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My opinion is that the Supreme Court Case Griggs v. Duke Power Company helped make college education effectively a job requirement for anything other than very

My opinion is that the Supreme Court Case Griggs v. Duke Power Company helped make college education effectively a job requirement for anything other than very simple labor. 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.

rahimnathwani 3y ago
If you're right then we should expect countries where IQ tests are not illegal, to have experienced a slower increase in the % of young adults with degrees. I wonder if you've seen any data like this?
- logicalmonster 3y ago
  Anecdotally speaking, all I can remember hearing drilled into me in the American school system as the path for life success was going to college. The implication was that you'd be a loser who worked flipping burgers at McDonalds for the rest of your life if you didn't go to college. 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.
  - rahimnathwani 3y ago
    I agree with the general sentiment that people do degrees for bad reasons, that even good reasons at an individual level may not be optimal in aggregate etc. 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35594618
    - logicalmonster 3y ago
      The reason for anything large usually has a lot of contributing causes, and I don't think I have all of the answers here, but a first guess would be to think about US Cultural Dominance. If the real world was a game of Civilization, the US would be having an overwhelming cultural lead after WWII. Basically whatever the zeitgeist in the US is ends up spreading through the world for many reasons. If it dominated American culture 50 years ago that going to college was mandatory, it seems likely that this attitude would have spread to a lot of other countries too. Is that the right explanation? Probably not entirely, but I think that attitudes and ideas that dominate the US end up spreading a lot because of Hollywood and other cultural reasons.
dragonwriter 3y ago
The problem with your theory is that the disparate impact criteria in Griggs creates exactly the same burden for college degree requirements as for IQ tests. (And, secondarily, that that burden for IQ tests is low enough that if they were as suited for purpose as your argument suggests, it would be routinely and easily met.) 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.)
- logicalmonster 3y ago
  > The problem with your theory is that the disparate impact criteria in Griggs creates exactly the same burden for college degree requirements as for IQ tests. (And, secondarily, that that burden for IQ tests is low enough that if they were as suited for purpose as your argument suggests, it would be routinely and easily met.) 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.

rahimnathwani 3y ago

If you're right then we should expect countries where IQ tests are not illegal, to have experienced a slower increase in the % of young adults with degrees. I wonder if you've seen any data like this?

logicalmonster 3y ago
Anecdotally speaking, all I can remember hearing drilled into me in the American school system as the path for life success was going to college. The implication was that you'd be a loser who worked flipping burgers at McDonalds for the rest of your life if you didn't go to college. 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.
- rahimnathwani 3y ago
  I agree with the general sentiment that people do degrees for bad reasons, that even good reasons at an individual level may not be optimal in aggregate etc. 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35594618
  - logicalmonster 3y ago
    The reason for anything large usually has a lot of contributing causes, and I don't think I have all of the answers here, but a first guess would be to think about US Cultural Dominance. If the real world was a game of Civilization, the US would be having an overwhelming cultural lead after WWII. Basically whatever the zeitgeist in the US is ends up spreading through the world for many reasons. If it dominated American culture 50 years ago that going to college was mandatory, it seems likely that this attitude would have spread to a lot of other countries too. Is that the right explanation? Probably not entirely, but I think that attitudes and ideas that dominate the US end up spreading a lot because of Hollywood and other cultural reasons.

dragonwriter 3y ago

The problem with your theory is that the disparate impact criteria in Griggs creates exactly the same burden for college degree requirements as for IQ tests. (And, secondarily, that that burden for IQ tests is low enough that if they were as suited for purpose as your argument suggests, it would be routinely and easily met.) 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.)

logicalmonster 3y ago
> The problem with your theory is that the disparate impact criteria in Griggs creates exactly the same burden for college degree requirements as for IQ tests. (And, secondarily, that that burden for IQ tests is low enough that if they were as suited for purpose as your argument suggests, it would be routinely and easily met.) 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.