America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

I don't get why lives are at stake here. Surely the consequence of reduced ATC coverage means less flights moving through the area, not the same amount of flights being managed by fewer people?

There's only additional risk if you treat the amount of planes in an area as some kind of inevitable force of nature. If an area isn't safe because of a lack of staff, flights can be canceled to reduce the load on remaining staff without impacting safety.

Sucks for the people who bought a ticket, but a canceled flight is a lot better than dying in a plane crash.

There are no artificial restrictions on residency slots. The Federal government funds a fixed number of slots, but states and hospitals also fund residencies. The "shortage" has much to do with geography and specialty--the money and interest is working in specialties on the coasts, not as a GP in rural towns. People who are rejected are typically vying for slots in high-demand areas and specialties; they often could have been accepted if they had applied elsewhere.

One answer would be to raise GP salaries, but that's difficult, especially if you're self-funding residencies and already paying out the nose for specialists and other inflated expenses deemed necessary in modern healthcare systems. Kaiser California imports medical school graduates from abroad for their in-house residency programs, which is presumably cheaper than raising salaries to draw more US resident candidates.

Kaiser arguably points the way forward. As an HMO--a vertically integrated healthcare system--there's greater financial incentive to self-fund residencies. When insurers, hospitals, and doctors are all at arms length from each other, the financial incentives don't align very well, thus the "need" for outside funding (i.e. the government) of residencies.

Note that unfunded residencies are also a thing, where the resident is responsible for sourcing the funds for their salary and expenses.

The article does not imply that they reduced standards in order to let DEI student pass.

Rather they added an insane biographical test that only DEI students could pass, with the net effect of dramatically reducing the availability of ATC's.

i.e. a minority ATC is just as qualified, but there are far fewer white ATC than there should be.

They did indeed reduce standards. From the article:

> Throughout the ‘90s and ‘00s, the FAA faced pressure to diversify its field of air traffic controllers, historically a profession that has been primarily white men, notably from the NBCFAE.4 In the early 2000s, this pressure focused on the newly developed air traffic control qualification test, the AT-SAT, which the NBCFAE hired Dr. Outtz to critique from an adverse impact standpoint. As originally scored, the test was intended to pass 60% of applicants, but predictions suggested only 3% of black applicants would pass.5 In response, the FAA reweighted the scoring to make the test easier to pass, reducing its correlation with job performance as they did so.6 In its final form, some 95% of applicants passed the test.7

> This was a bit of a shell game. In practice, they divided it into a “well qualified” band (with scores between 85 and 100 on the test, met by around 60% of applicants) and a “qualified” band (with scores between 70 and 84), and drew some 87% of selections from that “well qualified” band.8 Large racial disparities remained in the “well qualified” band. As a result, facing continued pressure, the FAA began to investigate ways to deprioritize the test.

> Why not ditch it altogether? Simple: the test worked. It had “strong predictive validity,” outperforming “most other strategies in predicting mean performance,” and it was low cost and low time commitment. On average, people who performed better on the test actually did perform better as air traffic controllers, and this was never really in dispute. When they tested alternative measures like biographical data, they found that the test scores predicted 27% of variance in performance, while the “biodata” predicted only 2%. It just didn’t do much.9

> The NBCFAE continued to pressure the FAA to diversify, with its members meeting with the DOT, FAA, Congressional Black Caucus, and others to push for increased diversity among ATCs. After years of fiddling with the research and years of pressure from the NBCFAE, the FAA landed on a strategy: by using a multistage process starting with non-cognitive factors, they could strike “an acceptable balance between minority hiring and expected performance”—a process they said would carry a “relatively small” performance loss.10 They openly discussed this tension in meetings, pointing to “a trade-off between diversity (adverse impact) and predicted job performance/outcomes,” asking, “How much of a change in job performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?” There is a trade-off between diversity (adverse impact) and predicted job performance/outcomes. How much of a change in job performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?

Corrupting or motivating? Thin line I’d say.

The other side of the coin is you won’t get the candidates you want if they can get the same money for less taxing jobs. Game theory 101.