I wonder if it's coincidence or the start of a trend back to sanity about job qualifications. Ironically, by becoming almost ubiquitous, university education also becomes irrelevant.
If having a four year degree becomes just a checkbox, there will be easier and easier ways of getting that checkbox. There will be rent-seeking entities that will facilitate this like degree mills and dubious online programs. It no longer becomes a qualification that the person has gained any skills, but only that they were able to finance paying tens of thousands of dollars to participate in a few discussion threads.
It was only a matter of time for people to realise that requiring degrees for jobs that don't really need them is just cargo-culting.
It's not just degree mills. It's mainstream colleges and universities. They are all staring a demographic "enrollment cliff" in the face and are having to drop admissions standards to keep their enrollment numbers up. Academic requirements are going by the wayside; if you can't complete an assignment, you'll be given more time, or an alternative. Nobody fails anymore unless they just absolutely don't show up, schools can't afford to lose students.
Not all. I definitely believe large numbers of liberal arts schools are having problems. But my school (University of Waterloo) has only seen dramatic surges in enrolment over the past 5 years. They're putting up new buildings like crazy just to accommodate all of them! And we're not talking sports centres or rec complexes, we're talking about big lecture halls and buildings full of classrooms and study spaces!
We have a bimodal distribution. Elite universities whose prestige is already established have an "embarrassment of riches" in terms of applicant pool, whereas middling and low ranked universities without a moat are facing enrollment cliffs.
Applicants are trying to go big or go home (and learn online instead)
I don't know Waterloo's situation but I know that money for new buildings is largely decoupled from need for capacity and is mainly tied to government make-work projects. I remember during the 2008 "economic action plan" universities got all kinds of buildings. It was entirely because the government was giving free money away to stimulate growth.
I'd prefer police officers with EMT (and preferably paramedic) training to those with four-year sociology degrees.
Knowledge of DNA and computer forensic methods and necessities, though, would probably improve their chances of getting promoted, as would legal training. However, those skills could easily be learned at two-year community college progams.
All in all, I think this kind of focus would lead to a more professional police force.
Mixed feelings... police in the US are woefully/tragically undertrained relative to police in Europe. 3-4 months is typical for a police academy in the US. Plus 6 months or so with a field training officer for basic on-job training.
Compared to 2.5 years of the same in Germany.
College may not be the right answer, but the current system of very little training isn't working.
Being a cop in Germany is much easier and less risky job than in US, because they have 50% more cops per capita while having something like 15% the crime rate of US. This means that, as a very rough estimate, there is something like 16 times more crimes per cop in US than in Germany. This is made even worse by things like US criminal being much more insane and erratic than German ones (Germany has a more collectivist, order-oriented culture, and will institutionalize miscreants much faster and for much less serious offenses than US will), and case overload forcing US cops to focus on the worst cases and worst offenders first.
For this reason, more people in Germany will put up with strict credential requirements and low pay than in US. To make police force more professional in the US, we first need to stop most crime, and for that, we need to hire a lot of police (to bring the crimes-per-cop ratio closer to low crime countries), and massively increase incarceration of repeat offenders, who are responsible for the bulk of the crime. It will be extremely hard to both hire more police and also to make standards higher: you’ll end up with highly professional cops who are too busy to help you unless you’re being actively murdered.
Wild to suggest that the US's issue is not incarcerating enough people considering we are near the top of the global leaderboards on that front. Specifically in comparison to Germany, the incarceration rate is almost 8x higher in the US.
You are also ignoring how the unprofessional nature of police contribute to the problem. Their behavior creates an adversarial relationship with the public. This has all sorts of negative repercussions. It helps escalate crime because cops are now more dangerous and less predictable, so people will go to greater lengths to avoid arrest or interaction with police. It also makes the cops' jobs more difficult as the community becomes less likely to cooperate in stopping or preventing crime. Hiring more cops can make matters worse because it can necessitate lowering the bar to find enough people to hire leading to even less professional behavior. It also creates more interactions between police and the community which as I mentioned, is often an adversarial interaction due to this unprofessional behavior.
Simply hiring more cops and throwing more people in jail isn't going to fix things. That should be obvious because that is all we ever seem to attempt in the US and the situation isn't getting better.
> Wild to suggest that the US's issue is not incarcerating enough people considering we are near the top of the global leaderboards on that front. Specifically in comparison to Germany, the incarceration rate is almost 8x higher in the US.
Yes, we are not incarcerating enough people, as clearly evidenced by the fact that we have a lot of repeat criminals, who commit a lot more crime than Germans.
> You are also ignoring how the unprofessional nature of police contribute to the problem. Their behavior creates an adversarial relationship with the public. (…)
This is a problem, but it’s not what’s causing criminals to rob stores, carjack random people, or do drive by shootings. If we made US cops as professional as German cops, we’d still have huge crime problem. In fact, having grown up in Poland (which is very low crime society), my experience tells me that prosecuting and jailing criminals is significantly more important than professionalism of police force, as Polish cops are significantly less professional than American ones.
> Simply hiring more cops and throwing more people in jail isn't going to fix things. That should be obvious because that is all we ever seem to attempt in the US and the situation isn't getting better.
I strongly disagree. We did start mass incarceration around early-to-mid 1990, and it did, in fact, solve a lot of crime problems. As the percentage of population in prison steadily went up, the crime rate steadily went down. As we started reducing incarceration rates in early 2010s, the crime rate started going back up again, and this greatly accelerated starting from 2020, with the growth of anti-policing and anti-prosecution movements.
Just to emphasize this: the incarceration rate is down a lot from its peak in ~2010 or so. It’s down by more than a third. We no longer just throw people in jail, we do quite the opposite in fact, and the situation is getting worse than when we just jailed criminals.
I think that throwing more people in jail technically is a solution, but it's a very expensive one that does nothing to address the reason why people are committing crimes.
There are many factors at play, and I won't pretend to know them all, but most people turn to crime out of despiration. Throwing people in jail for more minor offences and giving longer sentences will not make repeat offenders less desperate. Not to mention the fallibility of the justice system, and the ramifications harsher sentences has on people who were falsley imprisoned.
As a previous commenter said, the US has tried the "tough on crime" stance many times in its history (e.g. war on drugs, Bill Clinton), and while it is an effective strategy for easy results to report in time for your next campaign, the problem has not been solved, merely swept under the rug.
I personally am glad that the US is at least attempting to find a solution that addresses the root cause rather than the symptoms of crime. But I would agree that we have not found that effective solution yet.
> I think that throwing more people in jail technically is a solution, but it's a very expensive one
It's not, compared to the costs of the crime. Tangible costs of crime are big enough, and the intangible costs are bigger still. Cost of imprisonment is really nothing compared to the economic and social damage done by repeat offenders.
There is also big heterogeneity in the cost of imprisonment. Places with high prison costs could just send their prisoners to places with low costs. The reason it is not happening is, I suspect, precisely to argue for reduction of imprisonment, based on its high cost.
> that does nothing to address the reason why people are committing crimes. There are many factors at play, and I won't pretend to know them all, but most people turn to crime out of despiration. Throwing people in jail for more minor offences and giving longer sentences will not make repeat offenders less desperate.
This is very much false, and in fact, it is honestly quite insulting to tens of millions of desperately poor Americans who'd never turn to crime, or, for that matter, to billions of people in foreign countries, who are much poorer than pretty much everyone in US.
Nobody in US is actually so desperately poor that they have no choice but to steal basics. Supermarkets here don't put bread behind locks, they put alcohol and Tide, because it's easy to pawn off on black market. Carjackers are not desperate for transportation. Urban shooters are not desperate for places to practice target shooting. Assholes setting sawzall against your catalytic converters are not starving contractors unable to land a job.
It boggles my mind to see people suggesting that crime in US committed out of desperation. This might be believable if we talked about crime in the slums of Lagos or Sao Paulo, but not about the types of crime and its perpetrators as it actually takes place in US. I grew in a place that was (and continues to be) much poorer than the American crime hot spots (or, really, almost entirety of the country), and crime was basically nonexistent.
> As a previous commenter said, the US has tried the "tough on crime" stance many times in its history (e.g. war on drugs, Bill Clinton), and while it is an effective strategy for easy results to report in time for your next campaign, the problem has not been solved, merely swept under the rug.
If the strategy effectively and persistently reduces crime, how is it not solving the problem?
> I personally am glad that the US is at least attempting to find a solution that addresses the root cause rather than the symptoms of crime. But I would agree that we have not found that effective solution yet.
With this attitude you'll keep searching forever, and always remain mystified as to what makes teenagers in some of the wealthiest and most full of opportunity places in the world so desperate that they are forced to steal cars at a gunpoint, only to joyride for a few hours and then abandon in a ditch. Is it hunger? Lack of shelter? We might never know.
So, you’re arguing that Americans are just more prone to crime than Germans or Brits or Canadians? And that out incarceration rate naturally should be orders of magnitude higher than peer nations?
Sorry, I don’t buy that. There has to be something else at play.
It’s very difficult to compare numbers between countries like this because of different definitions. In the US are INS or FBI agents cops, what about secret service agents dealing with counterfeiters or protecting the president? How about detectives, dispatchers, part timers, managers etc. This is why you will see wildly different number of how many cops there are in the US generally it’s between 600k and 1 million but there’s many different counts.
When comparing things to Germany simply don’t see a 1:1 fit for what’s a US law enforcement officer.
There is an active political element in the U.S. that believes that “defunding” police is the answer. While they may have some valid arguments, they don’t see things from your perspective at all.
We had city-burning protests for months for a career criminal high on illegal drugs committing crime. In a few days after, there were worldwide protests and political statements (GF portraits on the Berlin Wall?!?). Those that support this obvious push towards more chaos and police oversight have deep pockets and international reach.
Real change in the US comes from tragedy and money.
