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handoflixue comments on What Is Signaling, Really? - Less Wrong
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College degrees are better signals for conscientiousness than intelligence, which is no coincidence, since employers in real life care more about conscientiousness.
I doubt this is true. I've seen research that claims that on average, college students spend less than an hour a day studying. I've attended 3 universities in my life (undergrad to grad school), and skipping classes frequently, dressing like a slob in class, and skipping the required reading seem typical. If I cared mostly about conscientiousness, I would be more impressed by someone holding down a job at McDonald's for 4 years than graduating college, because a McDonald's manager has no problem with firing someone who skips work frequently. Most college professors don't even take attendance.
Yet long-term McDonald's employees get very little career boost from this in applying for jobs at Goldman Sachs or whatever. A kid who manages an Art History degree at Harvard while mostly partying and doing the minimal work to pass has a vastly better chance than the a long-term McDonald's employee with a sterling letter of recommendation from his boss.
This is vastly over-simplified. I did an internship at a firm that designs employee-selection systems for businesses, and this varies widely. A company like Walmart or McDonald's doesn't care much about intelligence, they want reliable, polite workers who won't steal from them. On the other hand, intelligence receives a huge premium for high-level white collar work. For these kinds of jobs, beyond some reasonable level of conscientiousness, they no longer care, and more conscientiousness demands no premium.
You presume that "attendance" is the valued part of conscientiousness. Keep in mind that the students who are routinely skipping class and their required reading either failed out of college (and thus lack a degree to signal with), or succeeded despite this (and therefor can probably be trusted to meet deadlines even if their appearance is shabby and their attendance atrocious)
If the job is "write a first draft of the novel by September", with no need to coordinate with an editor until then, then attendance is completely irrelevant to job performance. The same is probably true for a great number of other jobs (many programming jobs require team work, many others can be done by a single person working alone, etc.)
I'd consider the college graduate far more qualified - I know they can handle a deadline and open-ended long-term tasks, and even if they appear to be slacking off, I can trust that they have the conscientiousness required to pull through in the end.
No I didn't. That was just one illustrative example. I also included this:
Getting a sterling letter of recommendation means more than showing up. At McDonald's, praise from a manager would probably be very close proxy for conscientiousness.
Note that you're just assuming that what lets the college kid succeed in passing in the end is conscientiousness. You could just as easily say, "I can trust that they have the intelligence required to pull through in the end." In fact that would be an obviously better fit, since someone who slacked off all semester isn't likely to make up for all the studying in hours that other students did. Instead he or she will rely on intelligence to quickly grasp enough concepts to pass.
Fair enough.
If they accurately estimate the amount of time that they must spend to get the job done to the specified quality (get some specified GPA, for example), and then put forth that effort, then they have demonstrated some combination of intelligence and conscientiousness. It doesn't matter to me if they are smart enough to succeed while partying every night or smart and conscientious enough to study three nights a week and pass, or conscientious enough to study five nights a week and pass, because their performance is adequate in every case.
Lots of jobs are perceived to require attendance, even in the white collar realm. For those jobs, a college degree is less effective signalling than a work history showing a long employment at a job that requires attendance.