While a few die-hards in the higher ed establishment keep saying that we must put more and more young Americans through college because the labor force needs more brainpower, it’s well established that much of the demand for people who’ve graduated from college is just screening. There are so many people who have degrees that nothing is lost by screening out all of the presumably less capable people who don’t. How we got on that track is the topic of a piece I have posted on Forbes.

Quite a bit of the blame, although not all, should go to the Supreme Court for its 1971 Griggs v. Duke Power decision. That case, which mangled the meaning of the 1964 Civil Rights Act so as to let the zealots at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission have their way, turned ability testing into a legal minefield for employers by importing the “disparate impact” notion into the law. As a result, companies started turning toward college credentials as a proxy for ability, a way of screening out lower ability workers that wouldn’t cause any legal trouble.

We probably would have had something of a higher ed bubble just from the way the government has subsidized it and pushed the notion that more education is always worth it, but Griggs helped inflate the bubble too.

Here’s a question I would like to know the answer to: has anyone ever challenged a company’s college requirement on the same logic as prevailed in Griggs?