At the always excellent Becker-Posner blog, Nobel Prize winning economist Gary Becker and Judge Richard Posner debate the value of higher education. I largely agree with Becker's assessment that the economic benefits of higher education to students are real and growing. Posner, however, claims that the large income gains accruing to college graduates are largely the result of credentialism, because colleges help employers screen job applicants for intelligence and dedication:
[C]olleges and graduate (including professional) schools provide a screening and certifying function. Someone who graduates with good grades from a good college demonstrates intelligence more convincingly than if he simply tells a potential employer that he's smart; and he also demonstrates a degree of discipline and docility, valuable to employers, that a good performance on an IQ test would not demonstrate. (This is an important point; if all colleges did was separate the smart from the less smart, college would be an inefficient alternative to simple testing.)
This is a very common argument, but I think it is seriously flawed. If the benefits of a university education mostly come down to "screening and certifying," one would think that the market could provide a way of achieving this objective without spending four years and tens (sometimes hundreds) of thousands of dollars in tuition. "[D]iscipline and docility" could be easily demonstrated through good performance in an entry-level job of the type that many college students do anyway - such as working part time at McDonald's or serving an internship. For that matter, many college students have already proven their discipline and docility through good performance in high school and in jobs they held as teenagers.
And, as Posner points out, you don't need college to prove your intelligence. A standardized test (or perhaps a battery of such tests) would suffice. Even if college is needed to prove one's discipline, docility, or intelligence, it is hard to see why it should take four years of school to do it. One year of good grades should be enough.
At least to a large extent, Becker must be right and Posner wrong: the benefits of a college education go well beyond screening and credentialing. However, there are a couple of caveats to this happy conclusion. First, college education is heavily subsidized by government, whereas other methods of screening and certification are not. Therefore, some students who could otherwise prove their intelligence and discipline in cheaper ways might choose to go to college instead. Second, many students probably attend school in large part because of the social benefits rather than the economic ones. College provides a great social scene for young people! This fact makes it more attractive to many high school graduates than other certification methods. I'm all in favor of students going to college to socialize, but I don't believe they should get government subsidies to do so. Finally, it's worth noting that neither of these reservations apply with the same force to graduate school and law school. These programs are much less heavily subsidized than undergraduate education, and they usually have a much less happening social scene. So if you really want to make a good economic investment in your human capital, get a graduate degree:).
CONFLICT OF INTEREST WATCH: Obviously, I'm a professor, so I have a vested interest in persuading people that higher education is a good investment. Caveat lector! (Reader Beware!).
For the employer, it's a highly useful sorting tool. When you're getting dozens, or even hundreds, of resumes for any posted opening, let's be honest - you're not sorting all 100 of them individually. Employers need to be able to narrow down the field by applying filters to the applicants, and they have a limited number of filters at their disposal. Presence of a college degree is one; GPA in college is another; experience in field (or experience in general) is a third.
The advantages of those filters are that they honestly have a correlation with people likely to be better employees (or at least smarter ones that are better at their job), and that they are actually legal. You don't get to use certain filters like race, sex, age, etc., because they're specifically illegal. In practice, there are a lot of other filters you can't get away with using if somebody could sue you and say "you're filtering for race/sex!" and you couldn't clearly distinguish your filter. You might find that hiring only die-hard NASCAR fans helps you run your office, but if you get sued by women who say that you're covertly discriminating against them, well, that explanation won't pay your legal bill. And what if you're filtering out people who went to high school in an urban area? But NOBODY says it's illegal to filter on college education and experience! So of course, employers do.
(This, of course, doesn't apply if you're not talking about a publicly-posted position. But if you know the prospective employee anyway, you don't have to pick his name out of a pile of a hundred papers.)
This also makes HR's job a lot easier. If you have fifty resumes, and ten of them have degrees and forty don't, you're gonna filter out people with no degree; you only have to interview ten people, if that many, and you can easily justify your labor-saving decision on quality grounds. Sure, maybe two or three of those no-college-degree resumes you tossed out would have done the job even better. But from the HR employee's perspective, is it worth sorting through a bunch of people who don't have a degree in order to find the diamond or two in the rough? (Especially if you yourself have a degree, and associate "high school education" with "mouth-breathing idiot"?)
So it's less work for the decision-maker, and it lawsuit-proofs you in case someone doesn't like your hiring pattern, and it probably works more often than not. Small wonder that it's employed in a lot of situations where college education doesn't really add all that much to the suitability for the job.
As for me, I went back to school. Last day of class was Thursday; BS in political science. ;p
I can hardly think of ways more effective at finding those who conform at the highest levels than those who excel at the social status indicative higher education institutions.
I just wish that those folks could have a non conformist thought...
-Gene
There's also an argument from increased urbanization/travel. It used to be that somebody could be adjudged as trustworhty or not based on their reputation in a small town or small community. There were plenty of problems with that (people being unfairly stigmatized, etc), but it worked. Today, people are coming from everywhere and anywhere to apply for jobs completely anonymously. They present a variety of credentials that are hard to measure (how good is XX high school? how meaningful was entry-level job YY?). Out of the sea of data, one thing is easy to measure: college degrees from US News-ranked schools.
Just theories.
When it comes to research universities, it looks like government subsidizes the time professors spend on pet research projects, not undergraduate education. I'd be open to figures that show that I'm wrong, but it appears that undergraduates subsidize universities.
