Does the college degree signify a real gain in human capital — valuable knowledge and analytical skills that individuals need to have if they are to cope with the increasing demands of the job world? Or is it mainly used as a screening device by employers, to avoid bothering to interview applicants who are presumably ill-equipped for anything but manual labor? I’ve posed that question before and here is another piece of evidence for the argument that employers use college degrees largely for screening purposes.
So many people with only high school educations are weak on fundamental reading, language, and math skills that employers don’t want to bother with them any more. Job postings that say, “minimum educational requirement is a BA” don’t mean that the job requires skills and knowledge that could only be gained in college classrooms. It means that the job requires at least a minimal degree of the skills that used to be taught in K-12, but often are not any more.
