Whereas a startup that had a really good solution for inculcating the kinds of skills and values white-collar employers are looking for could outcompete universities instead of legislating them out of the picture.

When people discuss the value signaling provided by elite universities, their first example is usually "the diligence and hard work it takes to get into the university". That strikes me as the kind of value you can find ways to signal just effectively without asking for $150k.

Graduation rates at universities for the elite are nearly 100%. Getting into the club is the only hard part and everyone involved knows that.

Empirically, what's required to get into the club is being wealthy enough to afford the private schooling, tutoring, and extra circular activities necessary to help your child game the admissions process.

As long as people value these prestigious brands, the elite will continue to buy them for their children. It's got nothing to do with education itself, which could be obtained any number of ways already.

If their process was an "Empirical, blinded, skills-assessment", and they funded anyone who met their predefined requirements, we'd have a real alternative to class-based universities. At least for anyone willing to create their own business.

YC is already more fair (less gameable) than the elite universities, but it's still far from being fair enough or big enough to really change things.

The student can then turn around to some great companies and say "I got into X university, but am thinking of waiting a semester and want to learn a bit about your business. Would you be open to some sort of internship?"

I don't know if that is the correct solution though. Much of what I learned came from being at school, but not necessarily the classroom. I learned a ton about alcohol and drugs and sex and other things that simply being in an environment with so many of my peers produced. Additionally, I'm a designer. If I weren't an editor for the school paper, I'd never have picked up a copy of creative suite and probably would be working a miserable corporate job somewhere otherwise.

The way to fix this is to sue lots of employers for requiring or discriminating based on college education. Or at least win a few high-profile cases.

This is the first I'm hearing that IQ testing is illegal as a basis for employment. AFAIK the military and many police forces employ IQ/aptitude tests as part of their hiring process.

Though sometimes we're trying to tech-fix things which are broken on a whole different level. Education is effectively free today. You pay to get the certificate. I think that's a broken system.

(I am not opposed to legislative fixes! I'm a statist liberal Democrat. I'm confining my response to the terms 'sama set out.)

So don't ask yourself "What degree does this guy have?", but "How much physics research has this guy done? Can I see his body of work? Is it high-quality stuff?" The latter is performed anytime a competent person performs a hire anyway. It's fine to skip/ignore the education when someone can demonstrate competence. The problem really comes in "soft" degrees like business, marketing, communications, etc., where it's not really possible for a body of work to be presented as evidence that the individual knows what he/she is doing.

Seeing the degree is a shortcut to verifying that the basic level of knowledge in the applicant's major has been satisfied. The testing necessary to verify that independently (and redundantly - one for each company being applied to) seems prohibitive.

For HR directors, purchasing managers, corporate controllers, practice managers, financial advisors, and jobs like that? Yes, I think you can devise filters for anything colleges filter for that would be both more effective and far cheaper than college.

Eventually I don't see why not but I don't think it's an easy thing to do nor do I know how to do it for a physics R&D type of position. Obviously education isn't the only criteria people use today anyway (I can't tell you how many CS grads I've interviewed who really struggled or flat out didn't know a lot about CS).

It's an age-old problem: how do tell if someone can do what you need them to do without wasting your time and money? As the skill and knowledge requirements go up this becomes harder and harder to do, with or without the degree shortcut.

But I don't need to - smarter people already did the work for me. This approach is already practiced (mini scale I believe) in our industry.

I am not sure I understand this. If you are going to a doctor, you would want to make sure she is qualified, isn't it? And the only way (currently at least) to make sure is that degree that proves she knows what she is doing. Of course this doesn't apply to all professions.

It's true if someone can do those 3 things without going to medical school they may be missing a great deal of knowledge passed from medical school that maybe they were not explicitly tested on or experienced in the field. I'm not sure what to do about that. If you could find a solution for that then banning from asking or considering education could actually work, I think...but that's a hard problem to solve.

In terms of education there are two options. Ban mentioning degrees only credentials, or ban mentioning school names which deflates the ivy name recognition. In both cases schools would need to focus on education not name recognition.

The thing that unlocks legal professions from the grip of $200k law schools is going to be something that reimagines the role of a lawyer, creating a new kind of legal professional that makes radically less money than a BigLaw lawyer.

I really, really, really doubt that.