Has the discussion about education become so pomo that the assumed core function has been deemed irrelevant?
Griggs v. Duke Power 401 US 424 (1971) ruled against the use of aptitude tests for transfer and promotion. The court held that under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act an employer had to show aptitude testing was “reasonably related” to the job the test applied to. Also see Washington v. Davis 426 US 229 (1976). But Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Atonio, 490 U.S. 642 (1989) reduced the employer’s burden only to have it increased by Congress by amending the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
While there might be additional twists and turns in the law that an expert could enlighten us about, I’m sure companies are afraid to use any kind of intelligence or aptitude tests for job entry. Thus I think Posner’s assertion that “you don’t need college to prove your intelligence” is disingenuous. As a practical matter you do. I don’t see why anyone really needs to attend law school. Why not simply require an apprenticeship at a law firm and passing the bar exam to get a license to practice law? Of course the answer is obvious: the current system is a jobs program for law professors. Law firms are just as happy not to have to do their own screening and testing and rely on the legal education system to do it for them. After all it’s someone else’s nickel.
jota: I strongly believe that you have never taught at university. Nothing about getting an undergraduate degree necessarily indicates mastery of rhetoric or language. The latest NAAL (2005) showed 31% of college graduates had achieved proficient literacy skills. You'd be stunned by how many college graduates really cannot write their own language.
The Becker-Posner blog is not always excellent. For example when discussing the H1-B non-immigrant visa program they showed that they were all too willing to inhale the sewer gas put out by industry on this matter. They completely ignored the fine work done by professor Matloff at UC Davis, who has published in law journals and testified in Congress. Matloff has thoroughly debunked just about everything Becker and Poser said about this subject.
BTW Becker does not have a “Nobel Prize.” There is no Nobel Prize in economics. There is the Bank of Sweden Prize in honor of Alfred Nobel. Now I’m well aware that many assert that this is a distinction without a difference because Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (supposedly) makes the award according with the same principles as those for the original five Nobel Prizes. However the influence of the Bank of Sweden is evident from who gets the prize. The Nobel family also sued to stop the practice.
The actual body of knowledge you take from college, even though important, is more likely than not to be underutilized for the rest of your life, but learning how to think is what cannot be replaced (and regretfully, few people ever learn to).
People in high school are too young, too immature, to really
profit from that training, and being just smart, or hardworking, is not enough. Thinking is a skill that requires practice and development, and, in my mind, that is the value college adds that cannot be replaced
What people who study linguistics mean (vs what the general population might mean) with regards to "mastery" is probably very different. I got a perfect score on my verbal SATs, nearly so on my verbal GRE's, yet according to my college's placement test as well as the MCATs, I might as well be a functional illiterate (bottom 5%). You might put this down to a vocabulary/"writing" issue, but in my technical sub-specialty, people generally like my writing.
The only real truth is that, unlike math, linguistic performance is relative, and that the statistic cited is meaningless without an age/race/gender/class-adjusted control consisting of people who have not gone to college. That would tell us if people who go to college improve their "mastery" of rhetoric and/or language.
For example, a student's interpersonal skills are important to us. We don't hire dorm rats, we need people with technical skills who can interact effectively with our customers. We don't want docility, but drive: initiative and determination toward a goal. We look for other signs of this, too but sticking out to get your degree helps show that. Maturity helps, too.
I have worked for companies that believed they could teach them more of what they needed than students could learn if they went on to graduate school, but none that thought they could replace college.
The more interesting question is why a company might insisted that all professional or managerial level experienced hires have a college degree. If someone's work history proves they're capable of doing the work, why insist on a degree? In the case of one company I worked for it was probably because most of our employees went on to get other credentials (CPAs) and the rule applied to even those that didn't need to for their work such as consultants.
Requiring a college degree for experienced hires is still pretty prevalent where the additional credentials aren't an issue. Is it really necessary?
For example, why would someone working in college admissions feel compelled to falsify multiple college degrees? I know the circumstances raise honesty and credibility issues, but 28 years is more than long enough time to prove you can do the work, degree or no degree.
I don't know if "relative" is the right word here. The real issue is which skillsets are important, and different tests measure different skillsets, even if each exam puts them under a "verbal" category.
As a mathematician (my current but by no means my only career), I would argue that the mathematical performance is just as "relative" (using the above meaning) as verbal performance. I have students who are great at algebra, but cannot do a proof to save their life. I also have students who are great at proofs, but have serious trouble deducing qualitative results from an answer (e.g. eyeballing the trend in graphs, determining whether a system stable or unstable, etc.). And I have students who are great at both proofs and seeing qualitative results, but they make a ton of mistakes in the algebra.
It would be difficult to design a universal test, since different skillsets are useful in different careers.
Regarding the use of intelligence testing, I had no idea that was an issue, and apparently neither did one of my employers. When I was applying for a job as a patent attorney, I had to take an intelligence test. I talked to others who told me this was fairly common for patent boutiques. I can't say I'm surprised--what do patent lawyers know about the law anyway? ;)
Posner is actually explicit on this point if you read the original links, e.g.,
He makes nonspecific citation to research in general in support of this intuition:
The question posed by your own experience is the merits of the marriage of vocational education or apprenticeship with the more avocational approach of a liberal education. The division here remains largely the color one desires for their collar.
