Prior to the 1960’s, companies could IQ and literacy tests to prospective employees, and make hiring and placement decisions from the tests. Now, any test which has different pass rates for blacks and whites is discriminatory, and subjects the company to a lawsuit. Thus, companies started relying on college degrees to signal basic literacy.
Now, with grade inflation, a college degree is no longer an adequate indicator. Consider that Sheila Jackson Lee graduated Yale.
Restore companies’ ability to look at test scores, and smart people could be hired right out of high school.
Consider that obama graduated Columbia (?) and Harvard Law School.
In 2001, Harvard was focused upon as part of a controversy in which high, but allegedly unwarranted, GPA's (Grade Point Averages) were awarded. While in 1940 C-minus was the most common GPA at Harvard, and in 1955 only 15 percent of undergraduates had a GPA of B-plus or higher, in the year 2000, 50% in of all the grades given were As or A-minuses, with just six percent being C-pluses or lower. More than 90 percent of the class of 2001 had earned grade-point averages of B-minus or higher.
In a Harvard Crimson article, noted conservative Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield contended that "Grade inflation got started … when professors raised the grades of students protesting the war in Vietnam..." "At that time, too, white professors, imbibing the spirit of the new policies of affirmative action, stopped giving low grades to black students, and to justify or conceal this, also stopped giving low grades to white students." The problem was essentially seen as the predominance of the notion of self-esteem, "in which the purpose of education is to make students feel capable and 'empowered,' and professors should hesitate to pass judgment on what students have learned." Such assertions resulted in no small controversy.
Harvard alumnus and author Ross Douthat attributed this problem partly to socioeconomic differences, and noted that "Harvard students are creatively lazy, gifted at working smarter rather than harder", being brilliant largely in their tactics "to achieve a maximal GPA in return for minimal effort." Few people who have taught at Harvard agree with Douthat's notions. - [19 ] Ross Douthat, "The Truth About Harvard," The Atlantic Monthly March 2005 ; adapted from his book, Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class.