A College Exit Exam? And How I Only Finished College Because I Know There's A Prejudice Against Those Who Haven't
It makes sense to test for ability in some professions. For example, when I hire a part-time editorial assistant, I give candidates an editing test and I look at samples of their writing.

The editing test involves writing as well, in case somebody turns in an essay that ways, say, first plagiarized by Jonah Lehrer.

But the notion that a college education is what prepares you for a job isn't necessarily true.

And businesses are stupid to do what Investor's Business Daily did to Matt Welch, formerly a reason Magazine writer and the assistant editorial page editor of the LA Times, and now the editor-in-chief of reason.

IBD was all set to hire him -- until they found that he didn't have a sheepskin. Why not? He went to college for three years and learned journalism by working on his college newspaper and then moved to Prague and started a successful newspaper with some of his buddies from the paper.

Matt wrote on his old blog:

[July 13, 1998] -- What do I, an obscure free-lancer, have in common with the exalted likes of Carl Bernstein, Walter Cronkite, Pete Hamill, Mike Royko, Hunter S. Thompson, Nina Totenberg and Ken Layne?

We are, all of us, ineligible to work for Investor's Business Daily, the nation's 49th largest newspaper. Why? Because none of us has a college degree.

"I'm sorry," explained the IBD's Mike Krey when breaking the news to me. "I didn't realize the guidelines were so strict."

This was the third time Mike and I had talked on the phone about a job on the computer/tech desk of the Wall Street Journal's main competitor. The first two times went very well, and he was further encouraged by my previous employers' recommendations, such as "there could be no better candidate for your job."

The next step was supposed to be a trial article and perhaps a quick test at the paper's Los Angeles headquarters. But the home office had its standards -- none of the 40-odd editorial staff is without a degree -- and my candidacy was snuffed.

"I was surprised to learn of that policy, and in complete disagreement," Krey wrote to my former editor. "I, too, thought we had a winner."

These are hard words to read when you can't afford to buy health insurance for your wife. Harder still if you hold onto the belief, despite all evidence, that newspapers are ugly and noble collections of diverse, flawed humans whose only shared characteristic is the desire to put out a good paper.

Ironically, I had originally been attracted to Investor's Business Daily because of its spirited help-wanted ads in the trades, seeking candidates who "go against the grain" or "think outside of the box" or whatever.

Idiots.

There's now a piece by Douglas Belkin in the WSJ about post-college testing:

The new voluntary test, which the nonprofit behind it calls CLA +, represents the latest threat to the fraying monopoly that traditional four-year colleges have enjoyed in defining what it means to be well educated.

Even as students spend more on tuition--and take on increasing debt to pay for it--they are earning diplomas whose value is harder to calculate. Studies show that grade-point averages, or GPAs, have been rising steadily for decades, but employers feel many new graduates aren't prepared for the workforce.

Meanwhile, more students are taking inexpensive classes such as Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, but have no way to earn a meaningful academic credential from them.

HNTB Corp., a national architectural firm with 3,600 employees, see value in new tools such as the CLA +, said Michael Sweeney, a senior vice president. Even students with top grades from good schools may not "be able to write well or make an argument," he said. "I think at some point everybody has been fooled by good grades or a good resume."

The new test "has the potential to be a very powerful tool for employers," said Ronald Gidwitz, a board member of the Council for Aid to Education, the group behind the test, and a retired chief executive of Helene Curtis, a Chicago-based hair-care company that was bought by Unilever in 1996.

Only one in four employers think that two- and four-year colleges are doing a good job preparing students for the global economy, according to a 2010 survey conducted for the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Meanwhile, GPAs have been on the rise. A 2012 study looking at the grades of 1.5 million students from 200 four-year U.S. colleges and universities found that the percentage of A's given by teachers nearly tripled between 1940 and 2008. A college diploma is now more a mark "of social class than an indicator of academic accomplishment," said Stuart Rojstaczer, a former Duke University geophysics professor and co-author of the study.

Employers such as General Mills Inc. and Procter & Gamble Co. long have used their own job-applicant assessments. At some companies such as Google Inc., GPAs carry less weight than they once did because they have been shown to have little correlation with job success, said a Google spokeswoman.

Exactly. You need to test for your job if you test. And it helps to be a good judge of character and to be lucky enough to not interview clever sociopaths who can fake it well.

Of course, what I'd want to do is take the test without the college. I learn more independently than I ever did in school. For example, I just posted on one of the ev psych boards I'm on on Facebook to ask for advice on books to read on epigenetics, one of which I just ordered from the library.

Quite frankly, I only finished college because I knew people have a prejudice against those who don't.