Higher learning

After I graduated from college and began looking for jobs I began to notice that college degrees were required by positions that I wouldn't have expected, such as admin/secretarial roles. This puzzled me, given that there seemed no obvious reason why someone should have had econ 101, a survey of world history or Greek and Roman literature in translation -- some of the classes I had to take to fulfill my core liberal arts requirements -- in order to answer phone calls, take memos, etc.

I reasoned at the time that it was largely a product of the fact that there were so many college grads out there that employers could demand such credentials. I also guessed it was an indication that possession of a high school diploma was insufficient to guarantee you weren't mentally impaired.

I thought about this some more when I read Charles Murray's column the other day that called for a system that downplays the role played by the BA, instead relying more on a system of certifications:

Discarding the bachelor's degree as a job qualification would not be difficult. The solution is to substitute certification tests, which would provide evidence that the applicant has acquired the skills the employer needs.

Certification tests can take many forms. For some jobs, a multiple-choice test might be appropriate. But there's no reason to limit certifications to academic tests. For centuries, the crafts have used work samples to certify journeymen and master craftsmen. Today, many computer programmers without college degrees get jobs by presenting examples of their work. With a little imagination, almost any corporation can come up with analogous work samples.

The benefits of discarding the bachelor's degree as a job qualification would be huge for both employers and job applicants. Certifications would tell employers far more about their applicants' qualifications than a B.A. does, and hundreds of thousands of young people would be able to get what they want from post-secondary education without having to twist themselves into knots to comply with the rituals of getting a bachelor's degree.

I absolutely agree. We have in place a system in which you need a bachelor's degree to obtain most kinds of work. That's fine, except that with college costs rising sharply in recent decades that we are placing an enormous barrier between people and the working world. That's significant money people are spending that I am sure they could find other uses for. Another side effect of this system is that autodidacts have fewer avenues to demonstrate their knowledge. If you are poor and spend all of your time in a library digesting books, how do you prove what you know?

You shouldn't need a bachelor's degree to demonstrate that you possess at least a basic competence for many jobs.

This begs the question of why many companies haven't come up with tests to demonstrate a desired level of competence rather than relying on the BA. I figured a lot of it had to do with corporate laziness. George Will offers up another explanation: essentially such tests were deemed racist.

Before 1964, Duke Power had discriminated against blacks in hiring and promotion. After the 1964 act, the company changed its policies, establishing a high school equivalence requirement for all workers, and allowing them to meet that requirement by achieving minimum scores on two widely used aptitude tests, including one that is used today by almost every NFL team to measure players' learning potentials.

Plaintiffs in the Griggs case argued that the high school and testing requirements discriminated against blacks. A unanimous Supreme Court, disregarding the relevant legislative history, held that Congress intended the 1964 [Civil Rights] act to proscribe not only overt discrimination but also "practices that are fair in form, but discriminatory in operation." The court added:

"The touchstone is business necessity. If an employment practice which operates to exclude Negroes cannot be shown to be related to job performance, the practice is prohibited."

Thus a heavy burden of proof was placed on employers, including that of proving that any test that produced a "disparate impact" detrimental to certain minorities was a "business necessity" for various particular jobs. In 1972, Congress codified the Griggs misinterpretation of what Congress had done in 1964. And after a 1989 Supreme Court ruling partially undid Griggs, Congress in 1991 repudiated that 1989 ruling and essentially reimposed the burden of proof on employers.

Small wonder, then, that many employers, fearing endless litigation about multiple uncertainties, threw up their hands and, to avoid legal liability, threw out intelligence and aptitude tests for potential employees. Instead, they began requiring college degrees as indices of applicants' satisfactory intelligence and diligence. This is, of course, just one reason why college attendance increased from 5.8 million in 1970 to 17.5 million in 2005. But it probably had a, well, disparate impact by making employment more difficult for minorities.

As with so many other things, when you see obvious malfunctions in a system you usually don't have to look hard to find the hand of government.