Due process started with the liquor store rightly calling the police about receiving a counterfeit bill from an intoxicated individual and the police questioning the suspect. When your culture tells you to resist, and you do, you have given up due process.
the society you get by deciding that tired jocks with guns and a 2-4x of baseline rate of domestic violence and an unstoppable union should get to decide what due process is bad. law enforcers should have to follow the law. also I am willing to bet you don’t know much about due process because there is no way you’re an attorney but I’ll eat my shoe if you show me where you’re licensed to practice law.
If they could put the money and time they spent on college into actual on-the-job training/academy maybe it would. State law enforcement academies are really only using college degrees as a filter that the person is capable of attending class, learning, and passing exams. That's what graduating high school used to show. But now nobody doesn't graduate high school, unless they drop out.
Also, tragically, people go to college wanting to get into law enforcement are working at cross purposes to what police departments want to hire: less intelligent cops.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/too-smart-to-be-a-cop/
I disagree. Having done a minor in criminal justice, officers, lawmakers, and others involved in the justice system could absolutely benefit from exposure to sociology and academic CJ. The American "justice" system is a travesty and continues following methods that we've known not to work for many decades. To fix the system we need the folks inside it to understand the system.
Part of that is education. Part of that is hiring officers who understand the system and want to improve and protect rather than a jobs system for those who want to exercise power over others.
The US has a fairly large political contingent that believes in retributive justice, not rehabilitative or restorative justice. In a lot of places the police have a culture of the "warrior mentality" and well-meaning new officers are either brought in line or driven out of the profession. This is compounded by the huge numbers of private and illegal/black market firearms on the street which make policing extremely dangerous. The combination reinforces the warrior and the retributive justice cultures alike.
Note I don’t believe policing is in even the top 25 most dangerous jobs in the USA. I’m not sure the “extremely “ dangerous applies when driving a truck or most construction jobs are more dangerous.
This is similar to the issue with statistics around shark attacks. Sure, policing overall is pretty safe because 99.9% of the time you're not trying to arrest an armed and dangerous suspect. Sharks are safe too because 99.9+% of the time people aren't even in the ocean where they might encounter sharks.
But if it's your job to go out into the ocean and interact with sharks face-to-face, those encounters are way more dangerous than the general statistics would have us believe. Same goes for police when they have to deal with an active shooter situation. That's what I mean by "extremely dangerous". Compared to Canada or most of Europe, the US has vastly more active shooter situations, and at least some of that can be attributed to the availability of firearms.
> St Albans Magistrates’ Court found her guilty, under the Communications Act (2003), of using a public communications network to “cause annoyance, inconvenience and anxiety”.
Fortunately, she eventually won on appeal and her conviction was overturned, but the process itself was the punishment.
Police need less power, not more sociology degrees.
>> To fix the system we need the folks inside it to understand the system.
Nope. The American justice system does not control itself. It is bound by laws and codes of practice dictated to it by outsiders, those good-idea people who's entire understanding of law comes from a highschool history or civics class they barely remember. It is as bad as it is because the general public honestly want it that way. Rough and violent justice is baked into American culture as much as guns and alcohol.
>>Part of that is education.
I agree, but it isn't the people in the system that need an education. It is the voting public outside who need the better understanding.
Every community meeting, every political rally, where crime is used as a wedge. Every pundit who says that person X is "soft" on crime and person Y is "hard" as if that makes any difference. Every idiot out there who wants drug dealers locked up for life yet is unable to address their own addition to prescriptions. Every armchair lawyer who will spend hours outlining how judges should rule on hypothetical cases, but has never spent a day inside an actual courtroom. Every idiot who thinks his speeding ticket as important as a murder trial. And every one of the to-be sovereign citizens at YouTube university. After than, then we go after the flat earthers.
> community meeting, every political rally, where crime is used as a wedge
Have you been to these? I have, in states red and blue. It's rarely a rah rah. Instead, people have complaints about specific categories of crimes, usually ones relevant to the community. The question is less locking people up than catching them. Policing. Sentencing is a separate system from policing.
Again, not in reality. Absent unlimited resources, street-level police determine which crimes are "policed" based on the severity of associated punishments. Change the punishment for drug dealing from a prison sentence to a minor fine and police will all but stop hunting drug dealers. Start sentencing jaywalkers to prison time and you will see cops at every pedestrian crossing. Sentencing is the guide by which police determine which laws the public most wants to see enforced.
I don't need police to be highly educated necessarily. I do need police to be psychologically balanced and show calm restraint. Is there a way we can put that in the job requirements and use it as hiring criteria?
I'd say that's part initial screening, part training, and part willingness to fire people that turn out to be unsuitable. All of that is helped by having access to a broader candidate pool, such as by not imposing arbitrary education requirements.
Something related that's often discussed in law enforcement and military is the idea of being able to hire directly into some upper specialist positions without the person having to rise through the ranks. This is sort of the opposite, admitting that some senior positions do not need an arbitrary field experience requirement. In both cases, it's about better matching the requirements and subsequent training and career progression to what's actually needed for the job. This kind of rationalization is the upside of a tight labor market.
Systematically, I think the answer is no. Whether or not this is a encouraging or discouraging answer depends on the extent to which you expect systems to solve human problems.
Astounding to me how deep that movie was for a kids movie, how DIFFERENT it is from the types of morals and values that are pushed in modern films, and how well it holds up today.
unironically yes? if a job "requires" a BA/BS, but realistically could be done by the median highschool graduate, that's four years off the person's life for no real reason.
of course, there are other benefits of higher education. but credential creep itself is a signal of waste, not progress.
Did it ever represent progress? What I was saying is that the increased baseline of education for the populace is progress, not that a degree represents progress itself
if a job has specific knowledge and skills requirements then it needs to have an objective test that people pass to be able to do the job.
that is the only way to eliminate the systemic discrimination that the university system and degree requirements propagate.
almost all serious jobs already have objective skills tests and licensing requirements for employment: doctors, lawyers, financial services, heavy equipment operators, etc, etc, etc.
adding degree requirements on top of those licensing requirements cannot possibly add any additional benefit but it is obviously discriminatory against many marginalized groups.
I find this to be a slightly weird argument. Med school degrees do have varying levels of quality. Moreover, in the US, you cannot be licensed without residency -- residency is practicing under supervision, essentially a skills-based set of active tests. Then after the residency program many physicians go for board certification, which is additional study and tests (run by a professional cabal that makes a ton of money off of questions about beaver fever, for instance).
Well, anyhow, you already do require skills-based assessment if you are seeing licensed physicians in the US. They don't let ppl practice with only book learning.
Hard agree, I'd rather not leetcode-ify* the health system. Nor do I want to see swaths of businesses dedicated to cracking the medical leetcode interview.
*because it really feels as if some companies translate leetcode skills to actual skills
getting a degree is nothing more than passing a series of tests over a period of time. medical licensing is residency, exams, board certifications, etc. it is all tests. the question is who is setting the rules for those tests and whether or not private corporations get to charge you 100s of thousands of dollars to take them.
medicine is way out of my field, so i don't have personal experience and can only go on what i have read, but i would guess that it is a lot like most other highly specialized fields: pre-med is a waste other than basic bio/chem, medical school is mostly information you will never use, residency is where you learn how to actually do the job, and then you get into a specialty and learn that specialty, and what you learn for your specialty is the only thing you really use.
Soooo...education beyond the 3rd grade is irrelevant?
I know I'm being snarky, but c'mon man! It wasn't that long ago the same could be said (and was said) for education past the 3rd grade, then the discussion moved to education past the 8th grade, and now it's moved to education past the 12th grade. It's just a rehash of the same, tired argument justifying a poorly-educated populace which makes for a poorly-educated electorate, which tends to be more susceptible to populism.
The demand for higher education has outstripped the supply of students capable of making real use of it, and so standards have been lowered. The value of the education provided — and the value of the degree received — has dropped precipitously.
Up until the 50s/60s, education past the 12 grade was the exception, not the rule. A degree was valuable because not everyone had the capacity to attain it.
I’m just going to say it - the statement “ The demand for higher education has outstripped the supply of students capable of making real use of it” is an extremely ignorant and short-sighted view of education. I expect better from the folks on HN.
I strongly suspect the issues you're referring to are much more an issue with attitude and mindset, rather than directly with education. I think there are probably much more efficient ways to adjust attitude and mindset than broad-based college education.
I'm glad I got a broad-based education. It was definitely the right thing for me, but I think it's a hammer being applied to too many problems that aren't roughly nail-shaped.
I think a college education is a great screening tool for determining levels of conscientiousness, ability to communicate, and ability to follow directions. All great things. My worst interactions with police officers all involved individuals that were low on these skills.
A lot of that can go out the window when they are placed in the position of power (rather than the professor) and are surrounded by existing officers. If I remember right, there are some studies about police group dynamics as a factor in the type and severity of force used (group size was positively correlated with level of force).
It's not clear to me that a bunch of psychology grads would naturally be better cops. If anything, police forces would be better investing in more internal training and apprenticeship that's actually related to policing.
Nobody said anything about what kind of degree let alone psychology
Not only does a criminal justice degree already exist but we could even introduce a new BA degree in policing with the kind of training that would result in an improved police force
People with university educations can very much abuse their power. Thinking otherwise is a liberal fantasy, much like the formerly popular meme that China would magically liberalize its political system because of globalization.
Yes? Political liberalism goes well beyond the narrow understanding that exists within the US, wherein the label has grown to be largely incoherent/redefined to mean whatever is mainstream within the Democratic Party.
Police need to be more highly trained -- I wouldn't equate that 1:1 with holding a degree.
U.S. training requirements for police are state-level matters sometimes augmented by local requirements; none of the state requirements, as I recall, are comparable to the more stringent standards required in many western European nations.
