WSJ OpEd Challenges the Near-Universal Requirement for College Education

I know that I’m not alone in occasionally seeing postings or want-ads looking to fill certain positions and thinking, “they require a college degree for that”?

Charles Murray has taken that a step further with an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal (free link):

Imagine that America had no system of post-secondary education, and you were a member of a task force assigned to create one from scratch. One of your colleagues submits this proposal:

First, we will set up a single goal to represent educational success, which will take four years to achieve no matter what is being taught. We will attach an economic reward to it that seldom has anything to do with what has been learned. We will urge large numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability to try to achieve the goal, wait until they have spent a lot of time and money, and then deny it to them. We will stigmatize everyone who doesn’t meet the goal. We will call the goal a "BA."

You would conclude that your colleague was cruel, not to say insane. But that’s the system we have in place.

Finding a better way should be easy. The BA acquired its current inflated status by accident. Advanced skills for people with brains really did get more valuable over the course of the 20th century, but the acquisition of those skills got conflated with the existing system of colleges, which had evolved the BA for completely different purposes. […]

The solution is not better degrees, but no degrees. Young people entering the job market should have a known, trusted measure of their qualifications they can carry into job interviews. That measure should express what they know, not where they learned it or how long it took them. They need a certification, not a degree.

Mr. Murray’s solution is certification exams like the CPA exam (or, presumably, actuarial exams) for many professions, in lieu of a Bachelor’s degree.

I’m not sure that I’d necessarily agree with that – after all, the downside in standardized testing is that the only thing measure by the test is one’s ability to take the test – but I have frequently wondered if many professions that “require” college degrees wouldn’t be better served by more-efficiently delivered vocational education.

Yes, there is value to a Bachelor’s degree – it’s a sign of persistence and some level of intelligence.  There is value to the concept of students being exposed to the depths of new subjects, and hopefully being though to think.

But, when you look at how big the business of education has become, how many students leave college burdened with mountains of debt…especially if they’re entering a very specialized field…and if they can obtain student loans in the current credit environment… isn’t it natural to wonder “is this all really necessary” and “isn’t there a better way?”