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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

#221

Post by xyzzyz »

alistairSH wrote: post #114
photochemsyn wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd prefer police officers with EMT (and preferably paramedic) training to those with four-year sociology degrees. Knowledge of DNA and computer forensic methods and necessities, though, would probably improve their chances of getting promoted, as would legal training. However, those skills could easily be learned at two-year community college progams. All in all, I think this kind of focus would lead to a more profe…

Mixed feelings... police in the US are woefully/tragically undertrained relative to police in Europe. 3-4 months is typical for a police academy in the US. Plus 6 months or so with a field training officer for basic on-job training. Compared to 2.5 years of the same in Germany. College may not be the right answer, but the current system of very little training isn't working.

Being a cop in Germany is much easier and less risky job than in US, because they have 50% more cops per capita while having something like 15% the crime rate of US. This means that, as a very rough estimate, there is something like 16 times more crimes per cop in US than in Germany. This is made even worse by things like US criminal being much more insane and erratic than German ones (Germany has a more collectivist, order-oriented culture, and will institutionalize miscreants much faster and for much less serious offenses than US will), and case overload forcing US cops to focus on the worst cases and worst offenders first.

For this reason, more people in Germany will put up with strict credential requirements and low pay than in US. To make police force more professional in the US, we first need to stop most crime, and for that, we need to hire a lot of police (to bring the crimes-per-cop ratio closer to low crime countries), and massively increase incarceration of repeat offenders, who are responsible for the bulk of the crime. It will be extremely hard to both hire more police and also to make standards higher: you’ll end up with highly professional cops who are too busy to help you unless you’re being actively murdered.

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

#222

Post by logicalmonster »

dragonwriter wrote: post #207
logicalmonster wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

The problem with your theory is that the disparate impact criteria in Griggs creates exactly the same burden for college degree requirements as for IQ tests. (And, secondarily, that that burden for IQ tests is low enough that if they were as suited for purpose as your argument suggests, it would be routinely and easily met.) That said, I do think that often college degree requirements serve the same purpose as the IQ…

> The problem with your theory is that the disparate impact criteria in Griggs creates exactly the same burden for college degree requirements as for IQ tests. (And, secondarily, that that burden for IQ tests is low enough that if they were as suited for purpose as your argument suggests, it would be routinely and easily met.)

A lot of business activity is guided by risk-management decisions that try to minimize the likelihood of dumb and costly lawsuits. An example is companies not wanting to write down feedback for job applicants that are rejected. We all know it's a shitty and dehumanizing practice to not give some feedback and encouragement, but companies can't be human because that creates a possible risk.

My response to what you said above is that no employer would face the risk of a lawsuit for trying to hire college graduates, so this system is 100% safe and desirable for them. In fact, this college-based system works great for employers because their employees are now addled with college debt so employees might feel a bit more cautious about risking their jobs to stand up and challenge working conditions. So I guess most existing employers aren't heavily incentivized to change this system too much.

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

#223

Post by sdfghswe »

kaitai wrote: post #191
wolverine876 wrote: post #173

Instead of better educating our population, the low-tax / anti-intellectual / authoritarian-reactionaries have convinced the population that they don't need education. With education, they might aim for socio-economic advancement (remember the American Dream?), think for themselves, challenge the established order (edit: i.e., they might decide to become the powerful and the leaders themselves). Now they know their p…

I have a friend with no college degree but a number of certifications in the insurance industry and most of a master's degree in a humanities field. Should said friend be allowed to proofread communications going out from Angie Craig's office? I have a friend with an associate's degree who has great customer service skills. Should said friend be allowed to be a receptionist for Angie Craig? I love education, I indulg…

> I have a friend with no college degree but a number of certifications in the insurance industry and most of a master's degree in a humanities field. Should said friend be allowed to proofread communications going out from Angie Craig's office?

> I have a friend with an associate's degree who has great customer service skills. Should said friend be allowed to be a receptionist for Angie Craig?

Do you think these two people are representative of the uneducated population?

I'm not suggesting that if you don't have an education then you can't be smart and competent. I'm suggesting that such people are a minority. So having an education is a useful signal, if not fullproof.

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

#224

Post by Eumenes »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #209
Eumenes wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is standard across the world, in professional and engineering jobs. Hiring can be filtered by where you work, what your major is, what school you went to. Not all jobs or education are made equal. Its not what I'd do, but saying, we'll only consider candidates with CS degrees from these top 25 schools seem like a valid strategy to recruiting. Esp. if you consider their professors can be renowned in certain resea…

This really doesn't happen in technology outside of the US. It seems like way more of a US thing in general, but I can't fully speak to that.

