I've never heard any justification for having "college education" as a job requirement. Or at least no justification that didn't amount to "keep out people who aren't like us", or "pretend to be competent", or "posture as exclusive".
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.
I wonder if you've seen any data like this?
As far as the data you ask for, I'm all for doing that kind of research, but there's probably many variables that are hard to directly even start to compare and interpret.
For instance, consider the impact of countries that are overall poorer than the US. It might be the case that this incentivizes a lot more people in other countries to go to school to try and escape a bad living standard. Or it might be the case that they don't have the resources to get to school even if they were desperate to educate themselves as much as possible. Even if you had this data, interpreting it would seem to be really tough.
Or what about countries with more homogenous populations? Perhaps IQ tests provide more value to employers in the US with a significantly heterogenous population and are far less useful in countries where just about everybody has the same overall background.
But I'm particularly interested in your hypothesis that it's driven mainly or solely by the inability for US employers to use IQ tests.
Your first sentences (about college being the default/accepted path) is also true in other countries that aren't subject to that supreme court case, like the UK.
Or like Sweden: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35594618
That said, I do think that often college degree requirements serve the same purpose as the IQ tests in Griggs: a conscious and direct choice to achieve racial discrimination that isn’t calibrated in any way to the actual requirements of the specific job but has enough of a superficial veneer of neutrality that people aren’t likely to challenge it. (Post-Griggs, while IQ tests are no more illegal than degree requirements, they are more likely to be challenged.)
A lot of business activity is guided by risk-management decisions that try to minimize the likelihood of dumb and costly lawsuits. An example is companies not wanting to write down feedback for job applicants that are rejected. We all know it's a shitty and dehumanizing practice to not give some feedback and encouragement, but companies can't be human because that creates a possible risk.
My response to what you said above is that no employer would face the risk of a lawsuit for trying to hire college graduates, so this system is 100% safe and desirable for them. In fact, this college-based system works great for employers because their employees are now addled with college debt so employees might feel a bit more cautious about risking their jobs to stand up and challenge working conditions. So I guess most existing employers aren't heavily incentivized to change this system too much.
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.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.
so why not just create a test that actually tests for the skills needed for the job? that would be the obvious way to optimize profit from a business perspective.
the fact that employers don't do that is a pretty clear sign that the purpose of degree requirements is explicitly discriminatory, the same as "IQ" tests (which are completely fraudulent).
IANAL, but my cynical guess is America's legal system. Being ever-so-obviously in the right does not pay your attorney's bills for you.
No, not really. Up for debate is pretty much only the overloading of the word 'intelligence'. But whatever it is, it correlates well with job performance and maximum level of education attainable.
But they are culturally sensitive, and thus racially sensitive, and you need to apply the right test to people, for the right goals, to get meaningful results.
If you want to hire only people n-sigma above the norm, in an area of rich and well-educated locals, and you apply the same test to them as to foreign applicants, you'll likely never hire a foreigner - they won't test as well as they would on a test in their native tongue/tasks/etc.
But if you try to estimate the level of abilities needed and you use the correct test to establish an applicant's ability against that metric and hire from anyone qualified, then the tests are useful. They're even a way for skilled foreigners to test into qualification without having to jump through expensive credentialing hoops.
If you're actually interested I can go and dig up some of the literature (I have a PhD in psychology in an adjacent area). Please let me know.
Basically though, anything that relies on something not printed on the test runs this risk.
highly doubtful, but i would be interested to see your evidence. IQ tests might provide a rough gating mechanism but applying them in the field you don't have any control group so there is no proof that they are actually selecting people correctly (you don't know how many good performers you are rejecting because they didn't score well on the flawed test).
> maximum level of education attainable
since the education system is also designed by the same misguided people who designed IQ tests it wouldn't be surprising if scoring well on IQ tests also leads to doing well in the education system, but that doesn't meant that either are doing anything of any value.
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.
No, it also shows you can show up on time for those years, and regularly complete a series of reasonably complicated intellectual tasks on a deadline.
> If that were the only criteria then holding on to a job for 4+ years should count for 1000x more than a college degree, because at least you are accountable for results.
No, college is far more standardized, and the students have their performance evaluated throughout, which can then be easily provided in a digested form.
The main issue with college is that many people who could complete the requirements can't, only because they don't have the money.
