Interesting to note that one of the most dynamic and lucrative industries, tech, has managed to smuggle IQ testing in via the whiteboard coding interview quite successfully for decades.
But even more interesting to note that even given the existence of widespread non-credentialed entry options, it's still far, far more common for professional software engineers to have a four-year degree than not.
My best guess is that the demise of disparate impact doctrine will open up more such opportunities but won't put a major dent in college enrollment. College is at least as much about class signaling as work-credential signaling, and I doubt we'll see much decline in demand for that status marker in our lives.
Software engineering used to be the only career path where you could go to a no-name state school and still land a top tier job just by acing interviews. Whereas finance/law/etc. only recruits from the top 15-20 schools. Unfortunately this door is kind of closing too with the glut of H1Bs and the general downturn in tech hiring.
No they haven't. The tech industry is in disarray because they only hire Hindu-1bs now and every White interviewed is only a smokescreen to pretend they aren't doing this. And this is why there are constant data breaches. Indians cannot do cyber security. Nor do Indians care to even try to.
I'm white, I'm just not completely retarded. I've worked with literally hundreds of H1B engineers primarily from China and India, and they are every bit as good as the white guys because they have to pass the same hiring bar (and make pretty much the same money).
What is your ethnic background. White is meaningless and europeans are heterogenous. If so, you are a pro-replacement cuck and you will screw over your own people. Individualism will always be destroyed by collectivism.
Either way, innate dispositions matter, especially social ones you are getting duped. The indianization of big tech and society will end in disaster.
If we need more geniuses and not slave labour. Then get our accomplished geniuses and former child prodigies to become gamete donors and make embryos for surrogacy and adoption. Similar to what cryobank california does.
Multiracial societies generate too much bad blood between groups as they compete (and rarely honestly), has very ugly politics that just goes in circles. With so many competing tribes, it will end in disaster.
A whiteboard coding example is not really in IQ test. It is a domain-specific test that is relevant to the job. I think we need more of the latter instead of Credentialism or IQ tests.
The problem with obtaining status “markers” is how to pay for such. The typical college graduate is mired in debt when they graduate—50% of starting freshmen, never do (give or take how you measure) graduate. Yet, they still accumulate debt. Many of those graduating, i.e., obtaining your magical status marker, cannot find a job that allows easy payback of debt. That is to say, last figures I saw was that the median annual earnings were $40K! That’s pathetic in today’s high cost society. This is not really hard to believe when one considers the types of (faux) majors offered by colleges and universities milking students for their tuition money. Little more than degree mills.
The mistake you make is in assuming that college students major in some sort of “tech”. Let’s just call it STEM. Only about 20-25% of graduates are graduating in STEM majors. The rest major in less rigorous courses of study which have little value in today’s job market—and their salaries reflect such (diminished) value from employers.
Then there is the confounding problem of “overproduction of elites”—those who graduate and feel society owes them something due to a piece of worthless paper and a ceremony, but that’s an issue for another discussion.
Tech has a clear, simple, and inexpensive way to measure performance that's relatively robust. The lack thereof in most other corporate functions is why credentialism and other biases can flourish.
Spot on. It is also a positive feedback loop. Academics who gained repute via credentialism do not have the cognitive capacity or individuality to assess the merits of others’ work, so they defer to the credentials of the authors of the work instead of the work itself.
I saw this firsthand during my PhD. Many PIs refused to form an opinion of a paper until others, whose credentials they respect, gave their opinions. In any journal club, their first question was always “which lab/institute is this from?”. Before submitting their student’s/postdoc’s work to a journal, they would send it round to at least five “credentialed” scientists, so that they could be sure that (a) the findings wouldn’t rock the boat, and (b) the science was sound—since they couldn’t/wouldn’t assess this independently. Of course, (a) was always more important than (b).
