U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers

I also don't really understand how university education is "almost ubiquitous"; I see that the prevalence of Bachelor's degrees amongst adults is under 40%. Is the claim that the demographic of 21-32 would have a percentage like 70% or what?

Knowledge of DNA and computer forensic methods and necessities, though, would probably improve their chances of getting promoted, as would legal training. However, those skills could easily be learned at two-year community college progams.

All in all, I think this kind of focus would lead to a more professional police force.

that is the only way to eliminate the systemic discrimination that the university system and degree requirements propagate.

almost all serious jobs already have objective skills tests and licensing requirements for employment: doctors, lawyers, financial services, heavy equipment operators, etc, etc, etc.

adding degree requirements on top of those licensing requirements cannot possibly add any additional benefit but it is obviously discriminatory against many marginalized groups.

If having a four year degree becomes just a checkbox, there will be easier and easier ways of getting that checkbox. There will be rent-seeking entities that will facilitate this like degree mills and dubious online programs. It no longer becomes a qualification that the person has gained any skills, but only that they were able to finance paying tens of thousands of dollars to participate in a few discussion threads.

It was only a matter of time for people to realise that requiring degrees for jobs that don't really need them is just cargo-culting.

I know I'm being snarky, but c'mon man! It wasn't that long ago the same could be said (and was said) for education past the 3rd grade, then the discussion moved to education past the 8th grade, and now it's moved to education past the 12th grade. It's just a rehash of the same, tired argument justifying a poorly-educated populace which makes for a poorly-educated electorate, which tends to be more susceptible to populism.

> If education is expensive, then making it less expensive seems to be the natural solution than eliminating its requirement.

Most of the arguments I see saying that college is too expensive are kind of like people using Lamborghinis to say that cars are too expensive. The fact that you can spend $500k on a car does not mean that cars are expensive. The fact that you can go $400k into debt for college doesn't mean that college is expensive. It just means that you can spend a lot on an expensive college if you choose to do so.

If someone takes dual credit courses in high-school, then gets a 2 year degree at a local community college, then transfers to a state school that offers a good return on investment, and does all that while working a part time job, college isn't that expensive.

And the more people try to take that path, the more college will respond to increasing those types of options.

An expert curation of thought techniques and their traditions that aims to develop a critical insight into a discipline (and into reality in general) in a crucial social setting is not really attainable anywhere else. Noam Chomsky noticed this in his famous essay "The Function of a University..." Obviously critical thinking is not a requirement for a government job, and maybe even a detriment?

Cheaper education would be great, but we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

One of the reasons college is expensive is that a degree is required for most jobs. This creates artificial demand, which drives up prices.

Eliminating these requirements where they're not necessary is, in fact, a way to make college less expensive.

And I'd argue that any time you see a requirement for a college degree that doesn't specify what field the degree is in, it's a pretty good sign the degree is unnecessary.

There's a lot of ways to begin lowering the cost of University education. Some of it relays on students being able to make good decisions. Students in general have been preferring schools with lots of expensive services and facilities, and schools have been increasing their tuition to pay for it. Other aspects would be to fight administrative overhead creep that is well documented.

There's more radical ways of handling it. Price limits tied to state/federal funding. Restructuring student loans so that the Federal Government is the buyer instead of the student, and using larger buyer status to negotiation with schools.

I think the free market will force schools to lower prices, and the number of students fall. This fall of students has been expected for awhile, and covid seems to have accelerated it.

>college = maturity

>college = growth

>college = intelligence

>college = responsbility

>college = you can see a task through

>college = diligence

>college = social skills

>college = well-rounded, interesting

>college = ...

Professors and administrators do it to justify their salaries and sell it to prospective customers. Alumni to justify the expense. Elites to justify their status, their agendas.

Actually testing applicant skills can be extremely expensive. Employers will always prefer filtering methods that are cheap.

An Ivy League degree is a signal that “you’re one of us”.

There are many other ways to show that, and it's silly to limit anything to only people with college degrees, but that's why people do it.

Really? Never?

"A degree shows they have learned how to learn."

"A degree shows they can stick with something for 3-4 years."

"A degree shows they have learned how to write."

"A degree is needed because high school education sucks so bad now."

Decades ago the use of IQ testing for job applicants was made illegal. Requiring a college degree serves as a legal and socially acceptable proxy for a level of intelligence.

Whether or not that is actually valid is another matter. From an employer’s perspective the amount of effort to require a college degree is virtually nill and it helps to cut down on the sheer number of applicants they have to process.

> The solution for businesses post-Griggs was obvious: outsource screening to colleges, which are allowed to weed out poor candidates based on test scores.

[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/about-us/new-at-mckinsey-blog/teari...

[2] https://hbr.org/2023/03/the-new-collar-workforce

A private company just isn't going to invest the time and energy needed to train an apprentice in these fields from scratch, and two-year community colleges rarely have access to the latest modern technology.

Other than that, your comment seems pretty accurate.

Before that, employers for any kind of professional job could offer some kind of IQ or other test so they could figure out if you had some basic level of competence and were capable of being trained to perform whatever task they needed.