You don't generally hear paeans to college having helped individuals acquire a specific sense of the merits of house traps versus trapping of specific fixtures amongst plumbers, or the requirements for abrasive cleaning and coating of aluminum wire connection points among electricians.
Whereas those who design the systems they are installing generally point to college as the source of their knowledge in similar regards.
The question is not whether any educational content is imparted in college -- for crying out loud, haven't you seen Animal House, no one's saying "seven years of college down the drain" here -- but whether there might be more practical or efficient ways for the imparting of such knowledge. Why wouldn't architects and engineers attend the same trade schools as plumbers and electricians - wouldn't that comraderie forge more effective working relationships across the white and blue collar distinctions that are often fault lines in industrial society.
Apprenticeship with a modicum of professionally focused education was the traditional source for draftsmen come engineers come architects. It's metaphorical equivalent was not an uncommon pathway to a career in the law either, once upon a time. Various forms of on the job training have attended humanity almost from the outset of consciousness. What efficiencies (or free riding) lead us to virtually discard this millenially tested system overnight in favor of credentialism? I'm not suggesting that the shift is purely intellectual irridenticism at play and that there is nothing to recommend a liberal education. But the comparative speed with which the existing industrial order was displaced at least deserves some skepticism.
Of course it can be compared to robust changes in technology over the course of this time, but that doesn't explain why you don't get unschooled engineers who start out as CAD draftsmen. I have an Uncle who was a design and construction engineer on the Convair projects constructing ballistic missile silos. These non-college boys built the defense systems of the day and it would have made little difference in terms of their appropriate qualificaitons whether the bulk of design drawings were performed with CAD or not.
Certainly you can argue that the present system more quickly integrates or rewards advanced engineering knowledge and that certain of the labrious aspects of drawing have been circumscribed by the CAD technology limiting the numerical need for apprentice style arrangements. But anyone who has spent time transfering manual drawing skills into cyberspace would, I think, support the notion that this is a realm benefiting as much from algorithmic repetition of various complicated computer commands as from abstrat study or integration of general scientific method skills purportedly resulting from college education environment. Ability with CAD programs is not necessarily derived from a higher knowledge of engineering, or even software engineering. And can be quite well carried on with little other than practical engineering knowledge and still reflect a fair degree of success and economic utility, if that is credentialism were set aside as even the simplest drawings now require not only compliance with some regulatory test in substance but some vocational seal of approval for the drawer.
I think without question that government subsidy and regulatory policy(by no means alone but as two more significant factors) has skewed society's move away from earlier traditions of vocational preparation. Others have referred to the difficulties of a chaste selection process and civil liability so I shall not dwell on this rich area of thought.
Rather, there appears a misconception about subsidy for college education, e.g., Public Defender writes:
This confuses subsidy with direct grants. While I am chary of the idea that the government ought to fund so-called 'basic' research and thus supplant earlier at least semi-private models such as Bell Labs (admittedly subsidized by government granted monopoly and hidebound telecom regulation), Xerox from which we got the GUI interface even if it didn't fill their coffers, etc. these are not the subsidies predominately at issue in undergraduate education.
Rather we're talking about the Pell grants, equivalent state grants and tax deducations, and the entire subsidized student loan industry.
The government subsidies here grossly favor the college environment as a government approved sorting system. These subsidies fuel bottom tier as well as top tier schools and increase the costs of this system across the board. If these benefits were not effectively dragooned from taxpayers colleges would cost less, or they would have to seek more direct compensatory mechanisms from the employers who theoretically benefit from this 'free' sorting system (and thus be forced to compare the relative costs of the college sorting paradigm to other traditional or innovative methods).
Government exhortations that everybody ought to go to college - like the latest "no twenty something left behind" murmurings of the Bush administration to send every single mother to some third rate state college - artificially fuel the social demand for this good. And the government's policies in this arena are all supported by studies coming out of the beneficiary system. You think any serious preponderance of college studies is going to say that college is useless or that the actual educational and organizational functions it serves should be open to innovative social competition?
Conflict Of Interest Warning (only half as long as the post): I, of course, did not go to college, nor will I participate in the 'credentialing' scam that supports the upper tier of blue collar life either. I have vicariously returned to the academy during my quartidecadal cycle and find that it is stimulating and content rich if approached with an open mind and serious interest. My impression is that does not necessarily define the approach of the majority of undergraduates.
As a fly on the wall (mentioned in previous posts) in the numerous ivy league apartments I maintain for the creme de la creme(sorry, don't know how to put in accents in these comments) of the nation's undergraduates, perhaps the most telling anecdote among many for my point of view was this fellow who was raving last April about having to change his major because he was going to fail a course in his concentration. I was busy installing a new door and flashing and would have had to have been wearing multiple sets of earplugs not to hear him going on at length on his cellphone about how the professor had let him down by not announcing at the beginning of the course that you needed to attend the class (and I'm not talking about every class, or even a majority of classes, he never went to the class or partook in any of its discussion or treatment on the substance of the course). This is not a joke (or maybe it is, but it is a literal translation of his discontent).
A friend of mine whose father was a professor at the same university (I was a campus brat, so many of friends had professorial ancestry) said to me when we were in high school:
and I have lived my life by that dictum ever since.
