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U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers

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Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers

#101

Post by bell-cot »

metalspot wrote: post #87
baryphonic wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

> so why not just create a test that actually tests for the skills needed for the job?

IANAL, but my cynical guess is America's legal system. Being ever-so-obviously in the right does not pay your attorney's bills for you.

Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers

#102

Post by TheRealPomax »

rcme wrote: post #27
TheRealPomax wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can lie about anything people ask you. That's lying's whole thing.

I was referring to George Santos, who has lied extensively about his entire history yet still serves as a sitting representative.

Good qualifier. Some might have thought you were talking about Obama.

Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers

#103

Post by nawgz »

augment003 wrote: post #97
nawgz wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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?

Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers

#104

Post by LawTalkingGuy »

metalspot wrote: post #87
baryphonic wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

> "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.

Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers

#105

Post by undersuit »

elil17 wrote: post #54
undersuit wrote: post #44

We should drop staffers; replace them with a number of representatives closer to the original 1:30,000 in the Constitution. Any direct report to a Representative should be another elected Representative not an employee, if direct reports must exist. Aspiring politicians should work their way up from the state and local level, which has it's own set of problems holding back my ideas. The current system is just a lobby…

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.

Why can't the individuals with specialization of labor be elected? You have a pool of 11000+ Representatives with the original ratio.

I can even conceive of Representatives running on the basis of their knowledge in such a system.

Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers

#106

Post by augment003 »

nawgz wrote: post #103
augment003 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers

#107

Post by troutwine »

AlbertCory wrote: post #86

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!" They didn't ask where he went to school, though.

My understanding is this anecdote originates with Abner Mikva. It is Chicagoland but from the 1940s.

Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers

#108

Post by ejstronge »

metalspot wrote: post #93
photochemsyn wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

> 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 ins…

> 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.

Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers

#109

Post by sokoloff »

metalspot wrote: post #75
version_five wrote: post #2

Sort 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…

I'm 100% on-board with requiring an actual med school degree for my doctor rather than a skills-based test.

Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers

#110

Post by cjdoc29 »

sokoloff wrote: post #109
metalspot wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm 100% on-board with requiring an actual med school degree for my doctor rather than a skills-based test.

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

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