Flipping this around, put yourself in this situation: you have five open positions, and expect 300 applicants. You have approximately 1 hour per day to interview, and need to fill the positions in 10-15 business days.

You would like to find people with the following characteristics: They can follow complex instructions with minimal oversight, they finish what they start, they have good social skills to work with colleagues and occasional outside parties, they are fully literate (i.e., spell well, read quickly, understand context), and can be trained and managed.

You're handed 300 resumes. How do you select the top 10-15 that are most likely to satisfy the requirements?

What would be your initial filtering criteria?

Past work experience, letters of reference, relevant training program/certification. This is assuming there is not a degree program that can be seen as preparatory for the position. A 4-year degree is a useless indicator when it's irrelevant to the workload. It tells you the person was willing to spend $40-80k (in much of the US) for a piece of paper that didn't prepare them for the job you're hiring them for.

Young people don't have past work experience, hence the need for them to put themselves through a college to serve as a signal for what they might be capable of.

Obviously, once you have work experience and letters of reference, no one cares about your college. But you're not going to have that when you're 18.

University is also a social exercise, which can serve to signal that you are okay or at least exposed to the type of cultural norms that might exist at an employer that is already full of similarly college educated people.

I listed relevant training/credentials. 2-year degree programs and 1- or 2-year training programs used to be more common than they are now, and should be restored as a reasonable entry into more white collar jobs.

> Obviously, once you have work experience and letters of reference, no one cares about your college. But you're not going to have that when you're 18.

That's actually not the case, unfortunately. My wife is fluent in two languages, can read and communicate in a couple more but isn't fluent, has 12+ years of experience, and letters of reference from CFOs and CEOs from major international corporations, and is struggling (here in the US) to get a non-minimum wage job in a medium sized city (we'd be better off if we were in a larger city, but this is where my work is right now).

For a somewhat large company, it may be necessary to come up with hiring standards to save time, one of which might be a minimum of a Bachelors degree, and maybe of a US college for simplicity of verifying the degree. I'm sure if you had the ear of an executive and they really wanted to hire you, they could make an exception, but that solution doesn't scale.

My point was more that the signal an elite college serves is relatively short lived assuming you then get experience at highly regarded employers. For example, once you have worked at a FAANG, no one cares if you went to a low ranked school.

> A 4-year degree is a useless indicator when it's irrelevant to the workload.

But it's not. It gives a good indication that the applicant has many, if not all, of the characteristics I listed.

And for many non-specialist jobs (data entry, call center, executive assistants, etc.) there is no relevant training program or certification. Few people grow up hoping to work at a call center or do data entry, so they're not going to go to school for that.

Again, a 4-year degree does not guarantee success, but it tells an employer far more than they were "willing to spend $40-80K for a piece of paper." Many people want to go to school to learn about something they love, then they get out and need a job.

I think it's fair for a hiring person to seek out degree holders as a desirable criteria.

Why are there 300 applicants? Why do employers have high standards for low skill jobs? It's because all these people failed to get an education that prepares them for a well paying job and now the employer is basically benefiting from their choice of education without having to fund it or pay a good wage.

As it is right now, being an average human in a developed country doesn't pay because there are lots of average humans in developing countries who are begging for work harder than you do.

I'm not disagreeing with you, but I'd embrace and extend your remarks with two other illegal or semi-illegal reasons:

One is employees who are deeply in debt can be more easily abused than, for example, wealthy skilled tradesmen. You can do all kinds of things to woman with a student loan debt larger than a mortgage and she'll have to put up with it, whereas a journeyman electrician, in addition to being paid more, would simply move to a competing jobsite the next day.

The other reason is colleges highly promote diversity in freshmen accepted class statistics but always cover up graduating diploma holder statistics. You can kind of legally/illegally guarantee you hire a white woman or certainly tilt the odds against PoC, by demanding the office receptionist hold a bachelors degree in something "to maintain office culture because everyone else in the office went to college and we wouldn't want her to feel left out". Presumably those type of places where PoC need not apply, will soon require their janitors to have a four year degree in some sort of liberal art...