If I were bernie sanders, I'd push for it to be illegal to ask about education status in job interviews (same as family status or sex stuff). This would hamper the signaling value of a college degree and get us back to the value of the skills conferred (if any).
You’re still buying into the myth/propaganda that higher education is only good because it makes someone more employable by providing skills (and/or connections) important for job-seeking.
Wouldn’t you much rather create and live in a world where higher education was free or nearly free, so that your neighbors, fuck it, even those you will never bump into, those on the other side of the country are better educated, better able to reason about the world, more likely to understand evolution and spot marketing and persuasion techniques around them, less likely to believe the blowhard on the radio who is promoting conspiracy theories, and more likely to have gone through a period of rapid personal growth during which they met and grew with people from diverse backgrounds? … without obligating these strangers to a lifetime of bondage to a particular high-paying career?
skills != job skills, necessarily. Everyone likes the scene in good will hunting where the martian puts down the sociology grad student by quoting out library books he memorized. and he gets the girl (how about them apples).
Though yes, employability is a big part of it. The dollar value of a college degree is an ROI calculation.
Because the only way someone can be intelligent, is if they wasted 5 years of there of life, not working, but reading old theories and academic papers that don't line up with the reality we actually live in?
I'll rather save 100k and listen to the blowhard on the radio, than be in debt and listen to the blowhard on a podcast.
>...maybe it will dawn on Barack Obama, by then retired and relaxing on the beach in Hawaii, that maybe we shouldn’t have thought of education as a market in the first place. Maybe college shouldn’t be about individuals getting rich. Maybe there is another purpose.
Maybe the federal government shouldn't involve itself in private colleges at all? What mandate does the US government have to interfere in college pricing or the existence of an on-campus LGBT center?
College tuition has gone up for three reasons (in order of importance)
1) Griggs v Duke Power
2) The availability of huge amounts of credit to students combined with an easy way to rank colleges, the accept:reject ratio.
3) Government mandates, particularly under Title IX and "dear colleague" letter type nonsense.
I read up on the court case, and the ruling was that you couldn’t require people to have (in this case) a high school diploma without it having a defensible relevancy to performing the job.
You're missing the implications of the ruling. Anything you do, as an employer, that has a disparate impact on hiring is illegal if it's not directly related to the job. If you're hiring programmers or, say, nuclear engineers, you can give tests about programming or nuclear engineering. That isn't affected.
But let's say you have a job position that doesn't require experience or a lot of education. You just want to hire someone who's smart, someone who learns quickly and can communicate in English. You put out a job req and get back 1000 resumes. Having no way to winnow the field, and realizing you can't interview them all, what you'd like to do is give everyone an IQ test, something that used to be very common, and maybe some kind of reading comprehension test.
But because of Griggs, you can't. If your test has a disparate impact on race or sex you're going to get sued. Not only that, your intent doesn't matter, even if the test is fair, you're still going to get sued. What you need is a proxy for intelligence. Some way the applicant can prove he/she is at least reasonably intelligent and can write a memo.
So... you change your job req to require a college degree.
That's why jobs that used to require only high school diplomas now require college degrees. Griggs created (or at least cemented) the practice of using a degree as a proxy for intelligence.
But wait, there's more! Now that college degrees are as common as dirt, you need some way to rank the people with college degrees. That's where #2 comes in. As an employer, you figure the smartest people are the ones who got into the the most competitive universities, and the most competitive universities are the ones that rejected the most students for each one they accepted.
So when you get a resume from an MIT (7.9% acceptance) grad and a resume from, say, an Arizona State (84% acceptance) grad, you figure the MIT grad is probably more intelligent. Might not actually be true, but that's the way to bet.
This is a positive feedback loop. MIT grads go right onto the lucrative Wunderkind track when they apply for jobs. Therefore more people apply MIT, making MIT's acceptance rate even lower. Rinse, lather, repeat.
That's why you can stroll into a $300k+ job after graduating from Harvard Business School (5.2% acceptance), but an identical graduate from Podunk U is starting at $45k. Even if Harvard teaches you nothing, the tuition is worth every penny. It would be worth 10x what they charge. Your employer doesn't care what you learned at Harvard. He cares that you were accepted to Harvard.
This is great for established universities, because it means they never have to face competition from new schools. You see, if you start a new university parents are not going to send their kids to your school, because they don't know what that all important ratio is. And because of that your acceptance rate will be very high, meaning you won't get a lot of applicants next year, either.
What it all boils down to is the competitive schools can charge whatever they want. And because Harvard is charging $60k, mid tier schools can get away with charging, say, $50k, even though they couldn't really justify it in an audit.
