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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

I think the dissonance you’re seeing here is between the signalling and human capital hypotheses of education. Spend some time around a lot of universities and you’ll see it in action. Rampant cheating, “bird” courses, mass dropping of challenging courses. These are all signs that lend a lot of support to the signalling hypothesis: that the purpose of education is to signal one’s desirable qualities to future employers, rather than to acquire those qualities in the first place.

Scaling access to bachelor’s degrees all over the world will only increase the demand for masters and PhDs.

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==Spend some time around a lot of universities and you’ll see it in action. Rampant cheating, “bird” courses, mass dropping of challenging courses.==

You make a great point. In my experience some of this is intended thinning of certain majors. For example, P-meds at my university always got a kick at how many people gave up that major after their first Zoology class.

Those kids now have to catch-up in order to complete their art history or general business major that they never wanted in the first place. The whole process we have created needs to be re-evaluated.

This is, of course, the employers' problem to solve. And many they're slowly (re-)realizing that they can hire inquisitive folks with a good work ethic but no bachelor's and get just as good results, that the signal doesn't have as much value as they thought.

What would be worthwhile is if employers identified what skills or knowledge or experience they actually wanted and figured out how to both test for those (and not just trust the degree-granting system) and train for those (because the degree-granting system doesn't reliably supply it).

>This is, of course, the employers' problem to solve.

This is difficult for them to do so, due to stupid laws. If they had a hiring exam, and it happened to show a certain race performing worse on it, they would get sued for racism and lose. So instead, they just do the safe thing, and let collages filter out the undesirables for them.

I believe this isn't true in the US at least for the following reasons:

- Many employers do in fact have hiring exams: see Triplebyte, HackerRank, etc. in our own industry, but also civil service exams etc.

- Colleges themselves rely on exams (like the SAT) with known racial disparities in scoring for admission.

- Colleges completion rates vary by race.

So one would think that employers would already be sued for racism if that were possible.

(But, perhaps the argument is that employers want to filter people by race, and they wouldn't be able to do so as easily with a hiring exam as via indirect means like recruiting from certain colleges.)

Thereby increasing corporate profit at expense of the worker and taxpayers. Moreover, it benefits the Ivy League at the expense of all other universities. There’s a need to differentiate and the Harvard name becomes the criteria rather than the education or diploma itself.

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