Getting some 4 year degree does not equate to 'highly educated'. College is an extension of high school for most americans, who didn't learn much there either.
>Also, many other countries require officers to have a university degree - or equivalent - before joining the police, but in the US most forces just require the equivalent of a high-school diploma
>Maria Haberfeld, professor of police science at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, says: "Some police forces in Europe have police university, where training lasts for three years - for me the standouts are Norway and Finland."
the solution is just to fire bad cops. The future bad cops will get the picture. no way to really pre screen cops other than keeping out known criminals.
I don't think there's anything sane about the Police reducing their job requirements when we see how ripe for abuse the position is and how unstable it has become in the US based on similar reductions.
I also don't really understand how university education is "almost ubiquitous"; I see that the prevalence of Bachelor's degrees amongst adults is under 40%. Is the claim that the demographic of 21-32 would have a percentage like 70% or what?
College degrees don’t seem to have done anything to make the police less abusive. Why waste money on them when we could instead give police better police training and resources?
Very idealistic to think that money would be reallocated to give police better training and resources, unless you mean military grade equipment for responding to domestic disputes.
Domestic disputes are one of the most likely calls to result in an injury to or death of an officer. I sure wouldn't want to show up to a couple fighting in a bad neighborhood without backup and guns because some suburbanite is squeamish about violence. Especially for like $50k a year or less.
> Domestic disputes are one of the most likely calls to result in an injury to or death of an officer.
I don't see that the FBI stats support that claim, and even if, the rate is still comparatively low, and skews very heavily towards the US South (which is only 38% of the population, but has very high gun ownership and gun violence rates):
Police officers' risk of on-the-job death in most years averages #14 .. #18, behind logging, fishing, farming, construction, heavy manufacturing, trucking [0].
From the 2021 data ('FBI LEOKA') [1] for on-the-job police officer deaths reported by 7886 LE agencies:
• 73 were Feloniously killed (only 7 total in responding to all disorders/disturbances (e.g., disorderly subjects, fights, domestic disturbances/violence))
- 61 of those 73 were killed by firearms
- 44 of those 73 were in the South
• plus 56 Accidental deaths (32 of which were crashes).
(If we check individual case reports at [2], we can see how many of the 7 total responding to disorders/disturbances were Domestic.)
• Assaults: [3] 43,649 officers assaulted in 2021
- 28.6% (12,463) occurred while officers responded to [all] disturbance calls
- 35% sustained injuries
- 49.5% occurred in the South
And for 2022, FBI releases preliminary LEOKA statistics for 2022 to October [4].
The latest years for which I can easily find all the detailed LEOKA Tables are 1996..2019 [5] e.g. Table 24: "Circumstances encountered by victim officer upon arrival at the scene of the incident".
[2]: Comprehensive data tables about these events and brief narratives describing the fatal attacks are available on the Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) portion of the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer at https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/
>>> Police officers' risk of on-the-job death in most years averages #14 .. #18, behind logging, fishing, farming, construction, heavy manufacturing, trucking
The difference is that everyone who works on those jobs has roughly the same risk. A cop who has to respond to a disturbance in a bad area is fat more at risk than someone in the crime lab or the evidence room. If you look at the risk of injury to cops who are out on patrol all day, it's more dangerous.
Sure but can you cite or estimate more accurate stats?
I read ~68% of officers do patrol, so as a decent approximation that's most of them.
I take your point about cities/areas/zipcodes/states. To me one pattern that keeps jumping out is that the South (LA, MS, GA, TN) has incredible levels of (gun) violence.
Ideally we could quote police officer injury and death rates, per-capita population, by region, by circumstances of incident.
No, sorry. But I don't know if the stats would fully capture what I think the difference is. Like, I remember a case of a cop who shot a teenager who was running away from him in an alley way at night. I think he had been armed but threw the gun away, not sure now. But the discussion about these incidents usually lead to the stats about how being a cop is not that dangerous in aggregate. That may be be true, but the distribution of danger is very peaky for cops and it's not just a question of whether they are patrol cops, but its also a question of the circumstances they're in in a given moment (which I didn't really mention in my previous post).
If you're called to investigate a group of armed young men in an alleyway at night, and you end up chasing one of them in the darkness, alone, you are in far more danger than the stats would imply.
From brief searching & skimming, I'm seeing that US police kill around 1000 people per year, while around 250 cops are shot. I deliberately compare shot to killed because police are usually far more accurate and effective at shooting than the average criminal. Needless to say this doesn't include all the time that police are shot at or attacked with other weapons that would justify shooting. So while yes they are not in as much danger generally as the people who attack them, it's certainly not a trivial amount of danger either.
I've thought about this a fair amount. I think a big difference is psychological. I've done logging (just family gather firewood for winter stuff, not commercially). It can be scary, but the trees and machinery bare no malice towards you, and you can minimize risks just by being alert and understanding the risks. That is, a lot of injuries are 'your fault'.
In contrast, in policing people really do shoot at you, they run to evade capture, etc. Even if the total risks of logging are higher I can imagine it is very hard to treat the risks in police work in the same dispassionate way the logger does. Tree leaning while cutting it vs suspect's hands maybe going towards their pocket. Even if the stats in those two situations are identical (I suspect they are not), I think very different emotions are going to be triggered, and without a lot of training those emotions are going to make situations go sideways either at the time or later (treating every person you meet as dangerous scum, etc). You don't hate the trees, you don't fear walking amongst them when not cutting them, you don't want to cut them a bit harder next time to teach them a lesson, and so on.
Anyway, I think all of that results in the 'feel' of police work in regards to danger to be quite different than logging or fishing, and ignoring that will lead to the police acting in ways we really don't want.
> In contrast, in policing people really do shoot at you
Definitely, some people do. Some don't. Some are trying to commit suicide-by-cop. Some are unarmed and not even a threat. Your post makes it sound like anytime an officer decides force is necessary, that it necessarily must be. Let alone, lethal force. Sometimes police get that determination wrong, whether by accident or intent. Sometimes police abuse qualified immunity. This stuff almost never goes before a jury, and on the occasions it does, if there's no bodycam and no other narrative (i.e. the other person's dead), unlikely to result in a conviction.
Angelo Quinto [0] was an unarmed, non-violent, non-criminal, 30-yo mentally-ill Filipino-American veteran killed in his own home by Antioch PD, by kneeling on his neck, while handcuffed. His mother was the person who called 911, and noone asked for the police, she only asked for medical. He apparently wasn't even committing any crime, just having a psychiatric emergency. But the police killed him.
Antioch PD didn’t disclose Quinto’s death to the public for nearly a month, then only after public requests. And there's no bodycam of his death. None of them were fired or charged, and there's no public mention of disciplinary actions. In response Gov Newsom signed eight police reform bills.
The level and frequency of police use-of-force in the US is also too high. It needs to be reduced.
> 'feel' of police work in regards to danger to be quite different than logging or fishing, and ignoring that will lead to the police acting in ways we really don't want.
Equally, ignoring all the above also leads to bad consequences too.
I'm sure the psychological factor is huge. That said, I did come across a few relevant stats [1]:
>>> 2,744 officers were assaulted with firearms; 6.1% of these officers were injured.
1,180 officers were assaulted with knives or other cutting instruments; 9.7% of these officers were injured.
The remaining 11,760 officers were assaulted with other types of dangerous weapons; 16.8% of these officers were injured.
That same year (2021) US police killed 1048 people - less then half the number of cops that were attacked with guns, and less than 1/10th of the number attacked with other dangerous weapons.
I wonder how this compares with European countries, i.e. the ratio of people killed by police to how often they police are attacked in a serious way.
True, but it’s only idealistic because nobody is seriously talking about it. The two options seem to either be defund or militarize. If more people talk about sensible options regularly then they won’t seem like pipe dreams.
In any case the point here is that college degrees clearly don’t serve as great police training.
There are people seriously talking about it. E.g. the current President of the United States has been talking about better police training since his campaign, and has issued executive orders touching on it. It's just kind of boring, so it doesn't end up in the news and doesn't go anywhere with the legislature.
(edit: I don't want to litigate whether POTUS's preferences for better training would actually improve things, I only want to point out he's been talking about it).
Domestic Disputes in America very often involves guns now. So yeah it seems like if you were a copy and you were told to handle a bunch of yelling from an apartment upstairs in the US, you might want to go with at least a vest on, if not helmet.
> College degrees don’t seem to have done anything to make the police less abusive
Sorry, but can we try to talk in facts?
In Canada, since 2000, there have been 704 police-involved deaths [0].
Let's take a conservative population of 30M for Canada (which will inflate this stat) - then we get:
704 / 22 / 30M => 1 in 1 million Canadians die at the hands of police per year
On the other hand, in the US, there were 1022 police shootings in 2022 alone [1].
1022 / 331M => 3 in 1 million Americans are SHOT by police per year.
There's already a >3x discrepancy while using only US police shootings vs all Canadian police-involved deaths, and I'm sure the police killed plenty of people with tasers, beatings, and negligence in the US in 2022 too.
So, in general, I disagree with your claim that university education hasn't done anything to make Canadian police better than US police, and it's unlikely you'll change that opinion unless you bring some statistics into this conversation.
Erm, your argument has nothing to do with college degrees at all. You’re just saying Canadian police shoot less people than American police, which nobody is disputing.
> your argument has nothing to do with college degrees at all
What I'm saying is pretty obvious, but I'll spell it out for you.
1. Canadian and American cultures are extremely homogenous
2. Canadian and American police have few differences, but a critical one is the Canadian-only requirement of university degrees
3. With no other clearly-defined drivers of police culture differentiation across the border, we see that US police are probably 4-8x more lethal than Canadian police per capita
So, since the police is clearly not about to properly train their people, let's not dismiss the value of a university degree as a filter, since it appears from a high level view that a university degree could serve to make a police officer 1/5th as likely to kill a citizen compared to a diploma.
