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I'm a strong advocate for scrapping all degree requirements to every profession, perhaps even in law (ie., banning most employers from asking). This shifts the

I'm a strong advocate for scrapping all degree requirements to every profession, perhaps even in law (ie., banning most employers from asking). This shifts the burden on to the employer to make a reliable assessment of the applicant. This would have two, imv, favourable effects: 1) a university education would compete on its merits as education with all alternatives; 2) breaking the rent-seeking monopolies universities have on entrance to the jobs market. The law would have to be carefully crafted -- but we're long past the era when a degree was predictive of anything. It was always a positional good, and if 50% of the next generation have one there's no signal within the noise anymore. And of course, it was always as much about 'keeping the rifraff out' as it was in selecting good candidates. For certain professions, eg., teaching/drs/etc., i think it makes more sense for the state to have 'licence to practice' certifications/exams -- rather than assume that a degree is such a licence.

firtoz 3y ago
It was great for selecting quality candidates until the education system got heavily abused and mismanaged and corrupted with maladjusted incentives, may it RIP.
kube-system 3y ago
> This shifts the burden on to the employer to make a reliable assessment of the applicant. It shifts the burden on the employer to make an alternative assessment of the applicant. If what they're using now isn't reliable, but convenient, why would any alternative be?
- liquidpele 3y ago
  There is often a very technology and IT centric viewpoint on this website. This is often the case anyway with technology positions, but for other things like accounting, medicine, law, etc formal education is more required.
  - mjburgess 3y ago
    If you wont pass an accountancy exam without formal education, and i'd say most wouldnt, then they'll get one. The number of applicants who succeed in such cases, at getting through without formal education, will be very small. And i'd be 90% of those cases, that applicant is way above their peers in performance -- ie., worth having let it
- mjburgess 3y ago
  Because the people best placed to assess a candidate for a role are those who know the duties of that role in detail. Much of what's taught at university has marginal benefits beyond a core, much smaller, cirriculum. Take something fairly complex like game development, say. Now: do some linear algebra, geometry, programming, etc. assessment in a wholistic way. Maybe a quick quiz for initial filter, then a hackathon with applicants (or w/e). People filtered by the quiz can be directed to the now many resources for self-study (you can easily do an entire degree via MIT lectures, etc. -- i know i did, i barely attended lectures and just watched stanford/MIT classes; gilbert strang's LA course several times). If you really want to be a game dev, and can't self-study after a failed attempt and a year or so of reflection then go to university. Now you know it's for you, that it really will help, etc. They're providing a service you actually need.
  - kube-system 3y ago
    I don't disagree, but that doesn't seem to address the point. If a hiring organization doesn't bother to assess that now, why would the above-proposed change make a difference?
    - mjburgess 3y ago
      I'm not concerned about the quality of hiring at businesses -- they are sufficiently strongly incentivised to hire productive employees, not ones whose net effect is to lower production. I think the incentives on everyone involved are faily 'naturally well-aligned'. I'm more concerned about how universities have positioned themselves gatekeepers to the employment market backed by state-granted degree awarding powers. I think this is an extremely artifical situation with extremely negative social concequences. Vast amounts of money are being funnelled into universities for little gain. They are, if you like, the App Store of the jobs market. Taking a 30% cut on just getting hired. It's insane, unsustainable, economic madness, and social madness.
    - haswell 3y ago
      > If a hiring organization doesn't bother to assess that now, why would the above-proposed change make a difference? I think the answer is in the question, and boils down to: the proposal is to change the status quo. Changing the status quo here means that organizations not doing these assessments are responsible for doing so going forward. It’s reasonable to think that an organization in the current environment is not focused on such assessments because the system is supposed to be handling this (I’m not saying this should be considered sufficient). A change that involves shifting the burden necessarily means a change in the status quo of hiring organizations regardless of their past practices around assessing candidates. To your point, setting the expectation that the hiring organization is responsible for assessing incoming candidates is part and parcel to the broader idea. The operating environment would no longer look like the current one, and would necessitate additional steps by hiring organizations. Not taking those steps would result in poorer and poorer quality hires. Bringing this full circle, I think it’s worth pointing out that the place this started from is: teachers who did not complete a specific training requirement are as effective as those who did. At the very least, this seems to indicate that completing the specific training requirement is not a sufficient assessment criteria, and is presumably not helping organizations bring in better people. At the same time, the requirement does reduce the pool of available candidates, with seemingly no positive effect. At least for this particular school example, in a worst case scenario, organizations that change nothing are no worse off than they already are. The training requirement isn’t acting as a differentiating criteria, which means that the organization is already the most impactful decision maker. The proposed change just formalizes the idea that completing a specific curriculum is not by itself a good indicator of future success. Organizations relying on this signal are not worse off if it’s taken away because it never indicated much to begin with, if the data are to be believed.