Regarding peer-review specifically—it’s a complete sham. Most journals allow you to block reviewers who don’t like you (i.e., who are wise to any dodgy science that you might have published) and to recommend reviewers who you are best pals with. Very few journals apply double-blind peer review as standard. At least in my field, success is more determined by who you know than what you’ve done/your actual work. It’s super easy to just recommend a reviewer whose grant application was given to yourself to review. You simply have to minimally communicate this mutual-dependability to each other and both sides instinctively proceed with pathetically shallow review. It’s possible for clades of scientists to propel themselves through decades of publications and grants via this circle-jerk tactic. Further, many older academics will deliberately avoid recommending younger academics as reviewers, since they are less tainted by decades of credentialism, and are more likely to actually assess the work.
Credentialism, and its ugly sister gerontocracy, are killing science.
That’s why I get frustrated with the cliche career advice that “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” This advice is really only applicable for people in business schools who can talk a good game, but not for people are more blunt and honest like myself. I tend to see myself as the lowest on the totem pole. I graduated with a generalized liberal arts degree that does not lend itself to preparing me for any specific position, and since I didn’t work or do any extracurriculars at college in my twenties due to mental health issues, I’ve basically had to act like someone fresh out of high school on the job market. And I’m really only qualified for minimum high school- level positions since I’m humble enough to not claim I know more about how to do a certain job than I actually do. But I’m a white privileged female with a supportive, well-off family who will do fine in the long run, but what about someone smarter but poorer than me with no education or connections whatsoever? Don’t they deserve to have access to opportunities too, perhaps more so than me?
That approximately 50% of the colleges and universities will need to shut down for lack of sufficiently capable applicants. As your graph shows, today’s typical college student has an IQ of around 105–give or take a bit. (I’ve read even lower estimates.) Whereas in the 40’s it was perhaps 120-125. It also shows a marked decline after the war and the GI bill, but still 1+ SD for admitted students. What is the purpose of a university education but to perfect the nest and the brightest among us?
Today’s generation of millennials is perhaps the most credentialed of all, with I am told, something like 40% having a tertiary degree of sorts. When I applied to university in the early 70’s, if you were deficient in prerequisites or simply low scoring on the entrance exam’s you were not admitted and told to find another institution of lower standards. Today that same university, now a leading “Hispanic Serving” institution, readily admits to 40% of its Freshman class taking remedial coursework. In short, they have reverted to being a post-HS remedial institution.
No matter how you run the numbers, we have at least twice as many students in tertiary academic education (non-trades) as can make use of such an education. To this effect the standards for most all disciplines have been reduced. As the author noted this produces “mediocrities” in all fields. What the author perhaps does not note/emphasize is that these mediocrities are not relegated to the traditional “minorities”, but also to an entire cadre of White students as well. It is not so easy to avoid mediocrity via racial classification as one might assume. AA and DEI affects everyone.
None. The current system now devotes resources into the wrong areas—depriving both society and the college attendees who waste their time and go into insurmountable debt.
“If selection by examination is not strict, the powerful will struggle to be foremost, and orphans and the poor will have difficulty advancing”. Imperial Censor Wang Ji, 1754 AD.
Your comment begs the question, is the criticism *true*. If you are well read wrt our declining post secondary educational system, you would know the truth of the author’s commentary. Mockery and ad hominem is the mark of one without argument/rebuttal. You’ve offered no evidence to the contrary.
Nonsense. I said it was vacuous, which means there is no way to determine whether the criticism is true or not from its internal structure. A facile but equally vacuous rejoinder.
Yep in my experience it's really tough for wealthy, well-connected students who aren't academically or technically-inclined to game tests such as the SAT or LSAT through prep. Months-long coaching will usually take them only from around a 70% to an 80% at best.
I think this is failing to appreciate the value of signalling and credentialism.
Like is an MBA a good signal of IQ not really, does it teach that much? also probably not. but the process that generates MBAs is doing useful work. Definitely agree we should allow cognitive testing and try to remove degree requirements. It's just not obvious how much that would actually change; the US is an outlier in terms of educational attainment but best I can figure it's only by like 5-10%. For a potential counter example here, look at Korea, they have iq tests for employment and the highest rate of tertiary education in the OECD
While the premise appears to have some merit, there is value in education.
For example an engineering education trains a person in problem solving. This activity, when undertaken at a young age, affects their habits of thought for the rest of their life. Four years of increasingly difficult story problems does that.