Amor et deliciae humani generis
Brian
Theoretically getting a bachelors degree should show that the recipient is able to think critically and be able to communicate complex ideas clearly both verbally and through writing. Unfortunately this does not happen enough and I have known history majors at big state universities to get away with not having to write any papers through their junior years. At my liberal arts university even the science and math majors were writing multiple papers their first semester which is closer to how it should be.
My grandfather became an engineer in the navy during World War II, but never graduated from college. He went on to be one of the top civil engineers in the state and led the construction on a fairly large reservoir and other major public works projects. He could not have done that today without a degree.
Don't get me wrong. I understand many companies advise supervisors to just give "name, dates of employment, and position" references. But that's a huge over-reaction.
Of course if a supervisor at a former job does tell some outrageous falsehood ("we fired Bob for stealing computers or sexually harassing the staff" when that's an intentional lie caused by the supervisor's personal dislike for Bob), and that statement really does cost Bob a job, I don't see why it's inappropriate to allow Bob to sue.
Also, re intelligence tests, they are still used. It is true that Griggs v. Duke Power made various tests illegal if they (i) didn't have a sufficient relationship to the job; AND (ii) had a significant "adverse impact" on a minority group. But employers still use all sorts of tests, including some really goofy ones.
Before we debate the value of 'a degree', shouldn't we distinguish 'real' degrees from those which merely serve to justify tuition while perpetuating the lumpen intelligentsia?
Illya is wrong on this point, for reasons noted by Zarkov: Griggs v. Duke Power has effectively prevented "the market" from using most useful screening tests, particularly IQ tests, without facing lawsuits. Since Griggs, companies rightly fear that using IQ and other screening tests would expose them to lawsuits. And their fear is well grounded: The predictive utility of most screening tests is directly related to their g loading, which is generally related to their correlation with IQ tests (Jensen, 1998, The g Factor, pp. 282-294; see also, Schmidt &Hunter, 1998, Pschological Bulletin: http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~psyc231/Readings/schmidt.htm)
Moreover, the higher a screening test's g loading, the greater the White-Black differences (favoring Whites) on the tests. So, companies that use highly g loaded tests will probably have widely disparate hiring outcomes for whites and blacks, which will increase the likelihood of disparate impact claims and lawsuits.
Posner nails an important reason why companies have not, by and large, lobbied to overturn Griggs: They would rather have universities and students absorb the cost of screening, so they don't have to absorb the cost themselves.
An interesting question. It's related to a question of great interest to a forum devoted to helping parents get their children into top colleges I frequent: are the tuitions top private schools charge worth it, or should we send our children to good public instititions?
As a rule the answer seems to be no, at least not economically. Watching how employers hire strongly suggests that where a degree is given is less important to most of them than how motivated and talented a particular student is. We know that informally from our recruiting experience. Formal studies show that over time, a student's salary is less predicted by where they went to school than their grades, SATs and such.
Don't get me wrong, there are definitely tiers within the US college system, and a degree from a top tier school often makes a great difference what kind of job you can get out of school. It's just that there doesn't seem to be that much difference in the education you can receive in the top two or three tiers measured by what students from the different tiers earn ten or more years out of school. What's different is the talent and motivation of the student involved. Once you've worked for a year or two, all I care about when hiring you is the caliber of work you've proven you can deliver.
That should be obvious. Plenty of top students simply don't have the opportunity to get into a top school or couldn't afford it if they could. And it doesn't matter where you go to school or what you study if you don't apply yourself.
So, so long as we exclude diploma mills and, perhaps, small fourth tier schools, a degree is a degree, at least school wise. And at least it is in my fairly exclusive industry.
(BTW, we have our share of English and Fine Arts majors, too, they just learned what they needed to know to work with us some place other than college.)
Moreover, the higher a screening test's g loading, the greater the White-Black differences (favoring Whites) on the tests. So, companies that use highly g loaded tests will probably have widely disparate hiring outcomes for whites and blacks, which will increase the likelihood of disparate impact claims and lawsuits.
--------
I'm not sure this follows. If a company wanted to efficiently use a screening test and yet not run afoul of anti-discrimination law, why not simply give a highly g-loaded test to all employee candidates, and then hire the top X% whites and Y% blacks, where X/Y is the "proper" white/black ratio to not violate the law?
Why not? Because then you are obviously applying different standards depending on race, and in so doing you are violating section 7.
So you don't give g-correlated screening tests at all. They are effectively illegal. Not only does government (in Ilya's words) heavily subsidize college education while not subsidizing "other methods of screening and certification," it effectively prohibits many, many other methods (not just tests). All a method has to do is pass blacks and whites at a different rate to be prima facie illegal. (A company can try to rebut the presumption but that is expensive, time-consuming, and rarely legal--as well as risking a boatload of bad publilcity.)
This was the holding of Griggs(cited by A. Zarkov above). But Griggs did even more to give schooling an advantage. The Court admitted that whites have more schooling than blacks and explicitly refused to declare the use of degrees or years of schooling to be illegal.
Combine that with the legal difficulties in writing honest recommendations, and the government has tilted the playing field very much in favor of credentialing by educational institutions.
Pete said,
I had to get a masters degree to become a librarian and getting the degree only helped me do my job a little better. The first nine hours or so of course work were helpful, but I have not used the later courses and I could have done the job almost as well with just a B.A or maybe with just the first nine hours of grad school completed. Mostly the degree requirement acts as a filter, but I have known several extremely skilled people who have quit the library where I work because they did not have a master’s degree and could not advance their career.
