In today’s Wall Street Journal, James Taranto offers his views on the Marilee Jones affair at MIT. He doesn’t like the credentialitis that infects so much of American life, writing “College is an expensive way of taking an IQ test.”

Taranto proceeds to argue that the culprit here is the Supreme Court’s 1971 decision in Griggs v. Duke Power, which made aptitude testing dangerous for employers. They’re likely to be hit with a discrimination suit unless they can prove to a court’s satisfaction that the testing doesn’t have any “disparate impact” on minority groups, so the next-best course is to look to educational credentials as a proxy for trainability.

Bravo for Mr. Taranto for seeing that higher education is much more a costly screening or signaling process than it is a provider of powerful intellectual capital.

Hmmmmmmm…… Where have we seen this argument before? Oh yes — Professor Lowell Gallaway made the same point in a piece the Pope Center released last year.