There is really no substitute for education in Engineering.
There is also value in practical experience. For mechanical engineers in particular experience in the manual arts is of great value, as is the experience gotten from work experience.
There is no substitute for experience in engineering.
There is also value in aptitude. The difference between a person of ordinary aptitude and a person of exceptional aptitude can be very dramatic. I have seen instances where one individual of exceptional aptitude produced billions of dollars of revenue where a person of ordinary aptitude would have produced possibly a few million. People of extraordinary aptitude change industries and develop entirely new technologies.
There is no substitute for aptitude.
However, in many cases what is needed isn't an extraordinary person. What is needed is a person competent enough for the work needing doing who will be happy in a job which is probably tedious, repetitive, and boring.
My daughter was a CPA for a while. She passed the CPA exam with a perfect score - her description - which I interpret as meaning she answered all questions correctly. She disliked working as an accountant because she was surrounded by people who were not very smart, not at all curious, and who resented her because she was dramatically more capable than they were.
So the real challenge isn't finding the smartest person for any job. The real challenge is finding the dumbest person who is likely to do the job at the desired level. The person with the highest aptitude for the desired work product should be selected.
In many cases that won't be the smartest person, the most experienced person, or the most educated or credentialed person.
So while the author's premise is helpful in illuminating a problem in the selection process, it is a bit of an oversimplification, or so it appears to me.
We'll celebrate once he can actually win in the courts on this issue (or has the balls to ignore them). No point huffing hopium when every action is tied up by TROs and lawsuits.
That being said, the educational and candidate quality of Ivy (and equivalent) schools has dropped off a cliff, thanks to DEI, wokeness, rampant LLM abuse, and other reasons. That's incredibly whitepilling, credentialism is going to die even if the courts try to artifically prop it up.
I agree with you that we need to move beyond Credentialism to Meritocracy, but I am not sure that IQ tests are the way to do it. Subject-matter expertise and skills are more important than intelligence. The smartest person in the world does not necessarily know anything about mechanical engineering (or whatever the relevant field is), and a solid mechanical engineer may only have above-average intelligence.
We need highly specialized test for the specific field along with training that teaches the knowledge and skills for that specific field.
Here is more on why IQ tests are not a viable alternative to Credentialism:
I do not believe that general intelligence tests should be allowed for employment because they are too general and a person can do little, if anything to change their score. I think such tests are far more useful for education. In fact, the SAT, ACT, and other academic exams are actually intelligence tests although they are not marketed as such.
Let me give an extreme example to illustrate why I oppose general intelligence tests by employers: imagine the smartest person in the world graduating from college. He takes an intelligence test and gets the highest possible score. He then applies for a job, and of course, he gets the job. Being intelligent, he realizes that he should not wait any further and then applies for a more prestigious job. He keeps doing this over and over again. Within a few months, he is CEO of the largest corporation in the world even though he has no clue how to do any of the jobs he got hired for! Such a system would be unacceptable.
We need a system of exams that encourages people to learn the valuable skills and knowledge that employers covet. Those skills and knowledge are very specific to a job. Such skills and knowledge cannot be identified by a general intelligence test. The most intelligent person in the world knows little about the specific skills and knowledge required for most jobs, so that person is not qualified to do them.
Obviously, a more intelligent person will have an advantage in learning those skills and knowledge at a faster rate than a less intelligent person. However, less intelligent persons can make up the gap through hard work and dedication, just as they do in the workplace.
The whole point is that skill and knowledge are kind of useless when not backed up by intelligence. So it is irrelevant to use that has a selection metric.
You can always make a smart person learn new skills and knowledge but you will never be able to make someone dumb, (but knowledgeable) smart. So they are still useless and all the investement into their training is just pure waste.
This is basically the story the metrics tell : you can invest all you want in education it is wasted if it doesn't focus on the rigth people and then you are left with selection problem that becomes even more complicated and costly down the line.
You can water and feed good nutrients a bad plant all you want, it will never become worthwhile. Similarly, you can train a work horse all you want, it will never become a race horse.
Those are just facts of life that we have conveniently ignored in service of an ideology.
