Email from EconLog reader Joshua Fox, reprinted with his permission. There’s no reason, of course, that you couldn’t have a similar job training model without the injustice of conscription.
Bryan, I loved The Case Against Education.
Further support for your thesis comes from the Israel Defense Forces, where twenty-year-olds control air traffic, direct large organizations, and develop software.
In civilian life, such levels of responsibility would require an advanced education.
The IDF sorts candidates partially by their formal schooling. But since the process starts in the beginning of the senior year, and certainly before matriculation tests are finished, academic progress is not the most important criterion.
The IDF administers IQ tests. They also give personality tests (created by no other than Daniel Kahnemann!). Other markers of personal “quality” are used, with less weight, as for example leadership in extracurricular activities.
New soldiers get taught exactly the needed skills. For example, software developers get a few months of training focused on software development. The army allows a a few recruits in
relevant areas, like engineering and medicine, to delay their service until after their degree.
And amazingly, the software developers, air traffic controllers, medics and others seem to do as good a job as any in civilian life. In fact, their levels of responsibility would otherwise
require many years of experience, another twist on your thesis. And these soldiers are not just a select few: Israel has broad mandatory conscription.
The next questions are whether and why these soldiers have to step down to a lower level of responsibility when they enter civilian life, and whether and why they need a B.A. to get hired.
Best,
Joshua
P.S. My four kids didn’t attend school.
READER COMMENTS
Philo
Apr 19 2018 at 11:15am
It’s easy to evaluate intelligence with a test. American employers are using the four-plus years of collegiate schooling primarily to assess conscientiousness and conformity. The Israeli Army relies instead on Kahnemann’s personality test, which may be a much more efficient indicator of conscientiousness and conformity if it really works. My question is: Does it work well enough to make it preferable (in the American context) to four years of college?
Brad
Apr 19 2018 at 11:39am
Wouldn’t HS grades, attendance, disciplinary records be enough to establish contentiousness? Then add in a personality test as well.
Add in the fact that you could conceivably fire low contentiousness folks quickly if they were hired for apprenticeship.
One downside of any apprenticeship program is that a person might be stuck in their current company since any other company might want to see a degree, Also the companies investment in training could be taken to a competitor.
Maybe the best way to exploit this would be for a company to partner with a university and develop an curriculum that focused heavily on distance learning, applied learning and internships.
The young person would begin working at the company after suitable testing and inspection of grades but would also take university classes that the company deemed valuable (likely remotely). The company would invest in the retraining in exchange for a loan forgivable in increments over 5-10 years.
The company could fire anyone who was not contentious enough or just did not work out, but the student would only be on the hook for the training cost to date.
Floccina
Apr 19 2018 at 3:24pm
If you have a bunch of facebook friends with and without college degrees, you begin to wonder why we have college at all.
It seems there are certain wrong things that need a college degree to believe.
Floccina
Apr 19 2018 at 3:27pm
Addition to my above post:
BTW It seems there are certain wrong things that need a college degree to believe. That might be due to the selection for conformity.
Edan Maor
Apr 19 2018 at 5:57pm
Interesting take by Joshua Fox, I hadn’t thought to link the IDF to The Case Against Education. (I was a programmer in the IDF, and was trained as Joshua describes).
I’ll answer the last points of Joshua: “The next questions are whether and why these soldiers have to step down to a lower level of responsibility when they enter civilian life, and whether and why they need a B.A. to get hired.”
The answer is, mostly, they don’t need a B.A. degree. In the Israeli high-tech community, being an army programmer is generally considered at least equivalent to having a B.A., and oftentimes better (as it comes with 6 years of real experience). Certain units have even more of a good reputation, much like working at Google.
Many IDF programmers still choose to get a B.A. degree. Partially this is for similar reasons as in other countries (i.e. signaling or improving their human capital – though here, I think the case for signaling is even stronger, but I’m not sure). Some IDF programmers get degrees because there are incentives to do so (free time from the army to study, structured programs built for IDF programmers, courses waived based on existing knowledge).
Doug
Apr 20 2018 at 4:36am
Wouldn’t HS grades, attendance, disciplinary records be enough to establish contentiousness? Then add in a personality test as well.
