|
I agree with you, but also think corporate hiring and HR practices also deserve a lot of blame as well. I think this is a big part of the antimeritocracy sentiment that's started rising in the US. It's not so much antimeritocracy as much as it is anticredentialing, and I'd go so far as to say debates about standardized testing fall under the same umbrella. It's a general pattern: take some thing — a degree, a test score, whatever — that bears some legitimate but also weak signal of skill, ability, or aptitude, and then mindlessly apply it as a criterion as if it were the underlying thing you're interested in. If corporations and HR wouldn't use these kinds of credentials mindlessly, there wouldn't be quite the unchecked demand that allows universities and colleges to feed off of it, and we wouldn't have all these debates about student debt. I've seen it in practice in administration at large companies, making certain kinds of degrees required for positions that absolutely do not require them, even of people currently working very successfully in those positions (i.e., they have to go get a degree to maintain a position they already have), because HR basically decides it will make the company look good, and the management gets a monetary bonus for implementing it successfully as policy. Debtholders get a lot of criticism on HN, but I usually feel very differently in these discussions. I have no debt, but it's hard for me to blame people getting masters in religious studies when they see people will other bullshit masters degrees in administrative positions basically because HR has decided a masters degree in something, anything, is required for administration. It's also absurd that we can see the value in a manifest self-taught computer science or math skillset but then somehow imagine that someone getting a degree in philosophy means they can't also have those skills. There's probably a lot more that could be said about a general problem in our society, of using weak metrics and algorithms as if they were precise, substituting poor measures for the thing itself. We have these neverending debates about whether the test score, or degree, or whatever, is a valid indicator of skill or not, as if that's the actual problem; it's never that these things aren't valid indicators of something, it's how much of an indicator they are and whether we should rely on them so heavily. It feels like it comes up everywhere: educational debt, medical regulation, everything. Reading stories of earlier times are really sobering to me. I'm sure there's a certain amount of survivorship bias in the stories themselves, but it never ceases to amaze me how often people would actually apprentice in positions, or actually work themselves up the ladder, or just show up at places and get jobs. That still happens today but it's like we can't function without a rubber stamp that has the flimsiest of basis to it. It feels like admittance and hiring decisions are basically nonsense in a lot of places, so rather than fix it we just play pretend with these proxies. |
Keep going down the root-cause trail. Corporations would not be using "college education" to filter for people who are literate, numerate, and can accomplish basic tasks if high schools were graduating people with that baseline. But K-12 education is not doing its job, and a high school diploma is no longer a reliable sign that someone can even function as an adult.