It is not true at all for most occupations that “skill and knowledge are kind of useless when not backed up by intelligence.” It is likely only true for a small percentage of occupations.
The vast majority of jobs are about repeating the same cluster of specialized skills over and over. Those can be done by people of below average intelligence. A plumber, mechanic, technician, and farmer have very specialized skills that most people do not have but can be mastered by people of below average intelligence. I would argue that virtually all working-class jobs and many white-collar jobs are like this.
I am more intelligent than the vast majority of plumbers, mechanics and farmers, but I could not possibly do their job without lots of training in their skill sets.
Plus intelligent people tend to get bored with a job that lacks variety and the ability to apply that intelligence. And intelligent people with low conscienceness can be very lazy and avoid working if they can get away from it.
Because of the above, there is no need to “make someone dumb become smart.”
Good article, but I think there are two unmentioned roadblocks to ending credentialism:
1) Young people actually like going to college. It’s ingrained in the culture as “the best years of your life” and people often go to college just for the experience
2) interview tests are time-consuming for interviewers and not well-liked by interviewees
It is a conflict of interest that educational institutions for the most part provide both training and the certification of their owmtraining (granting of the degree). The testing of the results of their training should be an external adversarial body, not there institutions themselves. The massive grade inflation we see now and increase in the number of students shows the consequences of this.
I agree, and the testing should be very specific to the needs of a specific occupation. And to push it further, you should not need to graduate a university to take the test. This would open up a huge range of alternatives methods for learning the basic skills to start a career. This would create a competition between institutions to deliver results in a cost-effective way.
I don't understand the point. Why would replacing credentialism with true meritocracy change anything about the ability distribution? This assumption seems to be the backbone of this post. But the end of credentialism just won't make the problem go away that there are only so many able people in this world, but all jobs need to be done and will keep being done mostly by the less able.
Not really. The less able will simply *not* graduate, or be accepted into programs of study, since the standards are maintained regardless of need. In the case of some professions, e.g., law and medicine, the less able will not be certified to work in their profession. Yes this could cause shortages in the workforce, but the assumption is that an unqualified worker is a danger in excess of any benefit.
Think about one profession, medicine. You want a doctor who is incompetent to handle your health affairs simply because there is a shortage of doctors? Check out some of the current complaints about the British NHS hiring foreign trained physicians of dubious credentials. BTW, I am not that “racist” in such beliefs having my life saved about 6 weeks ago by an Indian of limited English ability, but an excellent surgeon with much experience and reputation. Race is has simply become a proxy for incompetence since AA and DEI have infested our institutions. I can remember the day as a young student when race was a proxy for competent as the standards of the day were onerous and enforced and minorities had to be the best of the best to succeed under those conditions—and the were!
There is no need to be a cuck and share your native home with invasive populations. British culture is dead, diluted out of existence, and without tech and ideological intervention. The native british ethnic groups/genetic clusters will go extinct.
We can just get our former child prodigies and accomplished geniuses to become sperm/egg donors, then create embryos for surrogacy and adoption.
We produce 4 140IQ+ individuals per 1000. If we can multiply that subsection, it will be a ludicrous investment. It would below Ashkenazim's 24 per 1000 out the water.
Interesting to note that one of the most dynamic and lucrative industries, tech, has managed to smuggle IQ testing in via the whiteboard coding interview quite successfully for decades.
But even more interesting to note that even given the existence of widespread non-credentialed entry options, it's still far, far more common for professional software engineers to have a four-year degree than not.
My best guess is that the demise of disparate impact doctrine will open up more such opportunities but won't put a major dent in college enrollment. College is at least as much about class signaling as work-credential signaling, and I doubt we'll see much decline in demand for that status marker in our lives.
Software engineering used to be the only career path where you could go to a no-name state school and still land a top tier job just by acing interviews. Whereas finance/law/etc. only recruits from the top 15-20 schools. Unfortunately this door is kind of closing too with the glut of H1Bs and the general downturn in tech hiring.
Does a glut of H1Bs mean the door is closing or that the demographics of the people walking through it are changing?