- haswell 3y ago
  I read the parent comment differently. In a hypothetical future where there is no degree requirement, whatever they’re doing now to assess applicants is not relevant. In that scenario, the system has fundamentally changed, and I think this strongly implies that employers will now need to look for ways to screen candidates other than “has degree”. As things stand now, there is an expectation that holding a degree is in itself valuable and that the holder has already been assessed by the educational institution that granted the degree. Put another way, the lack of a reliable process now is the point. If I’m an employer, the reliability of the signal that is the degree the applicant holds is as variable as the standards of the various institutions granting those degrees. In a world where the degree is no longer a primary signal, employers must by necessity establish some other assessment criteria, and since that criteria is set by the employer, it’s at least more reliable than making decisions based on various other organization’s assessment criteria.
xhkkffbf 3y ago
Law? Medicine? Engineering? Would you want the bridges to be designed by anyone with any degree? I realize there's lots of sillyness in degree programs, but certainly the rigor is worth something, right?
- gbacon 3y ago
  This isn’t a realistic worry. Someone about to plunk down hundreds of thousands or millions for a bridge will exercise more due diligence than random selection.
  - xhkkffbf 3y ago
    Do you think so? There are already several sad examples of political leaders who insisted on people of their favorite race or sex. The bridges collapsed. The problem with the system is that the political leaders are spending other peoples money and they'll make decisions that don't always line up with the bridges staying up. The advantage of degree programs is that they add another layer of bureaucracy to mix. Yeah, that's a pain but it might be necessary with the political system.
    - s1artibartfast 3y ago
      you might be shocked to learn that degrees ARENT required for anyone building bridges and planes.
- mjburgess 3y ago
  Sure, so assess for rigour. A person who had studied mathematics and physics until 18 could then over two or three years easily, consume the relevant engineering curriculum from MIT/stanford/etc. if they wanted to avoid the fee's of a university education. A business will never let some jnr hire actually design a bridge to be actually built. Most of the relevant education comes from years on the job, in almost all jobs. All that applicants need have is enough prior conceptual foundations to cope during that on-the-job training.
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
meroes 3y ago
Tech already does this and it doesn’t seem great? The STEM initiative beginning in the 70s is a national program to get lots of qualified workers into STEM jobs. And yet most STEM graduates don’t have STEM careers (51%). One reason is tech companies hire whoever they want based on their own metrics. Your suggestion just gives large industry more power and leaves people without stable careers or not getting jobs they went to school for. It’s like, why even go through the effort of a national educational system. I don’t want ANOTHER elementary school in my district known as the “Google” school. Let’s just have Google in our lives from 1st grade onward!
- waswaswas 3y ago
  Isn’t the stat about STEM grads not working in STEM largely people with degrees in fields like biology (with all of its vocationally limited subfields like evolutionary and population) or chemistry (where you might only be qualified to work as a low paid technician without graduate study)? It seems to me that the difference in employability between a BS in Biology and a BSEE is enormous, both in ease of finding a job as well as career earnings.
- Manuel_D 3y ago
  "STEM" is a very nebulous group of fields. Plenty of people study math and become math teachers, financiers, or work in think tanks. Those jobs aren't "STEM careers" but mathematics knowledge is definitely applicable.
nullindividual 3y ago
> it was always as much about 'keeping the rifraff out' as it was in selecting good candidates. The proposal moves this phase to the university system, like it used to be.
karaterobot 3y ago
This just sounds like an argument that degrees are not good proof of qualification, but it assumes that a certification would be. Might certifications not fall prey to the same decline in quality as degrees, which used to act as an imprimatur?
- mjburgess 3y ago
  My proposal would be that organisations provide domain-specific assessments for particular jobs, rather than there be any certification outside of state-licenced areas. Eg., if you want to be a graphic designer, apply, perform the "graphic designer assessment by AssessCorpX" as required by IndustryX and so on. Basically just taking the examiniation function away from universities into the market, and making it industry specific. I think these are the 'natural incentives' businesses have, and these are distorted by the gov monopoly granted to universtiites (ie., their degree awarding powers). Prior to the era of mass university education people were hired based on a judgement of their suitability for the role, and then trained to do it over a period of years. That's still how things work.
tw04 3y ago
On the flip side, the reason they're finding emergency teachers just as effective as ones without degrees is because in many places all of the good teachers have quit to find other professions. This is less an indictment on the education of teachers, and more an indictment on society and how poorly teachers are treated in 2023. >Like other first-year teachers, those granted emergency credentials were disproportionately assigned to work with children with disabilities, English learners and low-income students. AKA: the jobs with the highest turnover rate of qualified professional teachers. >The law would have to be carefully crafted -- but we're long past the era when a degree was predictive of anything. It was always a positional good, and if 50% of the next generation have one there's no signal within the noise anymore. The point of a degree was to get you to think critically as much as it is about teaching you how to do the job the degree will lead to. Teachers need that skill as much as anyone when they're working with impressionable youth.