Will you propose a different reason why US police are so much deadlier, related to crime statistics or otherwise, or will you just continue to say "the police should train their people", not hold them to account for not training their people, and also excuse them for dropping educational requirements that served in lieu of that training?
So, you are actually claiming that the reason American police shoot more people than Canadian police is because Canadian police have college degrees and American police do not?
Even if your premises were correct, it wouldn’t be worth trying to debate that further.
Hint: They aren’t. Do some research on what percentage of US police have college degrees, and what percentage of Canadian police have college degrees. It isn’t what you think.
Also, you might want to look at the demographics of who police shoot in the US, and inform yourself of the differences between Canadian gun culture and the US.
> You might want to look at the demographics of who police shoot in the US
Canadian police are also quite racist, but if you're arguing that "less educated American cops are more racist", that tracks pretty nicely with "please don't accept less educated cops"
> you are actually claiming that the reason American police shoot more people than Canadian police is because Canadian police have college degrees and American police do not?
Do you have a different explanation?
> Do some research on what percentage of US police have college degrees
According to [0], the breakdown of US officer max education of no college/college diploma/undergrad/grad is:
* 49/20/25/5
> and what percentage of Canadian police have college degrees
And, according to [1], for Canadian officers, it's:
* 19/51/29/1.6
Quite a disparity. Especially when you consider sources like [2][3], which argue that:
> "Studies have found that a small proportion of police officers – about 5% – produce most citizen complaints, and officers with a two-year degree are about half as likely to be in the high-rate complaint group"
Overall, I believe there's lots of evidence suggesting more educated police are better police and citizens, and none suggesting the opposite - that less educated police are better.
Across the board, Canadian police are significantly better educated, with the exception of less Graduated degrees.
Across the board, Canadian police are less deadly to their citizens.
Not a coincidence - go ahead and say some more stupid shit though.
This butchering of statistical reasoning is so poor I have to assume it is a troll
But in case it’s genuine, consider vast differences in gun ownership, homicide rate, and… honestly so many other things it’s just annoying to list them.
Gun ownership is about 32% of individuals in USA vs 25% of individuals in Canada.
Homicide rate is about 2.5x higher in the US, which means US cops are outperforming this statistic vs US civilians.
> so many other things
It's not just annoying to list them, it's ridiculous; these countries are the exact same place. Across the board, everything you can think of has a lot of statistical homogeneity between these places. But Canadian cops are way better educated, and kill way less.
Around the world, cops that are better educated kill way less.
So why exactly are people excusing reductions in education requirements for police? It makes no sense. There's no supporting evidence that that's a good choice, and literal mountains showing that it's a bad one.
Your analysis is just dumb. You’re implying this is the only difference. You’re implying the entire outcome difference could be due to this one variable. You have shown no evidence to suggest this relationship exists at all. Like, for example looking at other countries. You’re implying that one thing has to account for the entire effect as a linear relationship by saying homicide rate being 2.5x is not important or that they’re “over performing in spite of it”. But you want one? Fine. Cops killed on duty. About 10x in the US. That settles your desire for a linear relationship on a compelling alternative story. Is that actually a sufficient analysis? No.
You get an F for intro to stats. And an F- for being confidently wrong.
There is no “excusing” reductions in education. You have not demonstrated a relationship between these two things as important.
Crime rates, prevalence of firearms, etc are major differences which could account for the discrepancy. Many police in the US are required to have 60 credits minimum in college education (associates degree equivalent).
If you want to really look into this, legitimately, the best thing to do would be to compare use police to each other based on education. This is likely hard to do. However, state-level requirements and deaths could be compared between states with similar crime/murder rates.
That's not a very good argument - those guns are concentrated in the hands of about 32% of the US population [0], whereas in Canada it's probably closer to 25% [1]. [1] says "[t]he overall rate of firearm ownership is at least 241 per 1,000 population and is comparable to ownership rates in other countries where hunting is a significant activity"
Compare Canada to Vermont, NH, Wisconsin, Montana and Idaho and see if your difference still holds. USA is a big place, with very different cultures and outcomes. Once you compare Canada to states that are culturally like Canada, your university hypothesis doesn't look to be correct.
Can you provide more sources that show Police education by state? While I don't disagree with the premise you are suggesting in and of itself, the link you've provided is entirely insufficient to make the calculations about police education and per capita police violence rate
I found [0], which in Appendix F has a state-by-state breakdown for only some states. Cross referencing it with your data source is useless, all the top states for per-capita police killings have their data omitted from that table.
Tangentially related, at my current job we do not filter candidates by certain "top schools" and it has lead to the most diverse (ethnic, gender, vocational background, social economic, nationality, etc.) team of software engineers I've ever worked on. This is in sharp contrast to all my previous jobs where they consistently filter by a list of schools. Obviously this is not a silver bullet but it's quite shocking to realize how many really qualified candidates (and now amazing coworkers) are filtered out that way. We still have engineers from Berkeley, the Ivies, etc. but our most common school is SJSU and this is the best team I've ever worked on in terms of talent, cohesiveness, and kindness.
I'm clearly naive and haven't worked closely enough to filtering stage of of the hiring process, but nevertheless.. I'm shocked to hear that there was a deliberate and explicit filtering by a list of "top schools. An implicit look at the school and some dose of bias, okay sure, I could see it, but an explicit filter? Wow.
There is a reason why in America there is an incredible focus on getting into certain schools, and follow-up obsession about what school you went to afterwards. There's a lot of 'brand name' focus and historically these schools have offered networking opportunities that far outweigh the actual academic quality (at the undergrad level). I always found it bizarre coming from a country where there isn't some idea of an ivy league-set of schools.
In some industries that's the norm. I did my MBA at Oxford (which, at least at the time, was not well-known for its MBA program). A recruiter at an investment bank told me that, since Oxford wasn't on their list of target schools for post-MBA hiring, they wouldn't even look at my CV until and unless they were unable to fill their associate-level positions with people from those target schools.
I've seen this in the startup ecosystem; it's a prestige game. When I was applying to jobs last year I would see startups brag on their websites about how many MIT, Harvard, Berkeley, etc grads they had. The most egregious was a startup that had a "select your school" dropdown that was basically the US News top 20 CS schools followed by "other"
It's a challenge. I get over 1000 applicants for every position, I can't read every resume and use a few filters to get a subset to read, but it's a disjunction (top 50 school OR company advanced in our field OR specific technology names).
This is standard across the world, in professional and engineering jobs. Hiring can be filtered by where you work, what your major is, what school you went to. Not all jobs or education are made equal. Its not what I'd do, but saying, we'll only consider candidates with CS degrees from these top 25 schools seem like a valid strategy to recruiting. Esp. if you consider their professors can be renowned in certain research topics.
That's not true. I worked for a big tech company with a large European presence and they 100% heavily factored in the prestige of what university you went into for hiring. Also, they do this with career fairs/college hiring - they aren't sending college recruiters to a community college, they're sending them to MIT, Oxford, Stanford, Yale, Harvey Mudd, etc.
If you work for an American company, you usually get the American experience. Local companies tend to be more in sync with the local culture.
One thing I remember from Finland is people who went to a prestigious foreign university and then returned home without work experience complaining how difficult it is to find a job. In some fields, a fresh graduate without real professional experience beyond internships is already a bit suspicious, because the Finnish system encourages starting your career before graduating. Finding job opportunities is difficult, because you don't have any professional contacts. And while recruiters recognize that you went to a reputable university, they don't know what to expect from you.
And if you went to a school like Harvey Mudd, which isn't really known outside the US, your situation is even worse. Because they don't know the school, recruiters may assume that you got your degree from a for-profit diploma mill and ignore your application.
I agree that things will be more localized depending on the company. But good recruiters should know what schools are good, but they should also be able to assess a resume that doesn't have an elite school attached to it. Obviously this doesn't always happen, but it should in practice.
It's really hard to meaningfully evaluate college new grad resumes en masse. They all have the same useless class projects and an impossible-to-judge GPA.
Unless you spend an hour doing a tech screen for each person, they just all look identical. I don't endorse a strict filter, but I understand why people do it. Top colleges filter for something meaningful for entrance criteria, and it's easy to take advantage of their filtering.
This is the norm in law firm hiring. Top firms don't look outside of a handful of schools. Good firms consider graduates from 1-2 dozen schools. And legal academia is at least as elitist — something like half of all law professors graduated from one of four schools. It's great for groupthink!
I am not aware of any hard data on it, but observationally, the degree to which people care seems to vary greatly by location in the US. The interest in "top schools" seems highest on the East coast.
University education has a been a "baseline" to determine qualified candidates. It also sorta implies broadened horizons, overall mature thought process, and several other qualities that are desirable the advisors/staffers.
What other alternatives exists to University education that impart the same level of knowledge and understanding to an individual that can be consistently measured?
If education is expensive, then making it less expensive seems to be the natural solution than eliminating its requirement. Seems this is another virtue signaling in the name of equity that is taking the country back than forward. Reminds me of UCs' eliminating SAT in the name of equity, or how Palo Alto and Culver City (both in California) eliminated AP (Advanced Placement) courses because not everyone can take those.
Work experience. Even the federal government mostly recognizes enough years of work experience as equivalent to an undergraduate degree, although the paygrade specs tend to want a 2-1 ratio (i.e. 8 years of work experience is considered equivalent to an undergraduate degree). It's hard to articulate many position-relevant benefits of an undergraduate education that people won't also gain from sufficient years working in the field.
It is rare to gain relevant work experience without having a basic framework for the said work, and consistency to measure that basic framework from a pool of candidates, both which come from college/university education.
Equivalency can be established for senior positions, not entry level ones. I assume the staffers do have entry level positions. Can a plumber or an electrician claim to possess experience to become a staffer? I doubt it.
