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Comment by Duff | Hacker News Reader

Not surprising. Decent jobs where a lack of high school or college education is acceptable don't really exist anymore, and we use the checkmark of high school/no high school or college/no college as a screening device.

I saw a posting for my local city's parks department for a person who basically mows grass. Education requirements? High school diploma, associates degree preferred.

The correlation/causation issue is that we assume that no jobs for folks out of high school equates to no "low skill" jobs.

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It seems to me that the real reason is that the attributes one posses to drive them through college are also valuable attributes in business success.

Someone who has no interest in working hard to attain good grades in high school and therefore does not go to college is, generally speaking, someone who has no interest in working hard to get a good job. However, if you took one of those employed college grads and stripped them of their degree, I think we would find their success in business would remain unchanged. It is the person, not the degree, that leads to employment.

Ultimately, we simply do not have enough information to reach any conclusions from the data.

I really do wish we could find a way that was cheaper than college for what is, in these cases, essentially a personality/intelligence test.

Employers used to give out aptitude tests all the time, prior to the rise of disparate impact lawsuits. Who knows how much better we could have gotten at testing these sorts of things if colleges hadn't essentially been granted a monopoly on employment psychometrics.

I believe that it is actually illegal under federal law to require education/skill levels that exceed those necessary for the job. This is civil rights era legislation, because excessively high requirement were routinely used to exclude blacks from jobs.

Educational requirements are invariably soft; I don't even have a high school diploma, but that's never disqualified me from a job.

We're in discussions regarding the purchase our small company, where I serve as (a technical) CEO. I'd be joining the purchasing company as CTO; nobody yet has asked me about having a degree in anything.

For most jobs, what educational requirements really express is the minimum level of skill in written and verbal communication, analytical abilities, and a sufficient level of proficiency in the trade in question.

When everyone in you field went to college, nobody even bothers to question whether you did, too.

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