Jay DeVoy is an attorney focusing on First Amendment issues and regular contributor to the award-winning law blog The Legal Satyricon.
I recently convinced a family member not to return to school for a Master of Arts degree, arguing that the diploma – and the tens of thousands of dollars in debt it entailed – would not make my relative more marketable. Having done my good deed for the month, I was puzzled how this person came to believe that an M.A. would lead to a j-o-b.
There are many causes underlying this belief. First, the nation’s largest employer, the Federal Government, awards additional points to advanced degrees under its employee candidate scoring rubric. Second, there is the misconception promulgated by self-interested educators that more education in a particular field is desirable at the entry level, despite the obvious disconnect between education and practice in most fields. (Engineers seem to have a marked advantage in this area.) Finally, as every degree’s value is debased by dubious online and for-profit schools, the ease of earning a Master’s creates a race to the bottom where everyone wants one in order to appear competitive in the job market. After all, it only costs the student time, since they’re not paying for it now, or possibly ever, as already-underreported default rates for federally subsidized student loans continue to rise. Frontline thoroughly addressed this issue recently.
None of this, however, truly examines why the Master’s degree is – or is perceived to be – so valued. If the M.A. didn’t confer a benefit onto its recipients, nobody would want it. This is true of all educational degrees, even if the benefit of their completion is merely the social currency of attending the “right” school. Nevertheless, economic analysis has shown some degrees, such as the MBA, to be worthless. The value of any degree is clustered in favor of the elite, as seen by the earnings and job offers conferred upon Ivy League and equivalent undergraduate schools, the top 14 (t14) law schools, and the top seven (M7) business schools. Everyone else pays as much as an elite degree costs, as there is relatively little price discrimination among schools, without receiving commensurate benefits.
Degrees of any kind serve as proxies for native intelligence, but especially advanced degrees, as college has metastasized into an extended high school experience. The correlation between a degree and intelligence has been overestimated in recent decades, though, because employers have been stripped of other tools on which to evaluate potential employees.
The Federal Government Unwittingly Adds a Step.
In Griggs v. Duke Power Company, the Supreme Court ruled that Duke Power’s requirement of a high school diploma or passing of a standardized general intelligence test for employment or transfer of jobs was unlawful under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 401 U.S. 424 (1971). The facts of Griggs specifically dealt with the racial impact Duke Power’s employee testing policy had on black employees as opposed to white ones, which was prohibited under Title VII. This same section of Title VII, however – § 703(h) – addresses discrimination along gender lines as well.
[It is not] an unlawful employment practice for an employer to give and to act upon the results of any professionally developed ability test provided that such test, its administration or action upon the results is not designed, intended or used to discriminate because of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.
No reasonable person can quarrel with the Court’s intentions in reaching its outcome, as eliminating racial animus is an important goal for national cohesion. The end result, however, is that general tests of intelligence cannot be used to grant or deny employment by employers covered under Title VII. Instead, the court held that only task-specific tests could be used:
What Congress has commanded is that any tests used must measure the person for the job and not the person in the abstract.
In the interest of clarity, Title VII defines employer in 42 U.S.C. § 2000e as “a person engaged in an industry affecting commerce who has fifteen or more employees for each working day in each of twenty or more calendar weeks in the current or preceding calendar year,” including his or her agents, with certain exceptions. Not every business is affected by this restriction, but almost all large companies and a great many “small” businesses are.
The Current Paradigm, a/k/a “Your Degrees, Please.”
The worthy desire to eradicate racial discrimination has carried unintended consequences. Aptitude and fitness for many jobs, particularly in today’s service-oriented economy, elude reliable and effective testing. Even if those skills could be tested and quantified, a risk averse large employer would want to avoid testing and potentially inviting a Griggs-style lawsuit.
This leads to hiring based upon the next best available source of information about competency: Educational attainment. In addition to spawning the higher education market discussed above, it has given rise to the lucrative test prep and admissions consulting machine, which adds thousands of dollars in costs to the application process.
Our credentialing system has created a feedback loop that disadvantages men. More women now hold post-secondary degrees than men, a trend that will continue as women continue to swamp men in college admissions. For example, women outnumber men in the University of Florida’s incoming class, a trend seen nationwide at other well-regarded schools such as the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. A prerequisite for any kind of graduate degree, women are leading men in obtaining Bachelor’s degrees for reasons that have been more thoroughly discussed elsewhere and are beyond the scope of this discussion. The end result is clear, though — men are structurally disadvantaged under the current regime and will continue to be well into the future.
In a broad sense, change may be afoot. Recent decisions such as Gratz v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 244 (2003), and Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003), show the court’s tension over identity preferences, and Ricci v. DeStefano, ___ U.S. ___, 129 S. Ct. 2658 (2009), specifically addressed Title VII, shining light on the murky relationship between the Civil Rights Act’s disparate impact standard and the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the 14th Amendment (noted in Scalia’s concurrence). All of this, however, is orthogonal to the issue of intelligence testing as an alternative to time-consuming, life-delaying and costly credentialing procedures. The emphasis on educational credentialing is particularly damaging in our under-regulated educational environment, which rewards hucksters for parting taxpayers with their money under the promise than an 18-year-old will someday, somehow, pay it back. Moreover, it creates a closed system where men face substantial obstacles to economically compete with women, if they are not excluded from competition entirely.
In this economy, job prospects for recent graduates are comparable to those of people who never pursued higher education. The latter camp at least avoided the college debt trap, and can always go back later in life when universities will still exist, and possibly with more competitive price structures in response to the smoldering student loan crisis. Despite decades of conventional wisdom favoring education, now might be the best time to not go to college.
Among those most harmed by the current system are smart people who don’t enjoy learning in a classroom. Who can blame them? From high school onward, learning seemingly is of secondary importance to social preening and consumerism within educational institutions. The work, in the form of problem sets, “reflection papers” and group projects – where a few do the labor of many for equally shared credit – is often unpleasant or pointless. In an upside-down post-Griggs world, people who don’t participate in or enjoy those activities are considered dumb or low-class by the yuppie influentsia, while their college-educated peers vie for a cubicle job to service an enormous debt load and discuss People Magazine on their 35-minute lunch breaks. In my experience, business owners and managers without formal education beyond high school have been able to run circles around me in their areas of expertise. Yet, without entrepreneurialism, it’s uncertain whether they would have fared as well as they have in a world so obsessed with college degrees.
The problems of excessive higher education have been clear for some time. While there are many causes, few realize that the nation’s highest court played some role in creating the system we have today. While the Supreme Court decided Griggs with noble intentions, the long-term effects of its decisions have quietly come to impose a cost on men and their ambitions.