What is going to happen is most staffing positions will be filled by senior work equivalency, while entry level positions will be eliminated. Fast forward a few decades, and there will be no eligible candidates for staffer positions.
Honestly, tradework like plumbing or electrical might be a surprisingly good qualification for entry-level congressional staff positions. Project management, scheduling, finance, and perhaps most importantly dealing with (sometimes pissed off) customers/constituents and the tradeoffs of what is possible, versus feasible, versus affordable.
Realistically a lot of the function of undergraduate degrees (in fields without specific technical education expectations) is to filter for people who have a basic ability to plan and complete work, meet requirements, etc. A huge range of entry-level jobs require these same skills. Many high-school educated office assistants have delivered larger projects under more pressure than a typical college graduate, and usually gained more applied knowledge in business/public administration while doing so.
The main function that degrees tend to offer here is just easy comparability, but I think practical experience hiring in many fields shows that college degrees do not actually reflect the level of consistency in outcomes that hiring managers wish they did. College degrees do have some advantage, and not requiring them will probably mean that you interview more candidates to find a fit, but I don't think either of those effects are as big as you might think.
For any hiring, there is required to be a minimum baseline. That has been college education so far, since it yields consistent and repeatable results (less work for hiring managers when they know someone has a 4 year engineering degree, as opposed to someone who has been educated in the school of life, don't you think?)
However way you look at it, hiring managers are going to require some baseline. What that baseline should be is debatable, and you can actually expand it to include trades like plumbing and electrical (many requirements do that).
But removing the college education requirement entirely is basically (a) increasing the burden on hiring manager, and (b) solving the wrong problem.
The real problem highlighted by the article is cost of college education, which needs to be addressed. Instead the proposal is let's hire highschool dropouts.
Let me ask this -- if college education is made affordable, will your position still be the same?
I'm not talking about positions that require a 4-year education in a technical field like engineering, they're a fairly different situation. What you see in areas like government roles are positions that require any 4-year degree, but most applicants will probably have a liberal arts degree. It's not that these degrees offer nothing of value, but the hiring manager isn't expecting any particular baseline education beyond reading and writing anyway.
I tend to think that more of the problem here is romanticization of congressional staffers. While there are positions that rely on more background knowledge like policy analysis, a lot of congressional staff members are essentially just customer service representatives and learn most of what they need to know on the job. Anyone who can keep track of a few different things and deal with customers should be a good fit.
I disagree, it is the baffling romantization of plumbers and tradesmen as some kind of a social panacea that is the problem. Here you have already predefined for yourself what plumbers are and how they should function, and so you employ this biased construction of plumbers for your post, where it is nothing but fantasy.
Don't be too hard on yourself though, you are only subject to the current shibboleths of pining for these fantastical tradesmen (possibly a result of some kind of desire for a safe simplicity), and so you only regurgitate these popular sentiments (that feel so good!) without being able to consciously check your delusions.
A University education is not the only valid signal, but it is one of the best signals that is widely accessible. Going through public K-12 and then a State University is a very paved path.
There's a lot of ways to begin lowering the cost of University education. Some of it relays on students being able to make good decisions. Students in general have been preferring schools with lots of expensive services and facilities, and schools have been increasing their tuition to pay for it. Other aspects would be to fight administrative overhead creep that is well documented.
There's more radical ways of handling it. Price limits tied to state/federal funding. Restructuring student loans so that the Federal Government is the buyer instead of the student, and using larger buyer status to negotiation with schools.
I think the free market will force schools to lower prices, and the number of students fall. This fall of students has been expected for awhile, and covid seems to have accelerated it.
College education implies and signals anything people want it to. As the value of a college education has approached zero, its proponents impose on it unquantifiable and unfalsifiable qualities as justifications.
>college = maturity
>college = growth
>college = intelligence
>college = responsbility
>college = you can see a task through
>college = diligence
>college = social skills
>college = well-rounded, interesting
>college = ...
Professors and administrators do it to justify their salaries and sell it to prospective customers. Alumni to justify the expense. Elites to justify their status, their agendas.
> If education is expensive, then making it less expensive seems to be the natural solution than eliminating its requirement.
One of the reasons college is expensive is that a degree is required for most jobs. This creates artificial demand, which drives up prices.
Eliminating these requirements where they're not necessary is, in fact, a way to make college less expensive.
And I'd argue that any time you see a requirement for a college degree that doesn't specify what field the degree is in, it's a pretty good sign the degree is unnecessary.
Most college degrees are awarded by state universities. The price of typical college education is set by political process, not by the market. If college is expensive, it's expensive because making it affordable is not a priority for those who vote.
> If education is expensive, then making it less expensive seems to be the natural solution than eliminating its requirement.
Most of the arguments I see saying that college is too expensive are kind of like people using Lamborghinis to say that cars are too expensive. The fact that you can spend $500k on a car does not mean that cars are expensive. The fact that you can go $400k into debt for college doesn't mean that college is expensive. It just means that you can spend a lot on an expensive college if you choose to do so.
If someone takes dual credit courses in high-school, then gets a 2 year degree at a local community college, then transfers to a state school that offers a good return on investment, and does all that while working a part time job, college isn't that expensive.
And the more people try to take that path, the more college will respond to increasing those types of options.
If you aren't targeting a field that requires a college education, even a cheap one is still pretty expensive in terms of time and money, and some subjects at some schools can be really weak. I can see why some people would opt for trade school or just learning on the job.
What annoys me a little is when highly paid software engineers around me say college is pointless, when every single one of them went to a good college thanks to their parents.
I grew up thinking college was a must for making big bucks but still didn't think it was worth it. After going to a trade school and doing jobs related and unrelated to my trade, I ended up needing big bucks and time. So I went to a boot camp and am now one of those software engineers. I don't think college is pointless, but I am so glad I didn't go.
My point being, bringing the hype/price/time down on college will likely do good for many smart industrious lower-mid class kids.
For software engineering, that makes sense. I think it's only worthwhile if some conditions are right (good school and covered costs). Which it was for those guys.
There are plenty of other things that could indicate broadened horizons - having lived or worked abroad, for instance. And as someone that went to university, working for a living and responsibilities matures you far faster than uni ever did.
Cheaper education would be great, but we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
I like this, and I think you hit the nail on the head with the price of education.
An expert curation of thought techniques and their traditions that aims to develop a critical insight into a discipline (and into reality in general) in a crucial social setting is not really attainable anywhere else. Noam Chomsky noticed this in his famous essay "The Function of a University..." Obviously critical thinking is not a requirement for a government job, and maybe even a detriment?
I kind of doubt employers have that much faith in the value of university degrees. Mostly, they're asking for a degree because they can. They get enough applicants with university degrees that they feel they can impose the extra requirement.
Actually testing applicant skills can be extremely expensive. Employers will always prefer filtering methods that are cheap.
I've never heard any justification for having "college education" as a job requirement. Or at least no justification that didn't amount to "keep out people who aren't like us", or "pretend to be competent", or "posture as exclusive".
My opinion is that the Supreme Court Case Griggs v. Duke Power Company helped make college education effectively a job requirement for anything other than very simple labor.
Before that, employers for any kind of professional job could offer some kind of IQ or other test so they could figure out if you had some basic level of competence and were capable of being trained to perform whatever task they needed.
Since it's now legally risky to use any kind of filter similar to that as a proxy for basic competence and trainability, college has become (an extremely expensive and time-consuming) proxy for measuring basic competence and ability to learn.
I think this Supreme Court Case had devastating effects on society in just some of these ways.
> People lose 4 of their prime income earning years.
> Not only that, but they start out life in mega-debt. Achieving something like the American dream gets delayed or put totally out of reach for many people.
> The combination of losing 4 years as well as being in debt means that many people, particularly society's most responsible, are going to be the ones delaying reproduction. This is bad news if you want to avoid something like Idiocracy, and has many other negative social consequences as well.
It's an all-around waste to incentivize a college degree as the standard proxy for demonstrating competence. And truth be told, outside of pretty specialized roles, college is completely unnecessary for average people. Most normal people have the capacity to be trained in a short amount of time for pretty much any typical office job.
The problem with your theory is that the disparate impact criteria in Griggs creates exactly the same burden for college degree requirements as for IQ tests. (And, secondarily, that that burden for IQ tests is low enough that if they were as suited for purpose as your argument suggests, it would be routinely and easily met.)
That said, I do think that often college degree requirements serve the same purpose as the IQ tests in Griggs: a conscious and direct choice to achieve racial discrimination that isn’t calibrated in any way to the actual requirements of the specific job but has enough of a superficial veneer of neutrality that people aren’t likely to challenge it. (Post-Griggs, while IQ tests are no more illegal than degree requirements, they are more likely to be challenged.)
> The problem with your theory is that the disparate impact criteria in Griggs creates exactly the same burden for college degree requirements as for IQ tests. (And, secondarily, that that burden for IQ tests is low enough that if they were as suited for purpose as your argument suggests, it would be routinely and easily met.)
A lot of business activity is guided by risk-management decisions that try to minimize the likelihood of dumb and costly lawsuits. An example is companies not wanting to write down feedback for job applicants that are rejected. We all know it's a shitty and dehumanizing practice to not give some feedback and encouragement, but companies can't be human because that creates a possible risk.
My response to what you said above is that no employer would face the risk of a lawsuit for trying to hire college graduates, so this system is 100% safe and desirable for them. In fact, this college-based system works great for employers because their employees are now addled with college debt so employees might feel a bit more cautious about risking their jobs to stand up and challenge working conditions. So I guess most existing employers aren't heavily incentivized to change this system too much.
If you're right then we should expect countries where IQ tests are not illegal, to have experienced a slower increase in the % of young adults with degrees.