firtoz 3y ago

It was great for selecting quality candidates until the education system got heavily abused and mismanaged and corrupted with maladjusted incentives, may it RIP.

kube-system 3y ago

> This shifts the burden on to the employer to make a reliable assessment of the applicant. It shifts the burden on the employer to make an alternative assessment of the applicant. If what they're using now isn't reliable, but convenient, why would any alternative be?

liquidpele 3y ago
There is often a very technology and IT centric viewpoint on this website. This is often the case anyway with technology positions, but for other things like accounting, medicine, law, etc formal education is more required.
- mjburgess 3y ago
  If you wont pass an accountancy exam without formal education, and i'd say most wouldnt, then they'll get one. The number of applicants who succeed in such cases, at getting through without formal education, will be very small. And i'd be 90% of those cases, that applicant is way above their peers in performance -- ie., worth having let it
mjburgess 3y ago
Because the people best placed to assess a candidate for a role are those who know the duties of that role in detail. Much of what's taught at university has marginal benefits beyond a core, much smaller, cirriculum. Take something fairly complex like game development, say. Now: do some linear algebra, geometry, programming, etc. assessment in a wholistic way. Maybe a quick quiz for initial filter, then a hackathon with applicants (or w/e). People filtered by the quiz can be directed to the now many resources for self-study (you can easily do an entire degree via MIT lectures, etc. -- i know i did, i barely attended lectures and just watched stanford/MIT classes; gilbert strang's LA course several times). If you really want to be a game dev, and can't self-study after a failed attempt and a year or so of reflection then go to university. Now you know it's for you, that it really will help, etc. They're providing a service you actually need.
- kube-system 3y ago
  I don't disagree, but that doesn't seem to address the point. If a hiring organization doesn't bother to assess that now, why would the above-proposed change make a difference?
  - mjburgess 3y ago
    I'm not concerned about the quality of hiring at businesses -- they are sufficiently strongly incentivised to hire productive employees, not ones whose net effect is to lower production. I think the incentives on everyone involved are faily 'naturally well-aligned'. I'm more concerned about how universities have positioned themselves gatekeepers to the employment market backed by state-granted degree awarding powers. I think this is an extremely artifical situation with extremely negative social concequences. Vast amounts of money are being funnelled into universities for little gain. They are, if you like, the App Store of the jobs market. Taking a 30% cut on just getting hired. It's insane, unsustainable, economic madness, and social madness.
  - haswell 3y ago
    > If a hiring organization doesn't bother to assess that now, why would the above-proposed change make a difference? I think the answer is in the question, and boils down to: the proposal is to change the status quo. Changing the status quo here means that organizations not doing these assessments are responsible for doing so going forward. It’s reasonable to think that an organization in the current environment is not focused on such assessments because the system is supposed to be handling this (I’m not saying this should be considered sufficient). A change that involves shifting the burden necessarily means a change in the status quo of hiring organizations regardless of their past practices around assessing candidates. To your point, setting the expectation that the hiring organization is responsible for assessing incoming candidates is part and parcel to the broader idea. The operating environment would no longer look like the current one, and would necessitate additional steps by hiring organizations. Not taking those steps would result in poorer and poorer quality hires. Bringing this full circle, I think it’s worth pointing out that the place this started from is: teachers who did not complete a specific training requirement are as effective as those who did. At the very least, this seems to indicate that completing the specific training requirement is not a sufficient assessment criteria, and is presumably not helping organizations bring in better people. At the same time, the requirement does reduce the pool of available candidates, with seemingly no positive effect. At least for this particular school example, in a worst case scenario, organizations that change nothing are no worse off than they already are. The training requirement isn’t acting as a differentiating criteria, which means that the organization is already the most impactful decision maker. The proposed change just formalizes the idea that completing a specific curriculum is not by itself a good indicator of future success. Organizations relying on this signal are not worse off if it’s taken away because it never indicated much to begin with, if the data are to be believed.
haswell 3y ago
I read the parent comment differently. In a hypothetical future where there is no degree requirement, whatever they’re doing now to assess applicants is not relevant. In that scenario, the system has fundamentally changed, and I think this strongly implies that employers will now need to look for ways to screen candidates other than “has degree”. As things stand now, there is an expectation that holding a degree is in itself valuable and that the holder has already been assessed by the educational institution that granted the degree. Put another way, the lack of a reliable process now is the point. If I’m an employer, the reliability of the signal that is the degree the applicant holds is as variable as the standards of the various institutions granting those degrees. In a world where the degree is no longer a primary signal, employers must by necessity establish some other assessment criteria, and since that criteria is set by the employer, it’s at least more reliable than making decisions based on various other organization’s assessment criteria.

