| | A lot of college is about getting your "union card", which strikes me as a waste of time. Basically, many people spend 4 potentially productive years of their life taking classes that will have little relevance to their future career or life, just to prove to an employer that they are reasonably intelligent, have perhaps learned a few things that might be tangentially related to the actual job they are applying for, and are able to complete a long-term project and are submissive enough to put up with a great deal of bullshit.
Most of this stuff could be ascertained during an employment interview.
The first criteria could be cheaply ascertained with an IQ test, if the federal government hadn't made that illegal because such tests tend to result in ethnic and gender outcomes that are not strictly in proportion to the ratios observed in the general population. For example, during the Sotomayor hearings, an issue was made of her ruling on the New Haven firefighter's exam, where everyone who qualified for promotion due to that test was white, with the exception of one Latino.
The problem the courts have been wrestling with is that this is not an unusual outcome, that if you give tests for most highly skilled work based strictly on merit and on objective facts, the outcomes, for whatever reason, tend to skew toward white applicants passing in numbers highly disproportionate to the general population.
And, since the EEOC laws and regulations assume that "fair" tests would not result in this outcome, that any ethnic disproportion must be due to racial prejudice rather than differences in the actual individuals applying for jobs, and that group "fairness" should take precedence over awarding jobs and promotion strictly on individual merit, it is basically impossible for employers to come up with objective tests of ability that meet liberal judges' desire for collectivism in the form of equality of outcomes, rather than equality of opportunities.
Curiously, nobody at the EEOC seems to be concerned about, say, the ratio of ethnicities and gender in the NFL or NBA, where you have teams where almost all the players are black, and where no woman has EVER made any team. Somehow it is accepted that there the difference in ethnic and gender outcomes is strictly due to individual merit and individual differences in ability, and that the pressures of a competitive marketplace have simply rewarded the most qualified individuals.
|
|