Anecdotally speaking, all I can remember hearing drilled into me in the American school system as the path for life success was going to college. The implication was that you'd be a loser who worked flipping burgers at McDonalds for the rest of your life if you didn't go to college.
As far as the data you ask for, I'm all for doing that kind of research, but there's probably many variables that are hard to directly even start to compare and interpret.
For instance, consider the impact of countries that are overall poorer than the US. It might be the case that this incentivizes a lot more people in other countries to go to school to try and escape a bad living standard. Or it might be the case that they don't have the resources to get to school even if they were desperate to educate themselves as much as possible. Even if you had this data, interpreting it would seem to be really tough.
Or what about countries with more homogenous populations? Perhaps IQ tests provide more value to employers in the US with a significantly heterogenous population and are far less useful in countries where just about everybody has the same overall background.
I agree with the general sentiment that people do degrees for bad reasons, that even good reasons at an individual level may not be optimal in aggregate etc.
But I'm particularly interested in your hypothesis that it's driven mainly or solely by the inability for US employers to use IQ tests.
Your first sentences (about college being the default/accepted path) is also true in other countries that aren't subject to that supreme court case, like the UK.
The reason for anything large usually has a lot of contributing causes, and I don't think I have all of the answers here, but a first guess would be to think about US Cultural Dominance. If the real world was a game of Civilization, the US would be having an overwhelming cultural lead after WWII. Basically whatever the zeitgeist in the US is ends up spreading through the world for many reasons. If it dominated American culture 50 years ago that going to college was mandatory, it seems likely that this attitude would have spread to a lot of other countries too. Is that the right explanation? Probably not entirely, but I think that attitudes and ideas that dominate the US end up spreading a lot because of Hollywood and other cultural reasons.
Hiring employees is a risky prospect and firing a bad hire can be an expensive and lengthy process, depending on the jurisdiction. So naturally employers want to minimize the risk of hiring someone incompetent.
Decades ago the use of IQ testing for job applicants was made illegal. Requiring a college degree serves as a legal and socially acceptable proxy for a level of intelligence.
Whether or not that is actually valid is another matter. From an employer’s perspective the amount of effort to require a college degree is virtually nill and it helps to cut down on the sheer number of applicants they have to process.
Many employers once used IQ tests, but the Supreme Court made this much costlier for employers under the "disparate impact" theory.[0] That is, employers had a burden of showing that their tests were sufficiently related to the posted job if the test results were any different among different ethnic groups, e.g. blacks scored lower than whites. Making a degree a literal requirement for the job is a low-cost proxy for IQ (or was in the past), and since it is earned, it can be listed as a job requirement, unlike IQ.
> employers had a burden of showing that their tests were sufficiently related to the posted job
so why not just create a test that actually tests for the skills needed for the job? that would be the obvious way to optimize profit from a business perspective.
the fact that employers don't do that is a pretty clear sign that the purpose of degree requirements is explicitly discriminatory, the same as "IQ" tests (which are completely fraudulent).
No, not really. Up for debate is pretty much only the overloading of the word 'intelligence'. But whatever it is, it correlates well with job performance and maximum level of education attainable.
But they are culturally sensitive, and thus racially sensitive, and you need to apply the right test to people, for the right goals, to get meaningful results.
If you want to hire only people n-sigma above the norm, in an area of rich and well-educated locals, and you apply the same test to them as to foreign applicants, you'll likely never hire a foreigner - they won't test as well as they would on a test in their native tongue/tasks/etc.
But if you try to estimate the level of abilities needed and you use the correct test to establish an applicant's ability against that metric and hire from anyone qualified, then the tests are useful. They're even a way for skilled foreigners to test into qualification without having to jump through expensive credentialing hoops.
highly doubtful, but i would be interested to see your evidence. IQ tests might provide a rough gating mechanism but applying them in the field you don't have any control group so there is no proof that they are actually selecting people correctly (you don't know how many good performers you are rejecting because they didn't score well on the flawed test).
> maximum level of education attainable
since the education system is also designed by the same misguided people who designed IQ tests it wouldn't be surprising if scoring well on IQ tests also leads to doing well in the education system, but that doesn't meant that either are doing anything of any value.
All that it shows is that you had enough money to pay for 4 years of college. If that were the only criteria then holding on to a job for 4+ years should count for 1000x more than a college degree, because at least you are accountable for results.
> All that it shows is that you had enough money to pay for 4 years of college.
No, it also shows you can show up on time for those years, and regularly complete a series of reasonably complicated intellectual tasks on a deadline.
> If that were the only criteria then holding on to a job for 4+ years should count for 1000x more than a college degree, because at least you are accountable for results.
No, college is far more standardized, and the students have their performance evaluated throughout, which can then be easily provided in a digested form.
The main issue with college is that many people who could complete the requirements can't, only because they don't have the money.
Our public education is very bad now in much of the country. The fact is what you get out of high school from a huge portion of the population is...not great.
No one is stopping anyone from hiring these people. If there is no difference, people will pay less for the cheaper labor.
Highly technical jobs in chemistry, physics, engineering, molecular biology require a certain kind of college education that involves a lot of hands-on experience in research labs. The traditional college coursework is not nearly as important as what amounts to vocational training working side-by-side with technicians, grad students, postdocs etc. There's no real way to acquire the needed experience without getting into a four-year research-centric university.
A private company just isn't going to invest the time and energy needed to train an apprentice in these fields from scratch, and two-year community colleges rarely have access to the latest modern technology.
Other than that, your comment seems pretty accurate.
> a private company just isn't going to invest the time and energy needed to train an apprentice
not as long as they can force people to pay for it themselves and have the government and the tax payers subsidize it.
universities were never meant to be vocational schools though, and they do a horrible job at it.
to take computer science as an example: a 4 years bachelor degree only has about 500 hours of classroom instruction in comp sci subjects.
a 9-5 vocational training program can provide 480 hours of classroom instruction in 3 months.
the idea that students benefit by going to a university where they only spend a few hours a day learning and the rest of the time playing games, socializing, drinking and doing drugs, is absurd.
put people in a 9-5 40 hour a week program that has the same attendance and performance requirements as the job they are training for and they can be trained to the level of any bachelors degree in 3-6 months.
> to take computer science as an example: a 4 years bachelor degree only has about 500 hours of classroom instruction in comp sci subjects.
> a 9-5 vocational training program can provide 480 hours of classroom instruction in 3 months.
This feels like a disingenuous response - are you suggesting that solely 500 hours of a computer science degree confers utility to a graduate? Even then, 500 hours taken consecutively can hardly be compared to 500 hours spent over multiple years, interspersed with hands-on projects and internships.
> 500 hours taken consecutively can hardly be compared to 500 hours spent over multiple years
500 consecutive hours should be far superior because the time is focused and with fewer distractions.
training people in a professional 9-5 corporate environment as opposed to the adult daycare resort environment of universities would probably lead to better outcomes as well.
very little of what you learn in comp sci is relevant to your job as a new grad.
for software engineering a comp sci new grad still needs years of mentorship, supervision and on the job training in order to perform at a senior level in whatever specialty they end up working in.
because software engineering is so highly specialized pretty much everything you need to know for a particular job must be learned on the job.
the only thing a comp sci degree really shows is that a person has interest in the field and is capable of learning, but there are much better ways to figure that out than requiring degrees.
That's precisely how the USAF train their network troops. Monday through Friday for 8 months, they take you from transistors to routers. After that, you're given 2 weeks to study and pass Sec+. Most people pass on the first try.
Yes, but what if you want to alter, restructure, or abolish parts of that bureaucratic apparatus? A lot of US officialdom (and business) is operated by unquestioning drones.
This is correct. It proves you're willing to jump through hoops and not think enough for yourself, since being creative often means diverging from the grading criteria.
The reason you haven't heard it is because nobody wants to say it out loud and get the resulting blowback: it's because college attendance is a proxy for IQ, which is far and away the strongest correlating factor with job performance. Since the Supreme Court ruled that employers can't use IQ tests in hiring decisions, they use the presence of a college degree instead.
> The solution for businesses post-Griggs was obvious: outsource screening to colleges, which are allowed to weed out poor candidates based on test scores.
> The 1971 Supreme Court decision remains largely unknown, but no ruling of the past forty-five years (except for Roe v. Wade) has done more harm to the American way of life.
Rolls eyes so hard they nearly come out of skull
Yeah, it probably had some effect, but I'd say there are a lot of reasons, probably starting with the GI Bill. Why settle for a high school grad when there's a glut of veteran-college-grads suddenly on the market, all looking for jobs? Plus it gives you an excuse for excluding most women, who are suddenly in the job market in much greater numbers, from higher-paying jobs... oh, and would you look at that, black veterans are having trouble actually getting the benefits they're owed, so aren't going to college at as high a rate as white veterans! How convenient that is.
Clearly, there are a bunch of reasons this would have been appealing to employers well before 1971, and once the ball's rolling, it's easy to see how this new situation becomes self-perpetuating (good jobs now require degrees, since there are plenty of degree-holders around -> kids aspire to college at much higher rates -> repeat)
> Why settle for a high school grad when there's a glut of veteran-college-grads suddenly on the market
You didn't need to "settle" for anything prior to this decision. You could simply screen for candidates based on innate cognitive ability. Going to college or not does not change that attribute.
Why have we seen a similar rise in crendialism in countries without similar rulings or laws? Where's the demand for Griggs-compliant intelligence testing? Such a thing is permitted! Where is it?
This may be a small—very small—part of the puzzle, but I don't see a compelling case that we can point to it and say, "yep, that's what did it!" I don't even see enough to make it look like that's a valuable direction to further examine. The evidence is scant, and behavior we see doesn't look like it ought to if that were the main cause.
> You could simply screen for candidates based on innate cognitive ability.
You could apply racist or sexist requirements laundered through "testing". The whole reason the case was brought was that that was actually happening.
