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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

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why settle for a high school grad when there's a glut of veteran-college-grads suddenly on the market You didn't need to "settle" for anything prior to this decision. You could simply screen for candidates based on innate cognitive ability. Going to college or not does not change that attribute.

Why have we seen a similar rise in crendialism in countries without similar rulings or laws? Where's the demand for Griggs-compliant intelligence testing? Such a thing is permitted! Where is it? This may be a small —very small—part of the puzzle, but I don't see a compelling case that we can point to it and say, "yep, that's what did it!" I don't even see enough to make it look like that's a valuable direction to fur…

> Where's the demand for Griggs-compliant intelligence testing? Such a thing is permitted! Where is it?

Right here: https://wonderlic.com/

> Why have we seen a similar rise in crendialism in countries without similar rulings or laws?

Because if you are an active participant in a market, you want to make it very hard for anyone else to enter it so that your own wages are not subject to market supply forces. So you lobby the government to restrict supply in any way possible (licensing, job requirements, training requirements). Its the same reason people are housing YIMBYs until about 30minutes after they close on their house and become NIMBYs.

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

#162
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Domestic disputes are one of the most likely calls to result in an injury to or death of an officer.

I don't see that the FBI stats support that claim, and even if, the rate is still comparatively low, and skews very heavily towards the US South (which is only 38% of the population, but has very high gun ownership and gun violence rates):

Police officers' risk of on-the-job death in most years averages #14 .. #18, behind logging, fishing, farming, construction, heavy manufacturing, trucking [0].

From the 2021 data ('FBI LEOKA') [1] for on-the-job police officer deaths reported by 7886 LE agencies:

• 73 were Feloniously killed (only 7 total in responding to all disorders/disturbances (e.g., disorderly subjects, fights, domestic disturbances/violence))

  - 61 of those 73 were killed by firearms
  - 44 of those 73 were in the South
• plus 56 Accidental deaths (32 of which were crashes).

(If we check individual case reports at [2], we can see how many of the 7 total responding to disorders/disturbances were Domestic.)

• Assaults: [3] 43,649 officers assaulted in 2021

- 28.6% (12,463) occurred while officers responded to [all] disturbance calls - 35% sustained injuries - 49.5% occurred in the South

And for 2022, FBI releases preliminary LEOKA statistics for 2022 to October [4].

The latest years for which I can easily find all the detailed LEOKA Tables are 1996..2019 [5] e.g. Table 24: "Circumstances encountered by victim officer upon arrival at the scene of the incident".

[0]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/careers/2018/01/09/work...

[1]: https://leb.fbi.gov/bulletin-highlights/additional-highlight...

[2]: Comprehensive data tables about these events and brief narratives describing the fatal attacks are available on the Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) portion of the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer at https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/

[3]: https://leb.fbi.gov/bulletin-highlights/additional-highlight...

[4]: https://www.police1.com/officer-safety/articles/fbi-releases...

[5]: https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2019/topic-pages/officers-feloniou...

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

#163

Tangentially related, at my current job we do not filter candidates by certain "top schools" and it has lead to the most diverse (ethnic, gender, vocational background, social economic, nationality, etc.) team of software engineers I've ever worked on. This is in sharp contrast to all my previous jobs where they consistently filter by a list of schools. Obviously this is not a silver bullet but it's quite shocking to…

I'm clearly naive and haven't worked closely enough to filtering stage of of the hiring process, but nevertheless.. I'm shocked to hear that there was a deliberate and explicit filtering by a list of "top schools. An implicit look at the school and some dose of bias, okay sure, I could see it, but an explicit filter? Wow.

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

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AKA: If everyone is super, then nobody is

Astounding to me how deep that movie was for a kids movie, how DIFFERENT it is from the types of morals and values that are pushed in modern films, and how well it holds up today.

Ten years later, we learned that if everything is awesome, nothing is awesome.

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

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TIL Kissinger and Nixon were liberal fantisists.

Yes? Political liberalism goes well beyond the narrow understanding that exists within the US, wherein the label has grown to be largely incoherent/redefined to mean whatever is mainstream within the Democratic Party.

TIL Kissinger and Nixon were Demorats. Along with apparently Reagan, Bush Sr, W. Who knew.

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

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why have we seen a similar rise in crendialism in countries without similar rulings or laws? Where's the demand for Griggs-compliant intelligence testing? Such a thing is permitted! Where is it? This may be a small —very small—part of the puzzle, but I don't see a compelling case that we can point to it and say, "yep, that's what did it!" I don't even see enough to make it look like that's a valuable direction to fur…

> Where's the demand for Griggs-compliant intelligence testing? Such a thing is permitted! Where is it? Right here: https://wonderlic.com/ > Why have we seen a similar rise in crendialism in countries without similar rulings or laws? Because if you are an active participant in a market, you want to make it very hard for anyone else to enter it so that your own wages are not subject to market supply forces. So you lob…

> Right here: https://wonderlic.com/

Cool. So... this and similar things are in wide use, in preference of degree requirements, since it's largely Griggs-related concerns driving the rise in degree requirements, and employers would prefer to just use tests like this?

If not, well, guess that's not a major driver of the phenomenon.

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

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiring people from a sociology/social justice background would just mean the same abuses of power, but different targets. Policing has gone in this direction in the UK, and now you have mothers being arrested in front of their children after “misgendering” someone online: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/i-stand-with-kate-scotto... > St Albans Magistrates’ Court found her guilty, under the Communications Act (2003…

Americans are normally the ones to myopically reduce the world's issues to their own, but sometimes the British are not to be bested!

I’m an American aware of how this idea has played out elsewhere.

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

#168

Tangentially related, at my current job we do not filter candidates by certain "top schools" and it has lead to the most diverse (ethnic, gender, vocational background, social economic, nationality, etc.) team of software engineers I've ever worked on. This is in sharp contrast to all my previous jobs where they consistently filter by a list of schools. Obviously this is not a silver bullet but it's quite shocking to…

I'm clearly naive and haven't worked closely enough to filtering stage of of the hiring process, but nevertheless.. I'm shocked to hear that there was a deliberate and explicit filtering by a list of "top schools. An implicit look at the school and some dose of bias, okay sure, I could see it, but an explicit filter? Wow.

There is a reason why in America there is an incredible focus on getting into certain schools, and follow-up obsession about what school you went to afterwards. There's a lot of 'brand name' focus and historically these schools have offered networking opportunities that far outweigh the actual academic quality (at the undergrad level). I always found it bizarre coming from a country where there isn't some idea of an ivy league-set of schools.

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

#169

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.

It's Goodhart's law in action. If having a four year degree becomes just a checkbox, there will be easier and easier ways of getting that checkbox. There will be rent-seeking entities that will facilitate this like degree mills and dubious online programs. It no longer becomes a qualification that the person has gained any skills, but only that they were able to finance paying tens of thousands of dollars to particip…

I'm worried that the same logic might cut the other way: "the easier it is to get that piece of paper, the worse you look for not getting it."

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

#170
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't need police to be highly educated necessarily. I do need police to be psychologically balanced and show calm restraint. Is there a way we can put that in the job requirements and use it as hiring criteria?

Have you ever had interactions with police? Did you find them psychologically balanced?

The answer to this may vary heavily by country, local jurisdiction, and certain demographic characteristics of the person interacting with police.
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