xhkkffbf 3y ago

Law? Medicine? Engineering? Would you want the bridges to be designed by anyone with any degree? I realize there's lots of sillyness in degree programs, but certainly the rigor is worth something, right?

gbacon 3y ago
This isn’t a realistic worry. Someone about to plunk down hundreds of thousands or millions for a bridge will exercise more due diligence than random selection.
- xhkkffbf 3y ago
  Do you think so? There are already several sad examples of political leaders who insisted on people of their favorite race or sex. The bridges collapsed. The problem with the system is that the political leaders are spending other peoples money and they'll make decisions that don't always line up with the bridges staying up. The advantage of degree programs is that they add another layer of bureaucracy to mix. Yeah, that's a pain but it might be necessary with the political system.
  - s1artibartfast 3y ago
    you might be shocked to learn that degrees ARENT required for anyone building bridges and planes.
mjburgess 3y ago
Sure, so assess for rigour. A person who had studied mathematics and physics until 18 could then over two or three years easily, consume the relevant engineering curriculum from MIT/stanford/etc. if they wanted to avoid the fee's of a university education. A business will never let some jnr hire actually design a bridge to be actually built. Most of the relevant education comes from years on the job, in almost all jobs. All that applicants need have is enough prior conceptual foundations to cope during that on-the-job training.
s1artibartfast 3y ago

meroes 3y ago

Tech already does this and it doesn’t seem great? The STEM initiative beginning in the 70s is a national program to get lots of qualified workers into STEM jobs. And yet most STEM graduates don’t have STEM careers (51%). One reason is tech companies hire whoever they want based on their own metrics. Your suggestion just gives large industry more power and leaves people without stable careers or not getting jobs they went to school for. It’s like, why even go through the effort of a national educational system. I don’t want ANOTHER elementary school in my district known as the “Google” school. Let’s just have Google in our lives from 1st grade onward!

waswaswas 3y ago
Isn’t the stat about STEM grads not working in STEM largely people with degrees in fields like biology (with all of its vocationally limited subfields like evolutionary and population) or chemistry (where you might only be qualified to work as a low paid technician without graduate study)? It seems to me that the difference in employability between a BS in Biology and a BSEE is enormous, both in ease of finding a job as well as career earnings.
Manuel_D 3y ago
"STEM" is a very nebulous group of fields. Plenty of people study math and become math teachers, financiers, or work in think tanks. Those jobs aren't "STEM careers" but mathematics knowledge is definitely applicable.

nullindividual 3y ago

> it was always as much about 'keeping the rifraff out' as it was in selecting good candidates. The proposal moves this phase to the university system, like it used to be.

karaterobot 3y ago

This just sounds like an argument that degrees are not good proof of qualification, but it assumes that a certification would be. Might certifications not fall prey to the same decline in quality as degrees, which used to act as an imprimatur?

mjburgess 3y ago
My proposal would be that organisations provide domain-specific assessments for particular jobs, rather than there be any certification outside of state-licenced areas. Eg., if you want to be a graphic designer, apply, perform the "graphic designer assessment by AssessCorpX" as required by IndustryX and so on. Basically just taking the examiniation function away from universities into the market, and making it industry specific. I think these are the 'natural incentives' businesses have, and these are distorted by the gov monopoly granted to universtiites (ie., their degree awarding powers). Prior to the era of mass university education people were hired based on a judgement of their suitability for the role, and then trained to do it over a period of years. That's still how things work.

tw04 3y ago

On the flip side, the reason they're finding emergency teachers just as effective as ones without degrees is because in many places all of the good teachers have quit to find other professions. This is less an indictment on the education of teachers, and more an indictment on society and how poorly teachers are treated in 2023. >Like other first-year teachers, those granted emergency credentials were disproportionately assigned to work with children with disabilities, English learners and low-income students. AKA: the jobs with the highest turnover rate of qualified professional teachers. >The law would have to be carefully crafted -- but we're long past the era when a degree was predictive of anything. It was always a positional good, and if 50% of the next generation have one there's no signal within the noise anymore. The point of a degree was to get you to think critically as much as it is about teaching you how to do the job the degree will lead to. Teachers need that skill as much as anyone when they're working with impressionable youth.