> Why have we seen a similar rise in crendialism in countries without similar rulings or laws?
Because if you are an active participant in a market, you want to make it very hard for anyone else to enter it so that your own wages are not subject to market supply forces. So you lobby the government to restrict supply in any way possible (licensing, job requirements, training requirements). Its the same reason people are housing YIMBYs until about 30minutes after they close on their house and become NIMBYs.
Cool. So... this and similar things are in wide use, in preference of degree requirements, since it's largely Griggs-related concerns driving the rise in degree requirements, and employers would prefer to just use tests like this?
If not, well, guess that's not a major driver of the phenomenon.
I have heard a lot of attempts at justification, but short of highly specialized STEM oriented careers, there is hardly a job out there that requires a degree in my opinion.
A lot of places are dropping all lowering their degree requirements as part of a move to increase diversity. McKinsey [1] and Harvard Business Review [2] have both written on the topic.
It's time to recognize that legal or organizational requirements for certain professions and government jobs to hold a college degree is a burden not only to talented people who are otherwise qualified to do the job, but leads to numerous burdens on society. These requirements have led to for-profit diploma mills, "nonprofit" universities charging $80k per year leading to billions in student debt that may never be paid off, and people who play the system to pad their salaries for no real benefit to the organizations or the people they serve.
For instance, in my state, billions in additional salary and pensions have been paid out over the past 50+ years to corrections and police officers who get a graduate degree. It's part of the "Quinn Bill" (https://www.mass.edu/osfa/initiatives/pcipp.asp) which dates to the Johnson Administration!
In 1967, the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice (the Johnson Crime Commission) released a report recommending more education for police officers. It said in order for the quality and effectiveness of American criminal justice to improve, its practitioners needed better training.
A friend who's a cop says the graduate degree programs that have sprung up to serve the Quinn Bill market are a complete joke, but everyone with a college degree completes them to boost their salaries, which carries over to their pensions. Note that police already get rigorous training outside of these programs in areas such as accident reconstruction, de-escalation techniques, forensics, etc.
Moreover, you don't even need a degree to become a police officer or corrections officer. In New England states are dropping age requirements to 18 or 19, because there is such a big shortage of staff: https://www.wbur.org/news/2023/02/27/essex-county-sheriff-lo...
It's such a silly requirement. One of the few local government jobs I tried to applied for denied me immediately because I don't have a degree. The requirement is built on top of a decades-long lawsuit about political patronage, where agencies are required to write very explicit hiring rules. I imagine modifications to the hiring rules for college degree requirements would require a lot of legal review before they make any changes. It's possible to get exceptions, but they're narrow and wouldn't have applied for me.
Personally, I found local government east to get into. When I worked for a state government it was easy as hell to get (but compensation was abysmal in a rather poor state)
But man federal jobs. I don’t think I’ve ever seen as good an example of choosing beggars. There are even jobs I’d be 100% willing to take the massive paycut for, but I will never qualify because I don’t satisfy the bureaucratic box tickers.
This is also a silly solution. There is no shortage of people with college degrees. The only result will be lower wages.
I am speaking as a SWE who only recently received a degree late in life, purely to assist in my next job search, which I don't expect to be soon. I am not defending such accreditation nonsense.
I'm confused by your post since for one, I never suggested a solution.. but also your post seems to be calling the removal of accreditation silly, but also calling accreditation nonsense. So you seem to be conflicted?
Instead of better educating our population, the low-tax / anti-intellectual / authoritarian-reactionaries have convinced the population that they don't need education.
With education, they might aim for socio-economic advancement (remember the American Dream?), think for themselves, challenge the established order (edit: i.e., they might decide to become the powerful and the leaders themselves). Now they know their places - don't get an education, and take a job where you won't ever need one. Sad to see the American Dream abandoned and people just giving up. Of course, the wealthy kids still get the education - they are in a different class in our new class-based system.
Also, education costs money, and that is the hardline priority over everything, including fundamental human welfare such as health care and education.
I have a friend with no college degree but a number of certifications in the insurance industry and most of a master's degree in a humanities field. Should said friend be allowed to proofread communications going out from Angie Craig's office?
I have a friend with an associate's degree who has great customer service skills. Should said friend be allowed to be a receptionist for Angie Craig?
I love education, I indulged in several degrees beyond college. I use those for highly specialized work now. But my spouse works at a hospital that literally can't carry out specialty surgeries right now because they can't hire enough low-paid staff for overnight support (not medical staff, but the other warm bodies who need to be around) and they can't staff the phone room for appointments, because they require a college degree of the person who calls you to confirm if 8 am will work or not. Folks with college degrees want to do something with their degree beyond confirming that 8 am is still good -- and can get paid more just about anywhere else.
Plenty of my lower-income friends & neighbors would've loved to have at least some college. But how do you pay $20k a year while also paying $10k for daycare and >$18k for rent when you're making $44k a year, the median pay for a high school grad in MN right now?
I applaud Angie Craig for opening up opportunities for advancement for talented people.
Sure you can. All you have to do is get admitted. I have a friend with a PhD and no high school or college degree. This person is indeed both smart and good at talking their way into things.
> I have a friend with no college degree but a number of certifications in the insurance industry and most of a master's degree in a humanities field. Should said friend be allowed to proofread communications going out from Angie Craig's office?
> I have a friend with an associate's degree who has great customer service skills. Should said friend be allowed to be a receptionist for Angie Craig?
Do you think these two people are representative of the uneducated population?
I'm not suggesting that if you don't have an education then you can't be smart and competent. I'm suggesting that such people are a minority. So having an education is a useful signal, if not fullproof.
Mankato state is $14k a year before books etc. Metro State is cheaper, if you pick the right classes. Someplace like Concordia is $20k or a bit more; Hamline or Augsburg is up to $40k. Sure it's all sticker price. I tried to pick a number on the low end for the Twin Cities given the location of Craig's office. The 2 year colleges are cheaper but the requirement above is specifically for 4 yr degrees.
Most college education right now opens up very little in terms of "socio-economic advancement" besides being "ticks the right box" on an application. Which is basically the opposite of "think for themselves, challenge the established order."
The status quo there isn't great; the wealthy were getting very different college degrees anyway and going into very different jobs.
I grew up in a trailer in a poor town. I’m a high school dropout, am in my mid thirties and became a software engineering team lead last year. I feel lucky that I make a great income that I can support my family, and nobody I work with cares about my education. They care that I know the field and have insights into how to solve the problems we encounter.
I’m doing better than almost every person I went to high school with, and my friends with advanced degrees (like philosophy) have either become software engineers or are saddled with more debt than they’ll ever be able to repay. I don’t see how that’s better?
I feel like my choice was the right one. Maybe it’s survivorship bias, but school was not for me and I’m glad I get to do work I’m proud of, and feel that going to college is a mistake for a lot of people.
> my friends with advanced degrees (like philosophy) have either become software engineers or are saddled with more debt than they’ll ever be able to repay. I don’t see how that’s better?
Your sample size represents nothing, of course (nor does my personal experience), and I agree that college is much too expensive. So saying that college isn't worthwhile because it's too expensive is circular.
Education, including college, provides far more than a career. It was in my humanities education that I learned that framing the argument is most of the battle. The anti-intellectuals / anti-liberal / low-tax crowd claims there is no value in intellect and other things learned in college; the only value is later money earned. They express that by framing the debate around career and income - do you see that when others respond in that frame, that 'crowd' already has won the debate and nobody else even realized it happened.
You can see many or most people in this discussion talking within that frame, as if it's an assumed truth and not a radical rejection of the Enlightenment - that through knowledge and reason we can control our destiny and change the fate of ours and our communities and societies.
Career is just a side issue. It's life. It's every day, in everything - our experience, understanding, love, family, community, citizen, etc etc. And also in career (including undertanding economics, the history of labor, the politics of the relationships, how to communicate, etc.).
> going to college is a mistake for a lot of people
Is going to high school a mistake? Middle school? Where do we draw the line? Why at 12 years and not 16 years?
Do you have any basis for this? How about we let people individually decide if they want to go to college, instead of others deciding for them. The fact is, many more want to go than do go.
I am pretty much part of the academic system now (part time professor, part time PhD student) working in a field that generally expects a degree (software engineering). I don't think anyone would call me "anti-intellectual", and I live in one of the highest-taxed states in the country.
That being said, I really think it's reductive to say that not require a college degree on every damn job is "abandoning the American Dream". I don't think college is for everyone, and it's certainly not for everyone straight after high school. I did really poorly in college the first time around, dropped out, and did much better nine years later. I am very grateful that I was able to find work decent work without a degree.
Ha! That's what I get for trying to write on my phone; I have a bad habit of omitting words when I do that.
First, I would like to say that, in my experience, academics aren't really any smarter than basically anyone with a desk job. It's not terribly hard to become an adjunct professor; depending on the state and/or school, you can become an adjunct with just a bachelors degree (though most require masters degrees or higher), and there are plenty of very dumb people who manage to get their BS or BA.
Second, the point I was trying to make was that I don't think that the parent that I was responding to was correct about this being an "abandonment of the American Dream". I think it should be encouraged to lower the educational bar for a lot of jobs.
Left unexamined: how long ago and why did employers decide that a 4-year degree was the minimum qualification for general employment?
And why should someone without a degree be excluded from socio-economic advancement, thinking for themselves, or challenging the established order? If anything, professional success based on work instead of degrees is a challenge to the current established order. :)
The American Dream doesn't need to be degree examiners gatekeeping it. If you care about socioeconomic advancement, don't pull the ladder up by excluding people without degrees: instead, make sure you don't require folks to jump through hoops before doing work that they already have the skills to do.