Many people in my business (high school teaching) would say the same thing, though few of them would find as many as nine hours useful.
When the government subsidizes student loans or Pell grants at major research universities, how much of that money really goes toward educating undergraduates? Or does it mainly go to support the personal research and non-teaching activities of professors? How much per-student undergraduate teaching (and prep) time do professors at major research universities really spend?
The government may subsidize tuition, but that's not the same thing as saying that the government subsidizes education.
Sweeny addressed a legal problem with the idea. But there also is a more practical problem: The ratio of Blacks and Whites who obtain a particular score on g-loaded screening tests is widely disparate in the general population.
Jensen (1998, pp. 355-356) reports some numbers for IQ (M=100, SD=15). IQ is strongly related to scores on the Wonderlic, which correlates highly with Full Scale WAIS IQ (r=.90) and has high predictive utility in occupuational settings.
IQ 85 (1 SD below population M): 1 white, 7 blacks
IQ115 (1 SD above population M): 7 whites, 1 black
IQ130 (2 SD above population M): 20 whites, 1 black (Since blacks constitute about 13% of the U.S. population, the actual ratio of whites/blacks above 130 is about 150 to one.)
These disparate ratios – particularly at the upper-end of the ability range – make it difficult to obtain a racially representative sample of blacks and whites who have comparable ability.
I personally took a few years off to work for an animation company. Had a fantastic time. Hobby for a living, and all that. But that's hard to distinguish from "dropped out because you can't hack it", and there's generally no spot on your resume to list your IQ (and, if I may be immodest, nobody would believe the number I have to put there anyway.)
As for "over-reaction"... Not many are brought? Sure. But so what? What percentage of car trips end with an accident -- but you wear a seatbelt anyway, don't you?
It's difficult to argue this point at some level, of course. But the other day I was thinking a lot about how bad law firms are at training, both their formal training programs and in the much-vaunted "learning by doing."
As for the formal training programs, the quality of instruction is usually far poorer than that of any law school course I took. The subject matter may be more relevant than the typical law school syllabus, but the method of imparting the information is far less effective. Moreover, the training usually jammed into the occasional lunch-and-power point, which never takes precedence over client work. To be effective, it needs to take place over a couple of days at a retreat-like setting, with no distractions. But it's really just thought of as a way to make sure lawyers can meet their CLE requirements without having to go to outside seminars and cost the firm even more valuable time.
And as for "learning by doing," this is just an excuse to throw unprepared junior associates onto deals and cases, i.e., for underinvesting in training. Would you want a physician the sum of whose knowledge was "learning by doing"? Of course not. It is no different for lawyers, and clients should realize this. I have lost count of how many little mistakes junior associates made that could easily have been avoided with a couple of days' worth of effective classroom instruction. (Is it really better, both for attorneys and clients, to learn the key differences between a Form S-1 and S-2 at 10:00 p.m. in the middle of some deal than to do so in a classroom setting?)
Therefore, while I agree that the law school curriculum may lack relevance to the practice of law, I'm not sure that private sector training is any better and is, in many ways, much worse.
Here is an incomplete list of job categories where a high IQ is a necessary but not sufficient condition for success.
Physics, chemistry, engineering, mathematics, economics, computer science, biology, accounting, finance, law, medicine, military leadership.
Now of course even with a high IQ, disorganization and laziness will certainly detract from your success, but you need a high IQ to do these jobs well. In other words, as the old adage says: “you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”
If you want more details on the relation between IQ and occupational success see the book, The Bell Curve.
Now Mr. Sweeny says such tests are illegal, largely due to the fact that DO accurately point such people out, and in so doing make evident that there are more such people who are white than are black, disproportionate with their percentage in the population.
But isn't hiring a proportionate number of blacks a presumptive demonstration of anti-discrimination. If blacks are 13% of the population and you hired 13% black in your workforce by hiring the highest scorers on an IQ test as follows: the highest black scorers until you have reached 13% of the workforce, and then the highest scorers overall, don't you have prima facie evidence of hiring in a non-discriminatory manner. You got the desired results. And isn't the evidence you hired some blacks with lower IQ scores than some whites you didn't hire evidence you DIDN"T use the IQ tests for hiring purposes, and therefore Griggs doesn't apply?
Obviously, I'm not a lawyer, and the fact that companies don't do this makes it evident the law doesn't allow it, but it seems that requires a perverse reading of the law.
I agree with J_A's comments.
I don't understand why this debate recurs. College offers more than just pre-job training (especially if students apply themselves). Many high school grads need something else provided by college: four more years to mature before starting a career. Working with college freshmen proved to me that most needed to be in the halfway house of college.
Occidental Tourist argues that we could return to the apprentice system for some professions. I think he is naive. Extensive on-the-job training is expensive. Businesses would not support apprentices unless they contractually lock-in prolonged employment. Few of today's teenagers would lock themselves into a particular job path at a particular business in a particular location. Thus, businesses hire those who learned the fundamentals at college and need minimal on-the-job training.
There are many states which allow for non-law school alternative to Bar membership. For example in California, one can be in some kind of apprenticeship arrangement
reading for law"
But very few people choose this route.
IIRC, the last time I read news account about the program, there are only about a dozen active attorneys(out of 200,000 statewide) in California went through this route. Mostly done within the families.
