Read his speech at Cato.
As the BA began to take on this gateway function, the customer started asking for something that the school could provide independently of the quality of education. And what happened as a result? Schools had every incentive to produce as many graduates as possible but no incentive to improve their product. As such, any remnants of a classical liberal education havemostly disappeared from college campuses.
Later in the speech:
No technical barriers stand in the way of evolving toward a system where certification tests would replace the BA. The problem is a shortage of tests that are nationally accepted like the CPA exam.
Suppose that college is nothing but an elaborate filtering/signalling device. Then it would seem that there are huge piles of $20 bills waiting to be picked up by the sort of certification enterprise that Murray hopes for.
I think it would be tricky to do so. College diplomas and venerable certification programs like the CPA and the Bar etc. are sacrosanct but any new certification regime would quickly run into Disparate Impact challenges.
It’s not that simple. Signaling as conceived by Spence is not about demonstrating how good you are at math or science or how knowledgeable you are on _any_ subject. It’s about the cost differential of obtaining a diploma between high quality workers and low quality ones.
If college is just a signaling device, making it cheaper for everyone won’t solve a thing, because the high cost for some is what makes it valuable for others.
There’s certainly a pile of money waiting to be made, but the problem is incremental change, like what Murray proposes. The fact is that the vast majority of a college education, whether STEM or not, is utterly useless, yet he would merely transfer the same crap online and have it certified more cheaply. But the giant opportunity here is to completely change what is learned, real disruption that most are too dumb to realize. When that happens, the destruction of the existing colleges and their legacy curricula will be swift.
I think ziel nailed it: there may be no “technical barriers” to an alternative certification mechanism, but there are emphatically legal and political barriers. Those $20 bills may be lying there, but they are cordoned off by the police.
I am more optimistic than ziel or luke. They are both correct about the problems confronting alternative certifications, but Murray is also correct. When there is a path to a career that is much shorter in time and a fraction of the cost of a BA, it will gain credibility over time.
Veterans of the military’s technical fields have no problem finding work, they’ve served their apprenticeship.
One risk or limitation of the certification scheme I see is what has happened with other licensing requirement. Take the licensing in the US maritime field. For those who do not attend a maritime university there are very stiff time at sea/job requirement before you can even sit for the tests. It is not impossible but it does require you to make the first hurdle of getting a job in the field. Independent study then testing is not a way in although required after you “get your sea time”. These sea time requirement continue to move to the next level. Attending a maritime university permits one to leap over these requirements for the entry positions such as AB, Oiler, 3rd engineer or 3rd officer (deck). While unlikely in the future due to industry changes, the “sea time” requirements have been drastically reduced when a sudden influx of labor was needed, such as in times of war.
So the risk is that industry interests will seek to create a guild limiting opportunities in the field and control labor available to employers to increase wages.
How many employers want 19 year olds who passed a test? Not too many. This isn’t an original point, but college is not about education.
In fields where performance matters and merit rises to the top, they don’t even care about the test, they just look at your work. You’re right, college isn’t about education, it’s the worst waste of time there is, it’s mere tradition.
The US Federal Government, perhaps prompted by rent-seeking traditional institutions of higher education, has already indicated that it will take harsh measures (prosecution under civil-rights laws and regulations) against employers who try to utilize alternative certification schemes:
http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2011/10/check_out_this_alternative_to_.html
If employers who use exam-based certifications get prosecuted, fewer of them will try, which means the certifiers will lack for customers.
I predict that very narrow vocational certifications (e.g., Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert) will survive and prosper but generic certifications an employer might use to screen non-technical industrial or office labor will be destroyed by disparate-impact litigation/prosecution.
Leprino Foods, the firm prosecuted for using the NCRC WorkKeys general certification test in hiring decisions as described in the link in my previous comment, was forced to accede to a punitive settlement:
http://www.dol.gov/opa/media/press/ofccp/OFCCP20121443.htm