Since it's now legally risky to use any kind of filter similar to that as a proxy for basic competence and trainability, college has become (an extremely expensive and time-consuming) proxy for measuring basic competence and ability to learn.

I think this Supreme Court Case had devastating effects on society in just some of these ways.

> People lose 4 of their prime income earning years.

> Not only that, but they start out life in mega-debt. Achieving something like the American dream gets delayed or put totally out of reach for many people.

> The combination of losing 4 years as well as being in debt means that many people, particularly society's most responsible, are going to be the ones delaying reproduction. This is bad news if you want to avoid something like Idiocracy, and has many other negative social consequences as well.

It's an all-around waste to incentivize a college degree as the standard proxy for demonstrating competence. And truth be told, outside of pretty specialized roles, college is completely unnecessary for average people. Most normal people have the capacity to be trained in a short amount of time for pretty much any typical office job.

In many cases, it’s just an easy way to thin the applicant pool.

Given EEO requirements (which have their place), having an easy way to thin the pool (often by a lot) is seen as convenient.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.

But man federal jobs. I don’t think I’ve ever seen as good an example of choosing beggars. There are even jobs I’d be 100% willing to take the massive paycut for, but I will never qualify because I don’t satisfy the bureaucratic box tickers.

I am speaking as a SWE who only recently received a degree late in life, purely to assist in my next job search, which I don't expect to be soon. I am not defending such accreditation nonsense.

The status quo there isn't great; the wealthy were getting very different college degrees anyway and going into very different jobs.

I have a friend with an associate's degree who has great customer service skills. Should said friend be allowed to be a receptionist for Angie Craig?

I love education, I indulged in several degrees beyond college. I use those for highly specialized work now. But my spouse works at a hospital that literally can't carry out specialty surgeries right now because they can't hire enough low-paid staff for overnight support (not medical staff, but the other warm bodies who need to be around) and they can't staff the phone room for appointments, because they require a college degree of the person who calls you to confirm if 8 am will work or not. Folks with college degrees want to do something with their degree beyond confirming that 8 am is still good -- and can get paid more just about anywhere else.

Plenty of my lower-income friends & neighbors would've loved to have at least some college. But how do you pay $20k a year while also paying $10k for daycare and >$18k for rent when you're making $44k a year, the median pay for a high school grad in MN right now?

I applaud Angie Craig for opening up opportunities for advancement for talented people.

That being said, I really think it's reductive to say that not require a college degree on every damn job is "abandoning the American Dream". I don't think college is for everyone, and it's certainly not for everyone straight after high school. I did really poorly in college the first time around, dropped out, and did much better nine years later. I am very grateful that I was able to find work decent work without a degree.

I’m doing better than almost every person I went to high school with, and my friends with advanced degrees (like philosophy) have either become software engineers or are saddled with more debt than they’ll ever be able to repay. I don’t see how that’s better?

I feel like my choice was the right one. Maybe it’s survivorship bias, but school was not for me and I’m glad I get to do work I’m proud of, and feel that going to college is a mistake for a lot of people.

We need to do a better job educating our population, for sure. Most of the failings are at the K12 level. IMO (as someone who works in edtech, in both K12 and higher ed), the primary issue with higher education is not that we're not doing a good job of educating students, it's that the cost is sky-high and does not correlate well to the value provided. So much of the value is in signaling and network-building, not in the actual teaching itself.

So IMO, this is not a choice between "better educating our population" and reducing the reliance on college degrees. The percent of the population that gets a college degree has shot up in the last 70 years, and it's likely we've overshot the sweet spot. The pendulum is starting to swing back a bit, and hopefully we'll reach an equilibrium point that makes sense and is affordable.

To your point, I even hope that when we reduce our overspending at the higher ed level, the government will be able to shift those resources to K12, where the bigger failings are happening.

And why should someone without a degree be excluded from socio-economic advancement, thinking for themselves, or challenging the established order? If anything, professional success based on work instead of degrees is a challenge to the current established order. :)

The American Dream doesn't need to be degree examiners gatekeeping it. If you care about socioeconomic advancement, don't pull the ladder up by excluding people without degrees: instead, make sure you don't require folks to jump through hoops before doing work that they already have the skills to do.

And to the "authoritarian-reactionaries" dig: note that the Congresswoman in this article is pursuing this as a progressive. Same with the new governor of Pennsylvania: https://www.penncapital-star.com/government-politics/in-his-...

(signed: child of an immigrant with an 8th grade education for whom the American Dream is alive and well)

I have two high school seniors. We have the resources and support they could need, but they have both opted out of all forms of college at this point. (They wouldn’t even fill out an application when I offered to pay them to apply, and refused to take any HS classes that were not graduation requirements as seniors.) I have tried to make the point that they owe it to their future self to keep their options open, but they just don’t care.

Now their friends are being accepted to college and starting to talk about going away for school…and I’m starting to see the first cracks of regret. I wonder if they’ll have more stress or less in the long run given their choices.

It definitely feels like this generation is skeptical of college, but very few are truly opting out.

i do pharmaceutical work, and my employer will only hire people with bachelors degrees but i swear i could teach this to a middle schooler. there's no reason we can't allow people to learn from life rather than learn for bureaucratic requirements.