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As long as college is an acceptable, and legal signal to use in the hiring process nothing will ever change. It's prisoner's dilemma. The "better" schools will
by endisneigh 3y ago
As long as college is an acceptable, and legal signal to use in the hiring process nothing will ever change. It's prisoner's dilemma. The "better" schools will always incentivize more and more pathological behavior in order to get a competitive advantage.
I propose that similar to age and gender, college name be no longer required as a criterion for job applications. If there is indeed an advantage of going to a better school than this will manifest itself in the actual interview process. If there is not, then it will be quickly realized that it doesn't make any sense to jump through these hoops to go to the better schools and thus the problem solved.
It's unlikely to happen as most legislators in the USA went to the very same schools that one is attempting to gain admittance to - a clear conflict of interest.
- nordsieck 3y ago> I propose that similar to age and gender, college name be no longer required as a criterion for job applications. That's never going to work for specialized jobs. If you need a chemical engineer, than you need a chemical engineer. But I think this is a very good idea for all of those jobs that just say "4 year degree required" without any specialty. Honestly, I don't understand how such postings aren't already illegal under structural discrimination.
- endisneigh 3y agoNote: I said college name, not degree. You can and certainly should be able to say that you attained a Bachelor's of Science in Chemistry. Whether college is required at all is also an interesting discussion.
- joelfried 3y agoIt's a lot easier to lie about a degree if nobody knows where you got it. That seems like a fatal flaw to your plan.
- ceejayoz 3y agoTreat it like a drug test. Extend an offer contingent on degree verification.
- endisneigh 3y agoThat's already true of all criteria in your application. It would be handled during the background check.
- quadrifoliate 3y agoThis. We really don't need some complicated ZKP scheme. 10 minutes of an HR person's time is enough.
- adamsmith143 3y agoPlenty of jobs check your credentials before hiring already. It's not a significant burden.
- meowkit 3y agoZero Knowledge Proofs You get a degree. You can prove that you got the degree from an accredited university, if that university is providing some cryptographic form of that degree, without revealing the name of that university. This only works if multiple universities sign on to a ZKP scheme, because (obviously) if only a single university did this you would know which university it was. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof#
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoNot all degrees are the same. Not everyone needs to be Ivy League. But especially with the current waive of partisan fuckery in higher education, I want to make sure I’m not getting a dud. If that information is literally banned, you’re going to emphasise hiring through informal channels, i.e. the well connected.
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- FooBarBizBazz 3y agoProblem is, that'll just shift competition somewhere else. This has already happened in Tech to some extent, where the interview process has gone exponential in just the last few years. We need to aim closer to the root, at the economic concentrations in society that all this competition is about trying to access. In a world of independent artisans, we wouldn't need to worry so much about all this status and hierarchy and gatekeeping. But there are a handful of FAANGs that reign unnaturally like giant totalitarian states. It's like we have Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia, when we're supposed to have The Netherlands, Italy, Thailand, Vietnam, and so on. Instead it's like some Tsar expanding over the whole of Eurasia. And you need to get into the bastard's court.
- endisneigh 3y agoThe shift is good. It is more meritocratic imo.
- FooBarBizBazz 3y agoI do see your point. But I feel we only need to look at, say, passing the exams to get into IIT, or at the South Korean school system, to see where this leads. At some point it's just too much, and it doesn't matter how fairly the Hunger Games are administered. Let me put it another way: It's extremely destructive to a society if too much effort is channeled into zero-sum competition within that society.
- thfuran 3y ago>This has already happened in Tech to some extent, where the interview process has gone exponential in just the last few years. What does that mean?
- FooBarBizBazz 3y agoMostly rhetoric, but it gestured towards some mathematical/modeling intuition. I was picturing a graph with time on the x axis, difficulty on the y, and a fairly constant value until recently, at which point things began to increase rapidly. I had in mind instability and explosion, a mania like for tulips, and self-destructive involution, like a society locked in competition with itself to pass the Emperor's exams. Why an exponential? I know that, in contrast, finance people speak of things going "parabolic". But there may be reason for literal exponentials, for dx/dt = x. It's not that difficulty begets difficulty, but that difficulty arises from economic concentration and concentration of opportunities, and economic concentration begets economic concentration.
- CPLX 3y agoThis is stupid. We can just demand, or even mandate, that colleges not suck so hard. They've basically turned into hedge funds at this point, we have quite a bit of leverage as a society and we don't have to let all this stuff happen. I'm exhausted by the current narrative that says we can't demand excellence from public institutions. Like why not. Why can't universities, the police, the department of homeless services, or the guys who regulate airplane safety not be competently run and effective at improving society? Why can't we improve them?
- endisneigh 3y agoBy what criteria do they suck? Regardless, it doesn’t seem relevant to what I’m suggesting. Even if colleges were perfect there were still be disparities if only due to the student demographics and the problem in the OP would still exist.
- CPLX 3y agoThey hoard tens of billions of dollars tax free and use that money to fund private equity firms who buy and destroy American jobs, while becoming an increasingly bloated service firm for the richest American families, and are almost complexly divorced at this point from their original public purpose of academic progress and educating the next generation.
- endisneigh 3y agothis seems completely irrelevant to the article, and still has nothing to do with school quality. what you're saying could be true and still be an academic powerhouse.
- CPLX 3y agoI was responding to this: > college name be no longer required as a criterion for job applications By saying maybe we could, instead, try to improve the reputations of our best colleges so the signal would be valid.
- dfadsadsf 3y agoI think this is already happening, to some extent. Back in the day, all the smart folks would flock to a handful of top universities. But now, things are changing. The reliance on SAT and merit is decreasing, and universities are focusing more on DEI when admitting students. This means that the cream of the crop won't be concentrated in just a few elite schools anymore. As a result, companies will start looking beyond the usual suspects and consider a broader range of candidates when hiring.