Comment on Open thread, 7-14 July 2014

Mon, 14 Jul 2014 00:38:04 GMT

You can't decide to get accepted by an elite college.

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.

Another way to phrase this statement is that there is less motivation to engage in costly signaling.

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.

Discuss