California also have 3 tiers of law school. There is the traditional ABA accredited law schools, then there is law schools accredited by CA state bar. There there are registered (with State Department of Vocational Education) law schools. Even with California's relaxed bar admission policy(I think it's also partially responsible for California's law bar pass rate), overwhelming majority of lawyers are admitted through the ABA law school route. So I don't think it's all just regulation. When I discussed the "reading for law" option with others, people actually told me they would go that route because they don't want most clients will want hire an attorney admitted this way.(And if you have to pay a non-family attorney 18 hours/week for a few years, you may as pay law school tuition)
Speaking of your mini bar exam idea. California does have a "baby bar" for students in the non-ABA school. I heard there were talked of expanding its application to all school, but I doubt it will be politically feasible.
Baby bar
As a group, we law librarians do have our issues with the current setup. I just came from a regional meeting of law librarians. As usual, law firm librarians are not shy in providing "feedback" to academic law librarians about what they think of their graduates. Paraphrasing what I heard :
"I had the 'pleasure' of working with our 1st year/summer associate so-and-so, who was in legal research &writing class co-taught by you. He is pretty weak at doing legal research task X. And I had to spend Y hours re-teaching him to do legal research task Z. .... "
Since firm law librarians are rarely involved with hiring decisions, that the best we can do. To their credits, academic law librarians do act on feedbacks from those of us who have to live with their graduates.
As for MLIS degree, while I didn't completed mine,(I received a battlefield commission and my own "command" and same time.) I did found most of the coursework useful.
I do think the whole MLIS experience overkill for people who want to work in large school/public library systems, where different roles are pretty well-defined by now. So maybe a series of certificate for (cataloging/tech service, references/public service, library management, technology, etc.) with CLE requirement to maintain, would better serve the profession. Of course, the problem with that is librarian's job description almost always includes the dreaded "and other duties as assigned."
Exactly. I am fed up with all of these disingenous discussions (at Posner, NRO's PhiBetaCons, etc) about the uselessness of the diploma that never once mention race.
Ironically, the race issue is not only the cause of the credential requirement, it's also behind the devaluation of a college diploma.
About 10% of 18 year olds leave high school knowing more than 70% of all college graduates will ever be capable of learning. If they don't go to an excellent school, they'll never learn anything new in college, as most schools out of the top 100 are teaching high school level material--because by now the average intellect whites and asians are going to college in order to have the same credentials as blacks and Hispanics with far fewer skills.
I hope at some point we look at tiering high school and college diplomas with certification exams--not just pass/fail, but actual scoring systems. The same problems exist--the whites and Asians will dominate the upper scoring tiers--but at least it would allow employers to get useful information out of the credential. If we keep going the way we're going now, the elite students will be in college for ten years for no other reason than to earn a PhD because the average college graduate has the skills of a sixth grader.
Call me cynical but never call me naive. I question the cost of colleges to the extent (large) supported by government subsidies as skewing private decisions about labor skill development.
Ah, the old free agency argument. It was companies perhaps more so than workers that limited the generational trajectory of employment. True I pointed to historical apprentice-like models, but I made no assumption that these were purely farm teams where those learning the ropes were a cost to the company that had to be recouped by retention. In any event, retention is easy enough to reflect in salary and benefits instead of government subsidized degrees.
Also, while the earlier industrial tradition of employment stability correlates with the prevalence of the apprentice paradigm, the two structures are not purely entangled. Just as employees may want the flexibility to change employment for money or personal choices about location, etc., companies wanted the flexibility to change their workforce size and composition.
This might seem to cut against the idea of learning on the job, but only if one assumed that the arrangement didn't provide present value. That is a suspect theory when looking at the history of these arrangements and at the continuing blue collar analog. Journeyman work in the trades is designed to create present value for the employer who is training an apprentice without the expectation that they will be a long term employee (the very purpose of training for many apprentices is to start their own independent business or to command a much larger salary as a disincentive to leave existing firms and compete directly).
That said, I made no proposition for wholesale return to apprenticeship per se. I suggested rather that without subsidy for their employee credentialing process, employers -- large and small -- could consider their options. Those could include supporting the college system in place, investing in test models designed to defeat legal restrictions, incorporating useful models of apprenticeship or OJT, parceling work into units and contracting it out to subs whose eligibility might be certified by some private body or simply by experience with positive results.
The same question can be asked of privately funded undergraduate tuition, can it not? Is your argument for more direct education or for reforming college budgetary priorities? Or simply that since so little of the money in your opinion filters down to undergraduate education that the portion supplied by government can't be seen as a subsidy to employers.
I'd be the first one to join you in suggesting that government funding of research is suspect as well (you didn't really suggest this but I'm trying to lock you in here). There is no reason that companies cannot develop risk tolerant models for investing in basic research. The notion that they 'can't' fund such research and need solely technologies that are ready to commercialize is essentially an identical argument to the notion that universities must also serve as the credentialing authority for modern industrial society. If this is really so, companies would figure out how to support it. But since the subsidy is there, of course they are willing to sit back and free ride.
The whole stem cell funding debate is just this kind of red herring based on the premise that government is the only possible funding source (Concedely, the debate is complicated by the hidebound government approach to determining whether any government money whatsoever if supporting the research making it tricky not to commingle 'regular' university research with stem cell research. But the difficulties for these researchers in making sure that they don't have a government funded paper clip anywhere in there lab reveals the disturbing extent to which they have come to rely on government). The drug companies and venture capitalists with knowledge of this general area of technology can fund that research and people can decide whether their morals prevent them from partaking of its products.
