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Azathoth123 comments on Open thread, 7-14 July 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Yes there is, we can pass laws making it illegal to hire on the basis of college degrees (possibly with an exemption for degrees directly relevant to the job).
You can't decide to get accepted by an elite college.
Another way to phrase this statement is that there is less motivation to engage in costly signaling. Thus there is less deadweight signaling loss and hence more resources available to utility production.
I was referring to discrimination based on whether you have a college education, not discrimination based on which college education you have.
Discrimination based on eliteness of college doesn't raise the same sort of problems because employers can't hire just elite college graduates and nobody else--there aren't enough of them. After the employers hire all the elite college graduates, the remaining ones go to colleges which are hard to rank against each other (unlike IQ scores, which are numbers and are easy to compare). The employers will in effect select randomly from that remaining pool, so it won't lead to people in that pool becoming permanently unemployed, or even to just becoming permanently underemployed by large degrees.
If I had to choose between black people getting the kind of jobs they got when discrimination against them was permitted, and signalling, I'd decide the signalling is less costly, and so would pretty much everyone else.
You do realize the signaling, at least in the US, currently involves taking out student loans under terms that boarder on debt peonage.
There was a long period of time between when discrimination against blacks in employment was forbidden, and college prices rose to excessive levels. I doubt that signalling alone can explain the increase in college costs, or that letting employers discriminate based on race or IQ would reduce them. I'd blame it more on other government interference (such as subsidizing loans and making it essentially impossible to discharge loans in bankruptcy).
Furthermore, the situation of black people before the civil rights movement was bad enough that I'd be hard pressed to decide that even being massively in debt for a college loan is worse.