Her cronies must not have degrees. Nothing to see here.
U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers
71–80 of 314 posts
Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers
#72University 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…
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.
Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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…
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.
Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. One can dream though...
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.
Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers
#75Sort of related, ontario is dropping university requirements for police: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/ontario-eliminating-edu... 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 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.
Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 perce…
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?
> 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.
[0]: https://newsroom.carleton.ca/story/police-involved-deaths-ca... [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...
Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. One can dream though...
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.
Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers
#78I'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.
Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers
#79University 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…
> 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.
Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers
#80I'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".
> I've never heard any justification for having "college education" as a job requirement.
In many cases, it’s just an easy way to thin the applicant pool.
Given EEO requirements (which have their place), having an easy way to thin the pool (often by a lot) is seen as convenient.