But if companies do employ the credentials of the college system as a sorting mechanism, it is irrelevant how tuition money is spent or whether education, as such, is accomplished.
In any event, you can't seriously propose that the government grants, loans, etc. providing support for attendance at community colleges are being disproportionately diverted to research.
Because the cost of so-called 'research' universities is greater, you can rationally argue that a greater share of the subsidy per individual at these institutions is supporting activities other than undergraduate education.
But these are selective institutions by definition -- only providing undergraduate spots for a minority of candidates. Even including large state schools that have developed this elite character, e.g., University of Michigan, UCLA, etc., I highly doubt this research diversion phenomenon applies to the majority of those attending college or receiving government aid for doing so.
Many would be a gross exaggeration. The ABA state requirement chart indicates only 7 states where this is possible and if you read the paraphrase of state requirements following you will see that most of the states noted as allowing 'law office study' actually require completion of several years at an ABA approved law school and simply waive graduation as a requirement.
That said, I am fine with the market providing an incentive for credential. If people would prefer to hire an
ABA-certified attorney that is fine with me (although I would prefer the fellow with the bust of James Madison in his office, see Todd's post on Bush justice 'hi-jinks'). As a matter of fact I don't favor state licensing at all and would prefer an entirely private endorsement system that does not have the force of the government behind it which has created the quasi-governmental function of the ABA, a follow on to FDR's ridculous industrial organizations that gaves us the Where's the Beef advertisments case.
With all due respect to The Paper Chase the bar exam is the substantive authority. It may well be that the law school environment hones critical thinking and produces the best attorneys (at least it could if faculties weren't so heavily loaded with ideological practioners, and may do so in spite of this burden).
Finally, insofar as non-criminal appellate law, there is even less justification for state certification of practioners. (spoken like the civil equivalent of a jailhouse attorney that i am).
Brian
Yes, an applicant could submit an intelligence test result, but the h.r. person doesn't have to consider it. There's no box on the form for it, and I'm sure (s)he's been trained not to ask for it. There are problems like "did the person really take the test and get this result?" (the h.r. person has to do some research and make some calls), and especialy "is this a good test?" Because the company cannot require the test, it has probably made a fairly conscious decision not to try to answer that question. So there is no s.o.p. about how to handle the score. But there probably is an s.o.p. saying "don't take anyone without a degree unless we're desperate."
In any case, IQ tests have their own limitations. They don't measure persistence, drive, creativity, etc. Charles Peters, in the early days of the Washington Monthly, tried to help create an "alternative certification" industry which would involve a lot more than IQ tests. After Griggs, this became a fool's errand. At the present time, since there isn't much in the way of decent "alternative certification," it is often efficient for employers to fall back on the presence or absence of certain amounts and kinds of schooling.
Of course, this would change radically if the law were changed to force employers to "validiate" the presence of a degree the way they must now validate a pre-employment test. I.e. if the employer were required to show that the degree was directly necessary to the job, not just "people with college degrees tend to do better at this job than people without."
Your suggestion is often referred to as "race-norming." It was once legal and actually encouraged by many in the "civil rights community." But it has been illegal for over twenty years (because two people with the exact same qualifications would be treated differently solely because of their different ethnicities). At least, it's illegal to do it openly.
So let me amend that "many" to some. Since I am most familiar with the California program, which is the most liberal among rest regarding law office study, I didn't bother to reseach others states program.
That being said, my original point still stand. If it's "just" legal restriction, not market force, there should be more people take the law office study route in the jurisdicitons that allow it. Even if the California model become adopted nationwide, I really doubt there will be a flood of attorneys admitted this way.
Working in a county law library, I mostly work with solo and small law firm attorneys, plus increasing number of pre se/per pro/Self-representing litigants.(SRLs) For all the crapping about bad legal research skills of new law school grads, it's still much easier for me to work with them, compare to SRLs. That being said, most of SRLs legal need can be meet by a Legal document assistant. I don't know about their status in other jurisdiction.
http://www.calda.org
It's my understanding that employers can't give IQ tests in most circumstances because of the unequal impact it would have on the hiring of minorities. Didn't the Supreme Court even rule one couldn't require employees to have a high school degree because it would have an unequal impact on minorities? As Somin points out above, one could provide test scores without being prompted, but an employer who systematically favored applicants who provided standardized test scores which then resulted in lower minority representation would be asking for trouble.
Your point about few Californians pursuing 'law office study' cuts both ways. If few people pursue it,neither is there a great concern that it could be a source of inappropriate admissions to the bar, making one wonder why 43 states have discarded what was once the quintessential pathway to a career in law.
While I think society has become almost exclusively comfortable with the idea of college providing the credential for vocations such as the law and medicine, this is a trend conflicted with many public choice complications. It is of course fair to say that it nonetheless conveys some sense of market choice, but professional associations have been given a great deal of effective jurisdiction over professional education and bar admittance circumventing market choice.
To the extent that these are private self policing efforts rewarded by private designations, such as membership or certification by the ABA or the like, this is desirable. But the inevitable pathway of industrial organizations FDR style is to try to capture the public regulatory system thus conflating the private brand and professional regulation. The ABA has come to see itself as the gateway to the bar, the gateway to judgeships, the idelogical enforcement arm of the profession. Once obtaining essentially appointive political power to accomplish these ends, the meaning or trade association membership as a beacon of consumer preference is almost non-existant.
