RobC said:
"Nancy,
Forgive me for messing up your paragraph into numbered points (thanks, looks better), it's just easier to answer them that way.
1. Some jobs simply require the applicant to have demonstrated a very exceptional quality of personality and achievement for the clear reason that those jobs themselves are demanding of those special abilities that the students have displayed. Degrees don't always/only reflect parrot ability. The job interview also takes cognizance of the other, additional things that the graduate has done in the pursuit of his/her degree, things outwith the strict requirements of the course, self-motivated interests in branches of the subject that (s)he has done on his/her own initiative. For example, a law graduate who has also excelled in inter-university debate; a medical student who has performed lots of voluntary work in various situations where it's applicable, such as first-aid at sporting events etc. People showing willingness beyond the formal, educational part of whatever they are involved with have that on their CV too... So in answer to the question, a good CV reveals the graduate's wider input and value.
(Most applicants don't get a job interview. Most businesses' HR departments will have a hard requirement for completed college degree for many positions. Considering my level of education (doctoral degree), I might be inclined to favor strict educational requirements for business positions, but my family history has made me somewhat skeptical. My father had some college, but never completed a degree. He had some manufacturing process management jobs and sales jobs, saved up, started his own business in the early 1960s. He had more business sense than a graduating class of M.B.A.s. If he had applied in the current climate, his application would have been rejected out of hand. Remember, HR types are using Monster and other online services to pre-screen applicants, and "outstanding, but not a college graduate" resumes automatically end up being rejected by computers before reaching human eyes.)
2. But it isn't just about "a person the upper management types will feel comfortable mentoring'' it's also very much about whom the managements' clients will feel comfortable opening up to/with in business and even social situations. If you have top-end clients, you don't want them to feel they are dealing with 'idiots', because those 'idiots' directly represent the company the clients have hired.
That can be rephrased as "top-end clients don't want to deal with blacks, women, smart country kids from fly-over states who were tops in their class at Large State University". This can also lead to completely missing out on markets or phenomena not in the usual world view of rich white boy graduates of Fancy Private Universities.
That's possibly the case in some places, and I agree that a lot of talent might not get through when it deserves to get through. But, that's life, and other top talent
does get through. You can't expect to have different rules for different social classes by decree; that many 'clients' might not like dealing with black people or women is probably perfectly true as well, but that's also life, and to make official quotas based on nothing more than forced selection arrangements smacks of tokenism too. There's a case of what looks suspiciously like that now in Canada with the 50-50 Trudeau government. We'll see how well that works in practice. (Funny, I seem to remember that Daddy Trudeau had a hellish time at the hands of a wife - or was it a girlfriend? - 'twas a long time ago, just as long ago as my memory, and I might well be mixing them up.)
They were hoping that the new, radical socialist leader of one of Britain's opposition parties would do the same, but it didn't quite get there, and tonight's news shows (to my amusement and delight) that the entire party is at internecine loggerheads, though not on that issue which, I'm sure, no party member wants to raise again right now.
But anyway, I think that tokenism is every bit as bad as the problems that cause it. And that's where governmental interference intended to 'socially engineer' life and society inevitably leads us: tokenism; an insult to the tokens, too.
I'm afraid that it's been my experience that it's impossible to 'arrange' society at the level that your utopìan system would need (one can't even arrange how a family works); there's nothing to recommend it beyond a political determination to have it so, and as political parties aren't the one's paying the salaries of most of the people getting employed (unless they are state pawns, and even then it's the taxpayer wot pays!), they are best advised to keep their noses out and figers off.
Now, were we starved of very bright young things making it, I'd be pleased to rethink my beliefs, but that's not the case: the case is one of preferring a different set of people to make it rather than the set that does right now. You can't do these things and have freedom. It's terribly easy to over-intellectualize life and cause utter confusion, and I fear that's what this kind of 'fixing what ain't broke' will do. In the end, the cream floats, even if not in the same container as originally expected.
Rob C