"One banking recruitment manager summarized the typical approach this way:
I’m just being really honest, it [an application] pretty much goes into a black hole. And I’m pretty open about that with the students I talk to. It’s tough. You need to know someone, you need to have a connection, you need to get someone to raise their hand and say, “Let’s bring this candidate in.” … Look, I have a specific day I need to go in and look at … the Brown candidates, you know, the Yale candidates. I don’t have a reason necessarily to go into what we call the “best of the rest” folder unless I’ve run out of everything else. … Unfortunately, it’s just not a great situation. There’s not an easy way to get into the firm if you’re not at a target school."
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 34.2 ms ] thread... not that I'm bernie sanders.
Wouldn’t you much rather create and live in a world where higher education was free or nearly free, so that your neighbors, fuck it, even those you will never bump into, those on the other side of the country are better educated, better able to reason about the world, more likely to understand evolution and spot marketing and persuasion techniques around them, less likely to believe the blowhard on the radio who is promoting conspiracy theories, and more likely to have gone through a period of rapid personal growth during which they met and grew with people from diverse backgrounds? … without obligating these strangers to a lifetime of bondage to a particular high-paying career?
Though yes, employability is a big part of it. The dollar value of a college degree is an ROI calculation.
I'll rather save 100k and listen to the blowhard on the radio, than be in debt and listen to the blowhard on a podcast.
Maybe the federal government shouldn't involve itself in private colleges at all? What mandate does the US government have to interfere in college pricing or the existence of an on-campus LGBT center?
College tuition has gone up for three reasons (in order of importance)
1) Griggs v Duke Power
2) The availability of huge amounts of credit to students combined with an easy way to rank colleges, the accept:reject ratio.
3) Government mandates, particularly under Title IX and "dear colleague" letter type nonsense.
I do not understand your argument.
But let's say you have a job position that doesn't require experience or a lot of education. You just want to hire someone who's smart, someone who learns quickly and can communicate in English. You put out a job req and get back 1000 resumes. Having no way to winnow the field, and realizing you can't interview them all, what you'd like to do is give everyone an IQ test, something that used to be very common, and maybe some kind of reading comprehension test.
But because of Griggs, you can't. If your test has a disparate impact on race or sex you're going to get sued. Not only that, your intent doesn't matter, even if the test is fair, you're still going to get sued. What you need is a proxy for intelligence. Some way the applicant can prove he/she is at least reasonably intelligent and can write a memo.
So... you change your job req to require a college degree.
That's why jobs that used to require only high school diplomas now require college degrees. Griggs created (or at least cemented) the practice of using a degree as a proxy for intelligence.
But wait, there's more! Now that college degrees are as common as dirt, you need some way to rank the people with college degrees. That's where #2 comes in. As an employer, you figure the smartest people are the ones who got into the the most competitive universities, and the most competitive universities are the ones that rejected the most students for each one they accepted.
So when you get a resume from an MIT (7.9% acceptance) grad and a resume from, say, an Arizona State (84% acceptance) grad, you figure the MIT grad is probably more intelligent. Might not actually be true, but that's the way to bet.
This is a positive feedback loop. MIT grads go right onto the lucrative Wunderkind track when they apply for jobs. Therefore more people apply MIT, making MIT's acceptance rate even lower. Rinse, lather, repeat.
That's why you can stroll into a $300k+ job after graduating from Harvard Business School (5.2% acceptance), but an identical graduate from Podunk U is starting at $45k. Even if Harvard teaches you nothing, the tuition is worth every penny. It would be worth 10x what they charge. Your employer doesn't care what you learned at Harvard. He cares that you were accepted to Harvard.
This is great for established universities, because it means they never have to face competition from new schools. You see, if you start a new university parents are not going to send their kids to your school, because they don't know what that all important ratio is. And because of that your acceptance rate will be very high, meaning you won't get a lot of applicants next year, either.
What it all boils down to is the competitive schools can charge whatever they want. And because Harvard is charging $60k, mid tier schools can get away with charging, say, $50k, even though they couldn't really justify it in an audit.
And ultimately, it's all because of Griggs.
I’m just being really honest, it [an application] pretty much goes into a black hole. And I’m pretty open about that with the students I talk to. It’s tough. You need to know someone, you need to have a connection, you need to get someone to raise their hand and say, “Let’s bring this candidate in.” … Look, I have a specific day I need to go in and look at … the Brown candidates, you know, the Yale candidates. I don’t have a reason necessarily to go into what we call the “best of the rest” folder unless I’ve run out of everything else. … Unfortunately, it’s just not a great situation. There’s not an easy way to get into the firm if you’re not at a target school."
https://hbr.org/2015/10/firms-are-wasting-millions-recruitin...