Yes, yes, it is, and we told you so a long time ago. (So long ago, in fact, that the links have expired at that old post.) It wasn't just a pyramid scheme at the lower levels of the academic food chain, even then.
It's interesting, though, how she won't see the root causes of the credential creep she bemoans.
In other words, even though most people already doing such jobs don't have a bachelor's degree, companies are only hiring new people who do. Part of the reason: that requirement automatically eliminates a lot of applicants, reducing the time and effort involved in making hiring decisions. Rather than sifting through résumés for specific skills (like the ability to use certain computer programs or write fluently), employers let a college degree serve as a proxy. The result is not only that they'll hire people who don't have the skills they actually need, but that they're eliminating people who do have the skills but not the degree. You won't be surprised to learn that those rejected applicants are more likely to be people of color, who are underrepresented among the holders of college degrees.In part, though, that's an unintended consequence of Griggs v. Duke Power, which held employer-specific aptitude tests to be discriminatory, although what happened next was not amusing. "I suspect Griggs v. Duke Power gets in the way of such testing, although the evolution of credentialing as a legal screening device that deteriorates into an aptitude test because of the failure of the credentialing institutions to do their work properly is funny." In the case of those communities of color, it might be failures of their high schools to prepare their students for college, and those failures might be a consequence of fretting over disparate suspensions of the disengaged and disruptive students.
You won't be surprised to learn, dear reader, that a Common Dreams contributor will not go there.
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