> And why should someone without a degree be excluded from socio-economic advancement, thinking for themselves, or challenging the established order? If anything, professional success based on work instead of degrees is a challenge to the current established order. :)
They aren't excluded; education empowers people to do it much more. Professional success is almost always within the established order and supports it; I'm not sure what you mean there.
> The American Dream doesn't need to be degree examiners gatekeeping it. If you care about socioeconomic advancement, don't pull the ladder up by excluding people without degrees:
I'm not pulling up the ladder, I'm lowering it and broadening it into a grand, wide staircase. I'm not suggesting people be excluded from jobs (I don't know where you got that), but that they have the opportunity to do more.
> And to the "authoritarian-reactionaries" dig: note that the Congresswoman in this article is pursuing this as a progressive. Same with the new governor of Pennsylvania:
Right. It's not a dig; it's a serious issue. I said that the authoritarian-reactionaries have convinced others, and that includes the member of congress and the governor. Are they expanding access to college education?
I'll bet the children of both politicians are going to college.
> child of an immigrant with an 8th grade education for whom the American Dream is alive and well
The Dream isn't alive and well if you want a college education.
We need to do a better job educating our population, for sure. Most of the failings are at the K12 level. IMO (as someone who works in edtech, in both K12 and higher ed), the primary issue with higher education is not that we're not doing a good job of educating students, it's that the cost is sky-high and does not correlate well to the value provided. So much of the value is in signaling and network-building, not in the actual teaching itself.
So IMO, this is not a choice between "better educating our population" and reducing the reliance on college degrees. The percent of the population that gets a college degree has shot up in the last 70 years, and it's likely we've overshot the sweet spot. The pendulum is starting to swing back a bit, and hopefully we'll reach an equilibrium point that makes sense and is affordable.
To your point, I even hope that when we reduce our overspending at the higher ed level, the government will be able to shift those resources to K12, where the bigger failings are happening.
> So much of the value is in signaling and network-building, not in the actual teaching itself.
People keep repeating that, but what is the basis? Reptition doesn't signal truth; it signals the opposite, arguably, that people are following each other rather than examining the facts and arguments.
There's a story in Obama's bio (I think) where he went down to the local Chicago Democratic Party office to volunteer. Someone could find the reference if I'm not GPT-3'ing this.
The guy behind the desk said, "Who sent you?" (meaning, "what Party official?")
Obama said, "Nobody."
So the guy sent him away, with "We don't want nobody nobody sent!"
This is really great. I've been talking with friends who have high schoolers, and it's clear that the college preparation and application process is incredibly stressful, time-consuming, and expensive. And that's for the kids who are a reasonably good fit for college, and who have supportive parents.
But so much of the market value of a college degree is in the signaling (just showing you were smart enough to get in) that it doesn't make sense to spend all this time, money, and heartache on this process. It's an arms-race dilemma for students and families, so it's hard to opt out of. But the more employers that move in this direction, the better things will be for lots of kids, and families.
I have two high school seniors. We have the resources and support they could need, but they have both opted out of all forms of college at this point. (They wouldn’t even fill out an application when I offered to pay them to apply, and refused to take any HS classes that were not graduation requirements as seniors.) I have tried to make the point that they owe it to their future self to keep their options open, but they just don’t care.
Now their friends are being accepted to college and starting to talk about going away for school…and I’m starting to see the first cracks of regret. I wonder if they’ll have more stress or less in the long run given their choices.
It definitely feels like this generation is skeptical of college, but very few are truly opting out.
What do your kids plan to do after HS? If they regret the decision after seeing their friends go off to college, couldn't they apply next year and say they took a gap year to do all the things they missed out on during COVID, or some such thing?
They don’t really have plans. (This is part of the problem.) My plan is to ask them to get jobs & take some increased responsibility for their own needs & wants after high school. I’m pretty willing to support them if they have _some_ kind of plan (start a company? Volunteer somewhere? Sure.)
You never know, they might apply to college in a year (or later), but they’ll still live with choices like not taking any advanced/honors or elective classes in high school—and just generally not applying themselves while they were there. COVID certainly did them no favors, but at some point that’s not a very good excuse anymore.
What caused them to opt out in this way? I would imagine it wasn't driven by developments like the one described in the article, since this is pretty uncommon.
If your kids don't end up going to college, wouldn't it actually be good if there were more jobs open to them?
I think it was a combination of COVID and well-intentioned bad advice from school.
As high school freshmen they went home during COVID lockdown for almost two years of useless home “school”. Teachers assigned work they never graded, and others assigned work they never taught (or the students just didn’t understand). But the bar was so low that all these kids passed their classes anyway. What’s the message that sends? Certainly not that school matters.
They also heard a lot from 20-something teachers about how much student loans cost and how important it is to think hard about your major and financing. All good advice, but what my kids heard is that college is an unaffordable waste of time unless you want to be a doctor or engineer—and that’s not what they want.
But they also do seem to have some expectation that college won’t really matter for them. Maybe more changes like this one in the article will make that come true, but that seems like a risky bet.
And to be clear, I’m not complaining about the OP article. I think it’s a good thing to unwind the credential creep that has happened in hiring.
i completely agree, the stress induced from the process of prepping for college and jumping through other bureaucratic hoops is not worth the cost and the cost is not worth the end result
i do pharmaceutical work, and my employer will only hire people with bachelors degrees but i swear i could teach this to a middle schooler. there's no reason we can't allow people to learn from life rather than learn for bureaucratic requirements.
I'll start by saying I have no problem with degrees and wish I had the time and money for one.
Working in infosec, I have seen really smart hackers who have no degrees and talented folks with degrees. Degrees simply can't tell you how talented a person is. That said, they do tell you how adaptable a person can be to a corporate environment if they ever work in management. But also, degrees technical folks tend to think very much in a box or in a "political" mindset that you see in academia (teacher's pet, death by powerpoint,etc...). You would think college teaches people to think outside of the box but many have the "this is how we did it in school" mindset which is hard to unlearn and even grads from unk's that have respectable infosec programs lack some very basic undersranding of infosec fundamentals or awareness of current trends in offense or defense.
Now my speculation is that college spends too much time giving students broad initial exposure and mostly in a theoretical framework. For at least half of a bachelor's degree they don't even touch the subject of what they majored in. Someone who has passion for the work and hands on IT or programming experience is much more likely to succeed than someone who relied on being spoonfed at school. But like I said, you do get talented people with degrees, it just doesn't tell you on it's own if they are qualified or not.
I personally consider the modern college system an ancient holdover from british colonial era. Technology has changed too much to be this inflexible to education.
As everyone drops every kind of requirement in the name of diversity, there is going to be a huge opportunity to set objective evaluation bars and get extremely high performers. The orgs will be 75% Asian though.
Rule one of politics: Don't train up your own replacements. Make sure you are always the most qualified person for everything. A good step to that is only hiring people without the qualifications they might one day use to replace you. How many representatives don't have college degree or at least don't claim to have degrees? Several do claim degrees they don't have, but I don't know of any that claim to have never
attended some sort of post-secondary education.
Lol at anyone who thinks this is for the reason people think.
The real reason Craig's office did this is because there are a lot of political active, non college-educated DFL staffers. Many of them didn't go through college or just didn't to begin with. Many of these folks are non-white (particularly, Somali, where Minneapolis is one of the largest enclaves for Somali refugees in the US).
This is just to let the very active, motivated, driven, and hard-working politicos like them into Congress. This is good.
Source: I live in Craig's district and state/local politics.
I appreciate the gesture but let's be real here. It's not like the requirement ever mattered. Just like a white house internship, nobody was getting a job as a congressional staffer without a recommendation from someone worth listening to.
I've heard it's actually not that hard to be a congressional staffer on the house side, especially if you're willing to work for someone unpopular. It is not however, the job that most people think it is. You mostly answer calls from constituents.
Former congressional intern and WH intern (and later WH staff) here - it's possible to get those internships without a recommendation from someone worth listening to. I would go so far as to say it's mildly common.
Can confirm - there are always some folks who slip by the nepo. My best friend became a WH Intern with no particular 'in' except for his past [hard] work with a state campaign.
By eliminating the requirement, the exact thing you lament about has been legalized. Now they have taken away whatever power we had as citizens to demand changes.
Curiously, it's not even a requirement to join the US State Department's Foreign Service to conduct diplomacy. Just pass the test.
Although certain support positions within the Foreign Service do require a degree, "core" diplomatic officers do not. Want to be a diplomat? Again, just pass the test.
The Constitution explicitly states that he or she must be a natural-born citizen of the United States; naturalization won't do. State election boards generally take the word of the political parties, but as has been shown in recent years eligibility can be challenged in court -- most often by racist shitheels upset about the skin tone of the candidate in question.
A qualifying birth certificate is usually the path taken here.
So yeah, you don't have to show it unless challenged, but if you can't show it you likely WILL be challenged, and that could be a problem.
Obama of course was born in Hawaii and of course he was a US citizen.
That said, the law at the time was that if your father wasn’t a citizen, then your mother had to be a citizen AND had to have been living in the US for the previous 5 years.
Dumb law IMO but it was the law and was raised by a lot of birthers.
It's not possible for Obama's mother to have been living outside the US 5 years before his birth. She only met Obama Sr 2 years before little Barack was born.
(Not that facts or logic matter to birthers, but anyway)
At the time of Barack's birth, of course, Ann Dunham was only 18 years old and had lived her entire life in the US.
I think at this point we all have to acknowledge the retarded genius of Donald Trump, the way he always got people to talk about what he wanted them to talk about. Discussions like this legitimize false statements, and were part of what legitimized Trump himself.
I think there's a huge benefit to having politicians work in teams because modern laws are so complex that you need some specialization of labor to read and write them.
I wonder if it's coincidence or the start of a trend back to sanity about job qualifications. Ironically, by becoming almost ubiquitous, university education also becomes irrelevant.