A whole bunch of the comments mention that employers who are insisting on college degrees as a hiring criterion are basically attempting to use the degree requi

A whole bunch of the comments mention that employers who are insisting on college degrees as a hiring criterion are basically attempting to use the degree requirement as a proxy for a requirement that would be more plainly illegal under current United States law. That's regrettable on two levels: degree requirements are demonstrably, by replicated research, poor criteria for hiring for almost any kind of job, and if the company is trying to find a work-around to practice illegal discrimination, the company should be just as liable for the degree requirement as for other illegal requirements. There is a research base on what hiring procedures work best (short answer: work-sample tests and general mental ability, a.k.a. IQ, tests) for finding good workers for most kinds of jobs. No hiring procedure is perfect, as all hiring procedures produce false positives (applicants who are hired even though they end up being lousy workers) and false negatives (applicants who don't get hired, even though they end up being great workers for some other employer). But if you want to be scientific about hiring and improve your odds of getting a good worker, you had better build work-sample tests into your hiring procedures. In the United States, IQ-type tests were held by the Supreme Court to be illegal (UNLESS specifically validated for the job in question) under the federal equal employment opportunity statute in a case that found that IQ tests have a disparate impact on applicants from some "race" groups. The facts on the ground are changing (the "race" gap in IQ scores is not nearly as large as it used to be, and appears still to be closing) and that rationale, properly thought through, would apply equally well to show that other hiring criteria might be just as illegal. Possessing a college degree is a much stronger signal of family wealth than of job-applicant intelligence, really, http://www.jkcf.org/news-knowledge/media-coverage/no-child-left-behind/ http://www.jkcf.org/news-knowledge/media-coverage/no-child-l... but many companies these days insist on college degrees from applicants for jobs for which a college degree is no preparation at all. That just tends to turn many lower-tier colleges into expensive diploma mills. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227923 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227923 for the most recent posting of my full-length FAQ on company hiring procedures, written specially for HN discussions.