"Door is closing for people in my ingroup"
No they haven't. The tech industry is in disarray because they only hire Hindu-1bs now and every White interviewed is only a smokescreen to pretend they aren't doing this. And this is why there are constant data breaches. Indians cannot do cyber security. Nor do Indians care to even try to.
This is pure cope and anyone who claims this with a straight face should be laughed out of the room
USA will lose its tech advantage to China with the indianization of big tech
Yeah you just outted yourself as a pajeet. Indians cut corners that should not be cut, and pretty much wholesale corruption emerges from them.
Indian civilization, region by region is a reflection of indian dispositions
I'm white, I'm just not completely retarded. I've worked with literally hundreds of H1B engineers primarily from China and India, and they are every bit as good as the white guys because they have to pass the same hiring bar (and make pretty much the same money).
What is your ethnic background. White is meaningless and europeans are heterogenous. If so, you are a pro-replacement cuck and you will screw over your own people. Individualism will always be destroyed by collectivism.
Either way, innate dispositions matter, especially social ones you are getting duped. The indianization of big tech and society will end in disaster.
If we need more geniuses and not slave labour. Then get our accomplished geniuses and former child prodigies to become gamete donors and make embryos for surrogacy and adoption. Similar to what cryobank california does.
Multiracial societies generate too much bad blood between groups as they compete (and rarely honestly), has very ugly politics that just goes in circles. With so many competing tribes, it will end in disaster.
A whiteboard coding example is not really in IQ test. It is a domain-specific test that is relevant to the job. I think we need more of the latter instead of Credentialism or IQ tests.
The problem with obtaining status “markers” is how to pay for such. The typical college graduate is mired in debt when they graduate—50% of starting freshmen, never do (give or take how you measure) graduate. Yet, they still accumulate debt. Many of those graduating, i.e., obtaining your magical status marker, cannot find a job that allows easy payback of debt. That is to say, last figures I saw was that the median annual earnings were $40K! That’s pathetic in today’s high cost society. This is not really hard to believe when one considers the types of (faux) majors offered by colleges and universities milking students for their tuition money. Little more than degree mills.
The mistake you make is in assuming that college students major in some sort of “tech”. Let’s just call it STEM. Only about 20-25% of graduates are graduating in STEM majors. The rest major in less rigorous courses of study which have little value in today’s job market—and their salaries reflect such (diminished) value from employers.
Then there is the confounding problem of “overproduction of elites”—those who graduate and feel society owes them something due to a piece of worthless paper and a ceremony, but that’s an issue for another discussion.
Tech has a clear, simple, and inexpensive way to measure performance that's relatively robust. The lack thereof in most other corporate functions is why credentialism and other biases can flourish.
Spot on. It is also a positive feedback loop. Academics who gained repute via credentialism do not have the cognitive capacity or individuality to assess the merits of others’ work, so they defer to the credentials of the authors of the work instead of the work itself.
I saw this firsthand during my PhD. Many PIs refused to form an opinion of a paper until others, whose credentials they respect, gave their opinions. In any journal club, their first question was always “which lab/institute is this from?”. Before submitting their student’s/postdoc’s work to a journal, they would send it round to at least five “credentialed” scientists, so that they could be sure that (a) the findings wouldn’t rock the boat, and (b) the science was sound—since they couldn’t/wouldn’t assess this independently. Of course, (a) was always more important than (b).
Regarding peer-review specifically—it’s a complete sham. Most journals allow you to block reviewers who don’t like you (i.e., who are wise to any dodgy science that you might have published) and to recommend reviewers who you are best pals with. Very few journals apply double-blind peer review as standard. At least in my field, success is more determined by who you know than what you’ve done/your actual work. It’s super easy to just recommend a reviewer whose grant application was given to yourself to review. You simply have to minimally communicate this mutual-dependability to each other and both sides instinctively proceed with pathetically shallow review. It’s possible for clades of scientists to propel themselves through decades of publications and grants via this circle-jerk tactic. Further, many older academics will deliberately avoid recommending younger academics as reviewers, since they are less tainted by decades of credentialism, and are more likely to actually assess the work.
Credentialism, and its ugly sister gerontocracy, are killing science.
