Ryan Craig and Monica Herk makes so many good points in their op-ed in Fortune on the discriminatory impact of degree-based hiring that I recommend that you read it in full. Here are their opening paragraphs:
As hordes of college graduates flood the labor market, their demographics reflect a troubling trend. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 42.1% of whites ages 25-29 have bachelor’s degrees, compared with just 22.8% of blacks and 18.5% of Hispanics. Minority students attend college at far lower rates than their white counterparts do—and when they do attend, they are far less likely to graduate.
Sadly, higher education’s diversity problem is magnified in the world of work at a time when degrees are being required for entry-level jobs that haven’t historically required them. Just 25% of insurance claims and policy processing clerks, for example, had bachelor’s degrees in 2014, yet half of the open positions at the time required one. That means the millions of Americans who haven’t donned a cap and gown have no chance to prove themselves worthy of the lowest rungs of the corporate ladder.
Actually, that understates the gravity of the problem. There’s a sort of arms race going on. Jobs that once required no more than a high school education and whose actual work requirements should need no more than a high school education now require a college degree. And for some jobs that once required a bachelors degree, don’t even bother applying with less than a masters. It may not be too far in the future that those jobs require doctorate along with the commensurate expenses in time and money. The enormous volume of educational debt isn’t increasing due to spontaneous generation.
Other countries including India (!) and Europe are already moving away from college degrees as the first prerequisite for employment. The irony of this is that it will be harder for the U. S. to do this because of the labor laws put into place to prevent discrimination:
Such a shift may, however, be decades from occurring in the U.S., where employers risk running afoul of 1970s-era labor law if such assessments have an adverse impact on members of a legally protected group. The rule of thumb on adverse impact comes from the 1978 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) Uniform Guidelines, which established the 80% rule: if the hiring rate for any subgroup is less than 80% of the rate for the group with the highest hiring rate, that assessment or practice has an adverse impact—regardless of the employer’s intent. Protected classes currently include those based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age (over 40), disability, and genetic information.
While the EEOC has historically been the enforcer on adverse impact—sending tens of thousands of letters annually to U.S. employers—under the Obama administration the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) became an even more aggressive watchdog. While the EEOC can’t initiate action until a job applicant files a complaint, the OFCCP is empowered to launch “desk audits,†in which it reviews hiring records in search of adverse impact.
Our higher education sector is presently enormously overbuilt and, difficult as it may be for underpaid adjuncts and associates to believe, overpaid. Over recent decades most of the increase in the cost of higher education, which has been enormous in real terms, has been due to the growth of staffs not faculty pay.
When the inevitable realignment takes place, it won’t be pretty.
I don’t know that a realignment will take place. The Democrats’ primary constituency is exactly the white-collar professionals working in and graduating from American universities. That gives the party every incentive to keep the system going no matter the cost.
It’s already taking place. Enrollments are falling for some institutions; some institutions are cutting tuitions and fees in the hope of attracting more students.
That isn’t to say that there won’t be an attempt at the federal and state level to prop them up. The states have other priorities, namely paying the wages of present and past employees that will come to suck every penny of revenue they can raise.
Private companies should be allowed to hire the talent they want, degreed or not. We see how well the government intervention worked. I also suspect that in no small amount today BS is yesterday’s high school diploma.
Purdue Global is that institution’s foray into online education. I’m not a big fan, but I understand the need. Of course we still have the problem that they are just being trained to be welders and such, and not titans of deep intellectual thought in philosophy and French Literature. Hell, if we still had plenty of French Lit Majors NASA might have already been to Mars. 😈
I agree with that but it’s not the question. The question is whom should they want? I think they should want the best qualified by virtue of performance, experience, and abilities. I don’t think that college degrees necessarily measure any of those things. Neither are grades. I also question HR departments’ ability to assess the value of foreign college degrees.
Sadly, that is not presently the case. They’re using degrees as a surrogate for methods of evaluation that would take more thought, i.e. would take longer and cost more or might run them afoul of the law.
“ I think they should want the best qualified by virtue of performance, experience, and abilities.â€
Well that’s like saying I’m for good things and against bad things. Of course they should. But they have obviously, for practical reasons, determined that degrees, grades etc are a proxy, however imperfect, for traits and skills they seek. At least for identifying the opportunity set.
I don’t think searching the haystack for the one women’s studies C student who could blossom into a great physical chemist is a very productive hiring methodology.
“I don’t think that college degrees necessarily measure any of those things. Neither are grades. ”
What metrics should they use?
Steve
As suggested in the linked article, they should be using more formal, personalized, and complete assessments of knowledge and abilities. Employers don’t want to do that for obvious reasons.
Our institutions of higher learning simply weren’t designed for mass vocational training but for two, much narrower purposes: pre-professional training and a forum in which children of the upper middle and upper classes could encounter one another, forging relationships that would persist for a lifetime. Those are still worthwhile goals but they aren’t how our institutions are presently being used and they aren’t goals that should be receiving the government subsidies our institutions of higher learning presently receive. For the purposes they are presently being used for they aren’t suitable to task.