Bryan Alexander summarizes a New York Times editorial (paywalled, but archived here) arguing that governments and companies shouldn't require that new hires have a college degree. Such 'degree screening', it argues, penalizes poor and minority students, who are less able to attend college, and prevents U.S. employers from accessing the estimated 50 percent of applicants who earned knowledge through alternative means. "For a generation we thought that the more people get more college experience, the better," writes Alexander. "Since 2012 or so there have been signs of that national consensus breaking down." It's not so much that the consensus broke down, in my view. It's more like the ideal was never achieved, so people are giving up on it. But the thing in, in a modern information-age society, you can't simply give up on having a higher education system, you have to replace it with something. How the U.S. responds really is a sink-or-swim moment for the entire society.
Today: 5 Total: 115 [Direct link] [Share]