That’s why I get frustrated with the cliche career advice that “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” This advice is really only applicable for people in business schools who can talk a good game, but not for people are more blunt and honest like myself. I tend to see myself as the lowest on the totem pole. I graduated with a generalized liberal arts degree that does not lend itself to preparing me for any specific position, and since I didn’t work or do any extracurriculars at college in my twenties due to mental health issues, I’ve basically had to act like someone fresh out of high school on the job market. And I’m really only qualified for minimum high school- level positions since I’m humble enough to not claim I know more about how to do a certain job than I actually do. But I’m a white privileged female with a supportive, well-off family who will do fine in the long run, but what about someone smarter but poorer than me with no education or connections whatsoever? Don’t they deserve to have access to opportunities too, perhaps more so than me?
“The End of Credentialism means…”
That approximately 50% of the colleges and universities will need to shut down for lack of sufficiently capable applicants. As your graph shows, today’s typical college student has an IQ of around 105–give or take a bit. (I’ve read even lower estimates.) Whereas in the 40’s it was perhaps 120-125. It also shows a marked decline after the war and the GI bill, but still 1+ SD for admitted students. What is the purpose of a university education but to perfect the nest and the brightest among us?
Today’s generation of millennials is perhaps the most credentialed of all, with I am told, something like 40% having a tertiary degree of sorts. When I applied to university in the early 70’s, if you were deficient in prerequisites or simply low scoring on the entrance exam’s you were not admitted and told to find another institution of lower standards. Today that same university, now a leading “Hispanic Serving” institution, readily admits to 40% of its Freshman class taking remedial coursework. In short, they have reverted to being a post-HS remedial institution.
No matter how you run the numbers, we have at least twice as many students in tertiary academic education (non-trades) as can make use of such an education. To this effect the standards for most all disciplines have been reduced. As the author noted this produces “mediocrities” in all fields. What the author perhaps does not note/emphasize is that these mediocrities are not relegated to the traditional “minorities”, but also to an entire cadre of White students as well. It is not so easy to avoid mediocrity via racial classification as one might assume. AA and DEI affects everyone.
Excellent points. See my comments above.
... that they will put up a strong political fight to push back against merit based decisions.
None. The current system now devotes resources into the wrong areas—depriving both society and the college attendees who waste their time and go into insurmountable debt.
“If selection by examination is not strict, the powerful will struggle to be foremost, and orphans and the poor will have difficulty advancing”. Imperial Censor Wang Ji, 1754 AD.
This is empty of data and full of vague opinions. Not worth the read.
Spoken like a true credentialist.
Spoken like one with no experience within the post secondary community. One might educate oneself from those who have been there and done that.
They're everywhere!
This criticism is vacuous and overly emotional. Worth the mocking.
Your comment begs the question, is the criticism *true*. If you are well read wrt our declining post secondary educational system, you would know the truth of the author’s commentary. Mockery and ad hominem is the mark of one without argument/rebuttal. You’ve offered no evidence to the contrary.
Nonsense. I said it was vacuous, which means there is no way to determine whether the criticism is true or not from its internal structure. A facile but equally vacuous rejoinder.
As I said, begs the question as thus your response.
Repeating rubbish doesn't make it less rubbishy.
You are dense, aren’t you. Give it up.
On the contrary, I found it well worth the read.
We all know what B.S. stands for -- Bachelor of Science-- and also BULL Shit. Then M.S. is MORE of the SAME. And Phd is PILED HIGHER AND DEEPER.
"We all know what B.S. stands for -- Bachelor of Science-- and also BULL Shit. Then M.S. is MORE of the SAME. And Phd is PILED HIGHER AND DEEPER."
You are painting with too broad of a brush. The value of a college education is in the subject chosen. I detect some jealousy.
Yep in my experience it's really tough for wealthy, well-connected students who aren't academically or technically-inclined to game tests such as the SAT or LSAT through prep. Months-long coaching will usually take them only from around a 70% to an 80% at best.
I think this is failing to appreciate the value of signalling and credentialism.
