There are some strong parallels between college degrees and taxi medallions, writes Rachelle Peterson in this Minding the Campus essay. “Having an expensive permit to drive people around has no correlation to the actual competence of the driver,” she writes. “Perhaps there are some tangential regulatory benefits in the form of screening out the truly inept and crazy. But the medallions don’t make the drivers any better…they just set up massive barriers to entry that protect the exclusive few who got in.”

It’s a good analogy, although taxi licensing was deliberately set up to limit entry and we have gradually morphed into a system under which the lack of a college degree keeps people out of many occupations and jobs. A big reason why companies now insist on college credentials, even if they don’t really ensure competence any longer, was that the Supreme Court’s 1971 Griggs decision started a move toward using the college degree as a legally safe proxy for competence and trainability. (I explain that connection in this recent Forbes piece.)

Now that, owing to decades of academic erosion, having obtained a college degree isn’t much of an indicator of competence, there’s movement toward college “competency based education” which, she writes, “proceeds by assessing skills and knowledge alone, apart from coursework, classes, lectures, and books.”

I have no complaint with competency based education, but it compares poorly with the way the country used to function. K-12 used to pretty well equip young people with fundamental skills and attitudes conducive to trainability. Then, employers would largely bear the further costs of apprenticeship and job training, which is where they belong — not paid for in large measure to taxpayers. Ideally, we would go back to that for occupational preparation and college would be for those who actually wanted to study something in depth. The way the government now waves gobs of money in front of all high school grads — an “attractive nuisance” as my friend Michael Poliakoff of ACTA puts it — if they will partake of any sort of accredited postsecondary education, guarantees huge inefficiency.