The other puzzle along those lines is why does conscientiousness have to be demonstrated in conjunction with intelligence? Employers want to see a college degree because that proves both. Okay, but why must they see both in the same endeavor.
We all agree that IQ tests are the gold standard for measuring intelligence. So, why don’t employers simply administer IQ tests, then solely focus on conscientiousness? Being a shift manager at Starbucks certainly requires as much conscientiousness as a bachelors degree.
Why don’t we see prestige employers like Google and Goldman Sachs look for fast food shift managers who score at 120+ on IQ tests? In fact why do elite colleges actually exist?
Harvard students probably aren’t really any more conscientiousness than Penn State students. They’re just much more intelligent. But with IQ tests we no longer need to sort by intelligence. Why not hire high IQ students from low-tier schools? (Of which I can assure you, there are massive numbers)
Kimball
Apr 20 2018 at 12:08pm
When my son turned 12 he was legally allowed to operate any boat according to Maine state law. I’m an avid waterskier and I trained my son at age 12 to operate and drive me skiing with my 10 year-old as spotter. They had been gaming for several years and their games are far more sophisticated and difficult than operating a boat safely, even a 310 hp high performance ski boat. We underestimate what kids can do and baby them too much. And we likewise overestimate how important it is for them to sit in a classroom and learn alongside 30 other kids.
Enjoy your articles and podcasts.
Best,
Kimball
P.S. My kids don’t attend school either, but they do spend a reasonable portion of their day learning and doing. It remains to be seen if they will go to normal college like I did.
Chris
Apr 22 2018 at 1:05am
RE: Why don’t businesses just use IQ tests?
Sadly, because of a Supreme Court ruling, 1971, Griggs v. Duke Power. They essentially held that *any* pre-employment testing must be limited to specifically identified business needs and that the burden of proof lay with the employer. If someone challenges the need for a pre-employment test, the business has to demonstrate to a judge’s satisfaction that that test is absolutely necessary to determine who was qualified for a particular position. As the Grigg’s case was specifically about IQ tests, those tests were pretty much ruled out altogether (unless the business can *document* a minimum required IQ to do the job, yeah right).
So, what did businesses do? They decided to allow an entity that is allowed to use such tests to do the discerning for them, i.e. the university. The way the court set it up its much easier to make the case that an applicant needs X degree or X level of education to do a job than it is to say they need X IQ or be able to pass some (possibly arbitrary) test. You’re explicitly not allowed to test IQ and just take those with the highest scores.
psmith
Apr 24 2018 at 8:45pm
Businesses do use IQ tests, though. I took one when I interviewed for Cornerstone, the consulting firm. Raven matrices and everything. Lots of similar white-collar companies do the same thing.
(They don’t call it an IQ test, and I assume a sufficiently rich and motivated litigant could raise a little trouble over it, but in expectation it’s apparently worth the risk.).
Yaakov Schatz
Apr 26 2018 at 9:26am
While I agree with “the case against education”, the IDF has a mixed record on this.
1) programmers do get a focused training and are assigned programming tasks. However, the desired development tasks are assigned to recruits with degrees.
2) Among the recruits who defer service and get an engineering degree prior to their army service, some are assigned technical development jobs in the field of their training. Others, however, are assigned responsibility tasks, which require nearly no technical knowledge. The requirement for a recruit with a degree for these positions is totally signalling.
3) Whenever possible, the army prefers accredited professionals from civilian schools. For this purpose the IDF actually financially supports civilian or semi-civilian technician schools. Only when the number of available recruits is insufficient does the army go for in-house training. The in-house trainees generally get the lower level tasks.
4) The IDF self trains paramedics, but in cooperation with civilian programs such that the curriculum is equivalent and accredited as civilian programs. On the other hand, the IDF is now trying to recruit nurses, from civilian four year programs. It seems they are not satisfied with their in-house system.
5) The IDF has intensive programs for teaching languages, especially Arabic. They do however, prefer recruiting students who studied Arabic in school, but give zero weight to degrees and just test the applicants for their knowledge.
6) The IDF pilots and navy officer courses provide bachelor degrees as part of the training. I believe the reason is to allow the trainees to continue for many years in the army without running away to get on in life.
7) The IDF radio station trains its own reporters. No degrees needed.
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