Like is an MBA a good signal of IQ not really, does it teach that much? also probably not. but the process that generates MBAs is doing useful work. Definitely agree we should allow cognitive testing and try to remove degree requirements. It's just not obvious how much that would actually change; the US is an outlier in terms of educational attainment but best I can figure it's only by like 5-10%. For a potential counter example here, look at Korea, they have iq tests for employment and the highest rate of tertiary education in the OECD
While the premise appears to have some merit, there is value in education.
For example an engineering education trains a person in problem solving. This activity, when undertaken at a young age, affects their habits of thought for the rest of their life. Four years of increasingly difficult story problems does that.
There is really no substitute for education in Engineering.
There is also value in practical experience. For mechanical engineers in particular experience in the manual arts is of great value, as is the experience gotten from work experience.
There is no substitute for experience in engineering.
There is also value in aptitude. The difference between a person of ordinary aptitude and a person of exceptional aptitude can be very dramatic. I have seen instances where one individual of exceptional aptitude produced billions of dollars of revenue where a person of ordinary aptitude would have produced possibly a few million. People of extraordinary aptitude change industries and develop entirely new technologies.
There is no substitute for aptitude.
However, in many cases what is needed isn't an extraordinary person. What is needed is a person competent enough for the work needing doing who will be happy in a job which is probably tedious, repetitive, and boring.
My daughter was a CPA for a while. She passed the CPA exam with a perfect score - her description - which I interpret as meaning she answered all questions correctly. She disliked working as an accountant because she was surrounded by people who were not very smart, not at all curious, and who resented her because she was dramatically more capable than they were.
So the real challenge isn't finding the smartest person for any job. The real challenge is finding the dumbest person who is likely to do the job at the desired level. The person with the highest aptitude for the desired work product should be selected.
In many cases that won't be the smartest person, the most experienced person, or the most educated or credentialed person.
So while the author's premise is helpful in illuminating a problem in the selection process, it is a bit of an oversimplification, or so it appears to me.
next in line is tests for other qualities you infer from having a degree:
mental health
reliability
conformity
etc etc
those are harder to test. but certainly we should be able to know about those without wasting years
We'll celebrate once he can actually win in the courts on this issue (or has the balls to ignore them). No point huffing hopium when every action is tied up by TROs and lawsuits.
That being said, the educational and candidate quality of Ivy (and equivalent) schools has dropped off a cliff, thanks to DEI, wokeness, rampant LLM abuse, and other reasons. That's incredibly whitepilling, credentialism is going to die even if the courts try to artifically prop it up.
I agree with you that we need to move beyond Credentialism to Meritocracy, but I am not sure that IQ tests are the way to do it. Subject-matter expertise and skills are more important than intelligence. The smartest person in the world does not necessarily know anything about mechanical engineering (or whatever the relevant field is), and a solid mechanical engineer may only have above-average intelligence.
We need highly specialized test for the specific field along with training that teaches the knowledge and skills for that specific field.
I go into more detail here:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-merit-of-merit-part-1
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-merit-of-merit-part-2-of-2
Here is more on why IQ tests are not a viable alternative to Credentialism:
I do not believe that general intelligence tests should be allowed for employment because they are too general and a person can do little, if anything to change their score. I think such tests are far more useful for education. In fact, the SAT, ACT, and other academic exams are actually intelligence tests although they are not marketed as such.
Let me give an extreme example to illustrate why I oppose general intelligence tests by employers: imagine the smartest person in the world graduating from college. He takes an intelligence test and gets the highest possible score. He then applies for a job, and of course, he gets the job. Being intelligent, he realizes that he should not wait any further and then applies for a more prestigious job. He keeps doing this over and over again. Within a few months, he is CEO of the largest corporation in the world even though he has no clue how to do any of the jobs he got hired for! Such a system would be unacceptable.
We need a system of exams that encourages people to learn the valuable skills and knowledge that employers covet. Those skills and knowledge are very specific to a job. Such skills and knowledge cannot be identified by a general intelligence test. The most intelligent person in the world knows little about the specific skills and knowledge required for most jobs, so that person is not qualified to do them.