What then of California, where 'law office study' has not been foreclosed even during the assent of the ABA as quasi-public agency, and the paucity of those who actually pursue this alternative route. The elephant in the kitchen here is just the issue we've been discussing in talking about the theoretical 'worth' of a degree. Given federal loan guarantees that support the graduate education system, I would suggest that you cannot look at the numbers chosing law school vs. OJT bar education in California as any kind of reasonable test of the comparative utility of these approaches.
How many law and medical schools would there be charging the tuitions they charge if the federal government didn't guarantee repayment of $18,500 per year of tuition for any attendee. They also subsidize a portion of the interest for some attendees on means test basis, but the guarantees are available to anyone who attends law school and self evidently put the risk of economic failure for legal candidates on the government rather than on lenders or those pursuing the vocation -- or in the context of this thread on firms or consumers who eventually wish to hire these candidates.
If there were no federal loan guarantees I think it is virtually incontestable that a significantly larger fraction of bar candidates would follow the "law office study" pathway. That might or might not still be an insignificant number.
How might this affect your life at the library. Certainly those engaged in 'law office study' will have some background or perhaps novice mentorship with regard to approaching legal materials and citations; and/or their employment at the law office in the first place is based on apptitude or narrowly vocational credentials as a paralegal, the logically useful employment one pursues while engaged in 'law office study'. This is a distinction that your comparison of law school graduates and pro se practitioners (e.g., yours truly)leaves out.
I am quite sure that perhaps the most competent at using the library facilities are actually paralegals. This is true of other alogrithmitized non-intuitive filing systems created by the legal process such as the title records at the local registry of deeds. The people who know the system best are para-professionals whose work product is then transmitted to attorneys.
There are some attorneys and some citizens who familiarize themselves with these systems and can navigate them as well as curators and legal researchers. A bit of familiarization with the nature of legal citation does give a law school graduate a leg up, but as others have pointed out, it doesn't take 3 years (or 7 if you count undergraduate requirements), more like 3 days, to learn the ropes in most of these particularized environments.
White collar professions have no lock whatsoever on the lingo-ceiling that prevents easy entry into the profession either pro se, professional or para-professional basis. Try going to a counter at a traditional plumbing or electrical supply house and coming away with what you need if you can't speak the inside language. But this hegemony has been challenged by Home Depot and Lowes who put all this stuff on a shelf and you can pick it out by appearance and fit various bits together in the store. This hasn't resulted in the nation's housing stock caving in, nor has it resulted in much of a diminished market for professional services in this arena.
Take away the government support structure for legal education, any quasi-political positioning of the ABA as doorkeeper to education, admittance and appointment and then we can have a discussion about how people choose to enter the profession.
Brian
(—Gene Hoffman)
Correct.
The years of student docility & conformity required at college bureaucracies are a key screening process for those who will 'fit in' with corporate & government employment.
Years spent earnestly occupying a classroom desk pursuing highly subjective course requirements & behavioral rules —
are perfect conditioning for office cubicle-life.
For example, Harvard Law School taught me only a tiny fraction of what I know about law.
I was so ignorant of law when I graduated that I had to learn the law through the bar review course and in my district-court clerkship (which my Harvard Law credential got me).
My undergraduate institution, the University of Virginia, was better, but I still learned more history outside of class than in it, even though it has a well-ranked history department.
I am an engineer and am not qualified to be a draftsman. The skills required to create drawings, especially with today's sophisticated drawing packages (3d, parametric modeling, etc...) are significant and do not necessarily overlap with the skills required to design a system or component. The two skill sets are complementary and knowing one can help with the other. However, I can design a part, system, product, etc... without being able to create the drawings or models. Likewise, the draftsment who work for me do not NEED to understand the engineering, though it helps.
My education did prepare me for my work. While I may not use the exact equations or facts that I learned in my engineering classes, I use the concepts and methods I learned. While I do not do any electrical engineering, the basic concepts are useful to me when designing mechanical parts that interact with electrical equipment.
On the other hand, I also have an undergraduate economics degree and could have probably learned everything I needed for that in a year or two.
I did some research into job performance predictors and found that general intelligence is the best predictor of job performance - better than grades, experience, level of education, etc... No predictor is perfect and I believe that intelligence had a correlation of about .6, which is hardly perfect, but everything else was worse.
Ironically, I believe that college typically teaches behaviors that are not useful in a work environment. For example, in college one is supposed to study and work alone. Typically, collaboration is the exception and reliance on references is limited. Closed-book exams are exactly the opposite of how the real world works. I would never attempt to complete a design until I had both looked up and double-checked my own work AND had someone else check it. In addition, I am expected to "cheat" in the sense that is is far better to use existing designs or proven concepts than it is to create something new to do the same thing or to recreate something old on my own.
As far as docility goes, I am expected to be far more "docile" and conformant at work that I ever was at college. College is often a time when people experiment with lifestyle choices. The transition from college to life as a professional is probably harder than the transition from apprentice work or low-skill work would be.
I would also echo the comment that discussing college degrees as though they are homogenous is inaccurate. I attended two universities (graduate and undergraduate) and found that the programs were very different at the two universities and that even within a single university the degree programs are very different in character and quality.
EI