Our public education is very bad now in much of the country. The fact is what you get out of high school from a huge portion of the population is...not great.
No one is stopping anyone from hiring these people. If there is no difference, people will pay less for the cheaper labor.
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.
not as long as they can force people to pay for it themselves and have the government and the tax payers subsidize it.
universities were never meant to be vocational schools though, and they do a horrible job at it.
to take computer science as an example: a 4 years bachelor degree only has about 500 hours of classroom instruction in comp sci subjects.
a 9-5 vocational training program can provide 480 hours of classroom instruction in 3 months.
the idea that students benefit by going to a university where they only spend a few hours a day learning and the rest of the time playing games, socializing, drinking and doing drugs, is absurd.
put people in a 9-5 40 hour a week program that has the same attendance and performance requirements as the job they are training for and they can be trained to the level of any bachelors degree in 3-6 months.
> a 9-5 vocational training program can provide 480 hours of classroom instruction in 3 months.
This feels like a disingenuous response - are you suggesting that solely 500 hours of a computer science degree confers utility to a graduate? Even then, 500 hours taken consecutively can hardly be compared to 500 hours spent over multiple years, interspersed with hands-on projects and internships.
500 consecutive hours should be far superior because the time is focused and with fewer distractions.
training people in a professional 9-5 corporate environment as opposed to the adult daycare resort environment of universities would probably lead to better outcomes as well.
very little of what you learn in comp sci is relevant to your job as a new grad.
for software engineering a comp sci new grad still needs years of mentorship, supervision and on the job training in order to perform at a senior level in whatever specialty they end up working in.
because software engineering is so highly specialized pretty much everything you need to know for a particular job must be learned on the job.
the only thing a comp sci degree really shows is that a person has interest in the field and is capable of learning, but there are much better ways to figure that out than requiring degrees.
It's a far superior system.
An Ivy League degree is a signal that “you’re one of us”.
Being able to navigate and succeed in these organizations is a skill every organization with employees needs.
> The solution for businesses post-Griggs was obvious: outsource screening to colleges, which are allowed to weed out poor candidates based on test scores.
Rolls eyes so hard they nearly come out of skull
Yeah, it probably had some effect, but I'd say there are a lot of reasons, probably starting with the GI Bill. Why settle for a high school grad when there's a glut of veteran-college-grads suddenly on the market, all looking for jobs? Plus it gives you an excuse for excluding most women, who are suddenly in the job market in much greater numbers, from higher-paying jobs... oh, and would you look at that, black veterans are having trouble actually getting the benefits they're owed, so aren't going to college at as high a rate as white veterans! How convenient that is.
Clearly, there are a bunch of reasons this would have been appealing to employers well before 1971, and once the ball's rolling, it's easy to see how this new situation becomes self-perpetuating (good jobs now require degrees, since there are plenty of degree-holders around -> kids aspire to college at much higher rates -> repeat)
You didn't need to "settle" for anything prior to this decision. You could simply screen for candidates based on innate cognitive ability. Going to college or not does not change that attribute.
This may be a small—very small—part of the puzzle, but I don't see a compelling case that we can point to it and say, "yep, that's what did it!" I don't even see enough to make it look like that's a valuable direction to further examine. The evidence is scant, and behavior we see doesn't look like it ought to if that were the main cause.
> You could simply screen for candidates based on innate cognitive ability.
You could apply racist or sexist requirements laundered through "testing". The whole reason the case was brought was that that was actually happening.
Right here: https://wonderlic.com/
> Why have we seen a similar rise in crendialism in countries without similar rulings or laws?
Because if you are an active participant in a market, you want to make it very hard for anyone else to enter it so that your own wages are not subject to market supply forces. So you lobby the government to restrict supply in any way possible (licensing, job requirements, training requirements). Its the same reason people are housing YIMBYs until about 30minutes after they close on their house and become NIMBYs.
Cool. So... this and similar things are in wide use, in preference of degree requirements, since it's largely Griggs-related concerns driving the rise in degree requirements, and employers would prefer to just use tests like this?
If not, well, guess that's not a major driver of the phenomenon.
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.
True. Though one might pay less, under-advertise the job opening, require N years of experience, or many other means to that end.
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."
[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/about-us/new-at-mckinsey-blog/teari...
You'd rather die? OK, your choice.