Do degree requirements exacerbate inequality?

During the 1990s and 2000s, sometimes it seemed like Republicans thought tax cuts were the answer to everything, and Democrats thought more college education was.

They both seem to just be bandaids for rising inequality. Tax cuts made people feel like they had more money, but in the long run made social mobility harder.

Giving everyone a college education seemed to let everybody into the middle class, except that it saddled them with a lot of debt, and a lot were not ready for college, so it just devalued a college degree while also making it required for practically any white collar job.So in practice it just established a kind of toll tax for white collar jobs.

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Yep.

It also provided a way to deflect criticism from gov’t trade policy. “All those manufacturing jobs going to China, because the elite think that will ‘liberalize’ Chinese culture/politics? That wouldn’t be a problem for you if you got off your butt and got a college degree.”

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I might quibble with the plumber and electrician one. You do need to be certified, but you become certified by on the job training (provided by a union you’re forced to join which is another topic altogether) instead of a traditional education process.

Yes and even a toll tax just for the chance of white collar jobs. There seem to be a lot of really poor decisions from young adults with respect to student loans, which isn’t terribly surprising. It’s also not surprising that Democrats would support more degrees given the association between academia, college degrees and party affiliation. Republicans of course love their tax cuts, especially for businesses and the wealthy.

As Indy notes, both seem to have been somewhat self-interested distractions from bipartisan personal financial interests in globalization, particularly outsourcing. In the charitable interpretation that these policies genuinely intended to offset the impacts, they still failed.

This is especially important for a Democratic president seeming to abandon unions and the working class for free trade, as Clinton was accused of doing, and actually did to at least some extent.

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Most apprenticeship programs I’m familiar with (plumbers & carpenters) don’t do “theory”. They do:
Here's how you do it; if you don't do it this way, you won't make journeyman.

And for electricians, you won’t see any “theory” until you’re working to be a master electrician.

You won’t make journeyman if you don’t pass the licensure exam either. That isn’t just black is hot and white is neutral. You might be able to sit down and read a book and pass that. I wouldn’t be able to. I’d need someone to teach me.

Guessing that the distribution of intelligence levels do a lot of the heavy lifting of inequality.

Should we do sonething about that?

Do you mean do something about the distribution of intelligence or about it’s impact on inequality?

It’s CS, so nobody knows.

Id rather not do either, but some solutions try to prevent the cream from rising in the name of “equality.”

Probably not much to do about the intelligence distribution. There might still be something to be done to improve education to wake up some dormant intelligence, but we’ve proven to be pretty bad at that.

Reducing the impact of that distribution on inequality could be helpful. I like that the cream can rise, but I don’t see why some of it has to hover several feet above the bottle…

Finding intelligence where it is not expected starts with freeing the mind of preconceived notions of expectations.

maybe instead of making people smart, we can dumb people down to achieve equality

pass that joint

Pretty sure that’s not the cream that’s hovering.

We don’t “make” people smart, for the most part, via the education system.

We can encourage the accumulation of knowledge, but you cannot force them to retain it.

Probably an easier phrase than that.

Earlier this year Delta dropped their degree requirements for pilots:

They were one of the last holdouts among major airlines

That’s mainly because there’s a pilot shortage. When there’s not a pilot shortage they’ll add it back so as to have fewer resumes to sift through.

Harrison Bergeron!

The pilot shortage may have been a factor in why they decided not to continue to be the last holdout, but I think the degree requirement is likely gone for good.

Possibly as a stated requirement. But when they are again in the position of having 498 applications for 12 openings, the apps of the pilots without degrees will be the first to go in the round file.

And honestly, they’ll probably just reinstate the requirement at that time as it will mean they’ll only get 346 applications instead of 498 which means less work for HR.

Delta is one of the highest paying airlines in the world. Under normal circumstances they can afford to be as choosy as they want.