I've actually been convinced of this stance for some years, though everyone I've talked to seems to think it's nuts. The thing is that education--and particula

I've actually been convinced of this stance for some years, though everyone I've talked to seems to think it's nuts. The thing is that education--and particularly choice of school--is tightly linked with class, which in turn is linked with race, etc. Add to that the bias of "I graduated from here, therefore I favor people who graduated from similar" and I'm pretty sure there's some bad stuff that comes out of it. We already recognize a little bit of this in that there's often advice not to put the schooling dates on your resume because it implies age, but people somehow don't make the jump to the schooling itself implying other discriminatory factors. Plus the emphasis on schooling filters non-traditional learners and autodidacts. The software industry exploded in part because we historically haven't done that, at least during the high-growth periods that corresponded to high-demand periods. There are obviously some sectors for which you absolutely want formal training (medicine, EIT/PE-type engineering, etc.) but I'd argue that's the exception and not the rule. In most jobs it just matters that you know what you're doing. We should figure out a way to evaluate and select on actual competencies rather than trying to use school as a surrogate for them. For many professions this should be relatively straightforward. Competencies are not the be-all/end-all (as we know from programming interviews) but to the extent that we expect schools to represent them we should be able to evaluate with testing if they're truly anywhere near objective. Unfortunately, that won't happen as long as the easy option is available.