Obviously, a more intelligent person will have an advantage in learning those skills and knowledge at a faster rate than a less intelligent person. However, less intelligent persons can make up the gap through hard work and dedication, just as they do in the workplace.
The whole point is that skill and knowledge are kind of useless when not backed up by intelligence. So it is irrelevant to use that has a selection metric.
You can always make a smart person learn new skills and knowledge but you will never be able to make someone dumb, (but knowledgeable) smart. So they are still useless and all the investement into their training is just pure waste.
This is basically the story the metrics tell : you can invest all you want in education it is wasted if it doesn't focus on the rigth people and then you are left with selection problem that becomes even more complicated and costly down the line.
You can water and feed good nutrients a bad plant all you want, it will never become worthwhile. Similarly, you can train a work horse all you want, it will never become a race horse.
Those are just facts of life that we have conveniently ignored in service of an ideology.
It is not true at all for most occupations that “skill and knowledge are kind of useless when not backed up by intelligence.” It is likely only true for a small percentage of occupations.
The vast majority of jobs are about repeating the same cluster of specialized skills over and over. Those can be done by people of below average intelligence. A plumber, mechanic, technician, and farmer have very specialized skills that most people do not have but can be mastered by people of below average intelligence. I would argue that virtually all working-class jobs and many white-collar jobs are like this.
I am more intelligent than the vast majority of plumbers, mechanics and farmers, but I could not possibly do their job without lots of training in their skill sets.
Plus intelligent people tend to get bored with a job that lacks variety and the ability to apply that intelligence. And intelligent people with low conscienceness can be very lazy and avoid working if they can get away from it.
Because of the above, there is no need to “make someone dumb become smart.”
Good article, but I think there are two unmentioned roadblocks to ending credentialism:
1) Young people actually like going to college. It’s ingrained in the culture as “the best years of your life” and people often go to college just for the experience
2) interview tests are time-consuming for interviewers and not well-liked by interviewees
I dont think Meritocracy would rise with rise of Credentialism, what happen is connection would rise. Who you Know would be even moreimportant.
It is a conflict of interest that educational institutions for the most part provide both training and the certification of their owmtraining (granting of the degree). The testing of the results of their training should be an external adversarial body, not there institutions themselves. The massive grade inflation we see now and increase in the number of students shows the consequences of this.
I agree, and the testing should be very specific to the needs of a specific occupation. And to push it further, you should not need to graduate a university to take the test. This would open up a huge range of alternatives methods for learning the basic skills to start a career. This would create a competition between institutions to deliver results in a cost-effective way.
I don't understand the point. Why would replacing credentialism with true meritocracy change anything about the ability distribution? This assumption seems to be the backbone of this post. But the end of credentialism just won't make the problem go away that there are only so many able people in this world, but all jobs need to be done and will keep being done mostly by the less able.
Not really. The less able will simply *not* graduate, or be accepted into programs of study, since the standards are maintained regardless of need. In the case of some professions, e.g., law and medicine, the less able will not be certified to work in their profession. Yes this could cause shortages in the workforce, but the assumption is that an unqualified worker is a danger in excess of any benefit.
Think about one profession, medicine. You want a doctor who is incompetent to handle your health affairs simply because there is a shortage of doctors? Check out some of the current complaints about the British NHS hiring foreign trained physicians of dubious credentials. BTW, I am not that “racist” in such beliefs having my life saved about 6 weeks ago by an Indian of limited English ability, but an excellent surgeon with much experience and reputation. Race is has simply become a proxy for incompetence since AA and DEI have infested our institutions. I can remember the day as a young student when race was a proxy for competent as the standards of the day were onerous and enforced and minorities had to be the best of the best to succeed under those conditions—and the were!
There is no need to be a cuck and share your native home with invasive populations. British culture is dead, diluted out of existence, and without tech and ideological intervention. The native british ethnic groups/genetic clusters will go extinct.
We can just get our former child prodigies and accomplished geniuses to become sperm/egg donors, then create embryos for surrogacy and adoption.
We produce 4 140IQ+ individuals per 1000. If we can multiply that subsection, it will be a ludicrous investment. It would below Ashkenazim's 24 per 1000 out the water.