A BA in Alphabetizing

Let's say you run an office that generates a lot of paper (side question: What ever happened to the "paperless office"?). Perhaps it's a real estate office. Or a medical office. Or a law firm. Whichever the case, you decide to hire a file clerk to help you manage all that paper.

What's the critical qualification for that job? How about: Knowing one's way around the alphabet.

After that... well, there isn't much, is there?

But increasingly, according to Catherine Rampell's article in today's New York Times, the new minimum requirement is a B.A.

As one example, Rampell writes about a growing law firm in Atlanta which "hires only people with a bachelor's degree, even for jobs that do not require college-level skills."

Why does that bother me? After all, in a terrible job market, why shouldn't an employer hire the highest-quality employee possible?

First of all, there's no guarantee that a college graduate will make a more effective file clerk than a high-school graduate.

Secondly, as Rampell writes,

This up-credentialing is pushing the less educated even further down the food chain, and it helps explain why the unemployment rate for workers with no more than a high school diploma is more than twice that for workers with a bachelor's degree: 8.1 percent versus 3.7 percent.

Me, I would worry that my college-graduate file clerk would take off as soon as something even a little more challenging showed up, leaving me with the cost of finding yet another file clerk.

But that's not the heart of the issue for me. The heart is, in an increasingly unequal society, we keep finding ways to make it harder yet for the poor to break out of the poverty cycle. I've written before about employers who will only consider job applicants who are currently employed, adding insult to injury for the long-term unemployed, and about the friend-of-a-friend hiring practices, that can so easily slide into discrimination against people "not like us".

While many more Americans today earn undergraduate degrees than was the case, say, 50 years ago, the rapid rise in the cost of a higher education has made that rung of the ladder a much harder one for the poor to reach. And now they can't even get hired as a file clerk?

The managing partner of the Atlanta law firm likes his college-graduates requirement, because "a floor of college attainment also creates more office camaraderie..... There is a lot of trash-talking of each other's college football teams, for example."

Rampell quotes him as saying,

You know, if we had someone here with just a  GED or something, I can see how they might feel slighted by the social atmosphere here. There really is something sort of cohesive or binding about the fact that all of us went to college.

What's wrong with that? Just try replacing that final phrase "went to college" with: "are white" or "are Christians" or "belong to the country club". Now how does it sound?

But my "favorite" comment was from an executive recruiter, explaining the BAs-only requirement: "When you get 800 resumes for every job ad, you need to weed them out somehow."

Funny, I thought that was what you hired recruiters for.