That's not true. I worked for a big tech company with a large European presence and they 100% heavily factored in the prestige of what university you went into for hiring. Also, they do this with career fairs/college hiring - they aren't sending college recruiters to a community college, they're sending them to MIT, Oxford, Stanford, Yale, Harvey Mudd, etc.

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

#225

Post by jpadkins »

nawgz wrote: post #76
augment003 wrote: post #39

Earlier 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?

> 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…

Compare Canada to Vermont, NH, Wisconsin, Montana and Idaho and see if your difference still holds. USA is a big place, with very different cultures and outcomes. Once you compare Canada to states that are culturally like Canada, your university hypothesis doesn't look to be correct.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/police-kill...

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

#226

Post by cgearhart »

gnicholas wrote: post #160
cgearhart wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flip side… I have two high school seniors. We have the resources and support they could need, but they have both opted out of all forms of college at this point. (They wouldn’t even fill out an application when I offered to pay them to apply, and refused to take any HS classes that were not graduation requirements as seniors.) I have tried to make the point that they owe it to their future self to keep their o…

What do your kids plan to do after HS? If they regret the decision after seeing their friends go off to college, couldn't they apply next year and say they took a gap year to do all the things they missed out on during COVID, or some such thing?

They don’t really have plans. (This is part of the problem.) My plan is to ask them to get jobs & take some increased responsibility for their own needs & wants after high school. I’m pretty willing to support them if they have _some_ kind of plan (start a company? Volunteer somewhere? Sure.)

You never know, they might apply to college in a year (or later), but they’ll still live with choices like not taking any advanced/honors or elective classes in high school—and just generally not applying themselves while they were there. COVID certainly did them no favors, but at some point that’s not a very good excuse anymore.

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

#227

Post by kevviiinn »

version_five wrote: post #42
kevviiinn wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Police should definitely be more highly educated, we see the result of them not being so in the US

It's not clear to me that a bunch of psychology grads would naturally be better cops. If anything, police forces would be better investing in more internal training and apprenticeship that's actually related to policing.

Nobody said anything about what kind of degree let alone psychology

Not only does a criminal justice degree already exist but we could even introduce a new BA degree in policing with the kind of training that would result in an improved police force

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

#228

Post by gnicholas »

wolverine876 wrote: post #173

Instead of better educating our population, the low-tax / anti-intellectual / authoritarian-reactionaries have convinced the population that they don't need education. With education, they might aim for socio-economic advancement (remember the American Dream?), think for themselves, challenge the established order (edit: i.e., they might decide to become the powerful and the leaders themselves). Now they know their p…

> Instead of better educating our population

We need to do a better job educating our population, for sure. Most of the failings are at the K12 level. IMO (as someone who works in edtech, in both K12 and higher ed), the primary issue with higher education is not that we're not doing a good job of educating students, it's that the cost is sky-high and does not correlate well to the value provided. So much of the value is in signaling and network-building, not in the actual teaching itself.

So IMO, this is not a choice between "better educating our population" and reducing the reliance on college degrees. The percent of the population that gets a college degree has shot up in the last 70 years, and it's likely we've overshot the sweet spot. The pendulum is starting to swing back a bit, and hopefully we'll reach an equilibrium point that makes sense and is affordable.

To your point, I even hope that when we reduce our overspending at the higher ed level, the government will be able to shift those resources to K12, where the bigger failings are happening.

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

#229

Post by sparselogic »

wolverine876 wrote: post #173

Instead of better educating our population, the low-tax / anti-intellectual / authoritarian-reactionaries have convinced the population that they don't need education. With education, they might aim for socio-economic advancement (remember the American Dream?), think for themselves, challenge the established order (edit: i.e., they might decide to become the powerful and the leaders themselves). Now they know their p…

Left unexamined: how long ago and why did employers decide that a 4-year degree was the minimum qualification for general employment?

And why should someone without a degree be excluded from socio-economic advancement, thinking for themselves, or challenging the established order? If anything, professional success based on work instead of degrees is a challenge to the current established order. :)

The American Dream doesn't need to be degree examiners gatekeeping it. If you care about socioeconomic advancement, don't pull the ladder up by excluding people without degrees: instead, make sure you don't require folks to jump through hoops before doing work that they already have the skills to do.

And to the "authoritarian-reactionaries" dig: note that the Congresswoman in this article is pursuing this as a progressive. Same with the new governor of Pennsylvania: https://www.penncapital-star.com/government-politics/in-his-...

(signed: child of an immigrant with an 8th grade education for whom the American Dream is alive and well)

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

#230

Post by gnicholas »

guynamedloren wrote: post #163
hangonhn wrote: post #61

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.

This is the norm in law firm hiring. Top firms don't look outside of a handful of schools. Good firms consider graduates from 1-2 dozen schools. And legal academia is at least as elitist — something like half of all law professors graduated from one of four schools. It's great for groupthink!
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