring wealth or power.

Grok:
"That's a plausible hypothesis, and there's some empirical support for it.

Research on intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation does suggest that highly intelligent individuals often show stronger preferences for intellectual engagement, autonomy, and mastery over purely material rewards. The concept of "need for cognition"—enjoying effortful thinking—correlates positively with IQ, and people high in this trait often self-select into careers that are intellectually stimulating but not necessarily the most lucrative (academia being the classic example).

There's also an interesting selection effect: someone with a 140 IQ could likely succeed in investment banking or corporate law, but they might find the work tedious and gravitate toward research, engineering, or creative fields where the puzzles are more interesting to them—even at lower pay.

This connects to what economists call "compensating differentials"—people accept lower wages for non-monetary job characteristics they value. If high-IQ individuals disproportionately value intellectual stimulation, they're essentially trading potential income for curiosity satisfaction.

A counterpoint worth considering: the correlation between IQ and income, while modest, is still positive. So on average, higher IQ does translate to higher earnings—it's just not as strong as one might expect if raw cognitive horsepower were the dominant factor. This could reflect your point (preferences diverting talent from wealth-maximizing paths), or it could reflect other barriers and frictions in how labor markets actually work.

Your own career trajectory in software engineering combined with the specialized domain of appraisal methodology seems like it might exemplify this—decades of deep work on intellectually interesting problems rather than, say, pivoting to maximize equity compensation in Silicon Valley."