We didn't choose that, it is the only practical way that countless applicant could be sorted into those likely vs unlikely to have the actual skills required.
Sorry, I'm really not grasping the theory that explains how ZiprHead's co-worker who had working experience doing hospital management was less likely to have the actual skills required for his job than some random applicant with a B.A. in Art History.
The comparison is to someone with a B.A. in Healthcare Management or other major related to the requisite skills of the job. Also, the only reason his co-worker got the job in the first place was his credentials. They didn't just hire a random person off the street who happened to test well, which is what your system would require. In addition, "work experience" is itself just a form of "credential" similar to a college degree. That is what a degree denotes, that you have experience with and/or previously demonstrated aptitude in knowledge or skills related to the job. And just like other credentials, work experience can be faked, in fact more easily than college degree credentials.
Without this, every job would have 10,000 times the number of applicants, and every one of them would need to be directly tested for the required skills, and a valid and reliable and quick and easy to score test would have to exist for all required skills.
So what has changed, to cause every job to start having 10,000 times the number of applicants, since that manifestly wasn't the case back in the days before society took up mass discrimination against non-college-graduates?
First, educational credentials are not some new thing, but have been used with steadily increasing frequency over centuries. Their use in employment decisions has corresponded tightly with the shift from the % of jobs requiring physical labor in which many entry level grunt positions exist requiring no skills and during which one could learn the skilled labor on the job, to jobs requiring cognitive and decision making skills that require a wealth of knowledge and practice applying that knowledge before one can perform any task of any financial use to the hiring company (meaning that the skills can rarely be acquired on the job after being hired for some unskilled task. In combination with this fact, the kinds of cognitive skills needed are changing at the most rapid pace in history, such that your prior work experience is much less applicable to the currently available jobs than it used to be. IOW, today's jobs and nature of the workforce means that for more and more jobs applicants with little skills are of no use to the company and thus cannot learn on the job to gain experience, and prior job experience is less relevant to the next job than it used to be. This means that who is the most qualified required knowing the knowledge and cognitive skills in a person's head that they often have not yet had a chance to use in previously paid job. There are only two ways to know this, education history in the applications or directly testing each person for all the relevant skills. Contrary to your belief that college degrees are just about elitism, employers use them because they are a measure (however imperfect) of what knowledge and skills a person is likely to possess. If we throw out education history, then there is little to nothing in the peoples' applications that discriminate among who has these cognitive skills. On paper, every person in the world is "qualified" for the job. And in the internet age, every person in the world can be aware of the job being filled. Since any plausible specific test of knowledge and skills that the employer could give and score for large numbers of applicants is of limited validity and reliability, people who know that they have less skills (often because of less education), might as well apply to every job that pays better than their current one, even if they have to fake it or get lucky on the test. IOW, the massive increase in applicants for each job is the same reason why students who know they didn't study and don't know shit about the material still show up to take the test. They might get lucky and pass it. The difference is that doing well on your single test gets them a well paying job, but it only boost their grade in one course that they still might not pass and does little to get them a college degree.
And, assuming your claim is correct, what's the theory that explains why if I get 10,000 applicants I have to test every one for the required skills?
You have rejected the most valid pre-existing indicator of each persons' relevant cognitive skills, whether they exposed themselves to the knowledge in a formal manner (attended college) and whether they demonstrated those skills well enough to do well in their courses, and did so in enough courses to earn a degree.
That means you nothing to distinguish among all your applicants other than any specific test you give them to perform. Any applicants you do not test, could very easily be the most qualified applicants. That is the point of using college performance and degrees as initial screening criteria to determine who you bring in to "test" and who you give no further consideration to. The more we allow the college performance/degree system to be cheated and not reflect acquired knowledge and skills to less reliable that screening process is and the more likely it is that anyone we do not directly test is the best applicant.
That creates demand for fake credentials, just like demand for fake IDs. Griping about the evil purveyors of fake IDs is pointless; so is griping about the evils of the profit motive leading people to sell fake IDs, as though outlawing profit ever stopped people from constructing fake IDs for one another.
Not true. First, loud public discourse about how these schools are scum and clearly have no motive to provide a real education will greatly reduce the people who go to them. Since the existence of these schools increases fake credentials of the sort in question by many times over, this will greatly reduce the % of credentials that are fake.
Not seeing the evidence for that assertion. You seem to be assuming that the accredited non-profit schools are not also providing fake credentials.
I am not assuming zero invalid credentials by accredited non-profit schools, just much much less, and I gave you very detailed argument as to why.
But grade inflation is rampant in regular universities, as are pass/fail, sorry, pass/"no credit" courses, as are courses with no serious academic content.
First, real Universities reject a huge % (in many cases 90%) of the applicants based upon reliable indicators of the knowledge and skills they already have and that predict whether they will learn what is taught in college courses. Every rejected applicant is essentially a "fail" on many assessments (every grade they got in H.S., every course they took, there scores on each sub-scale of entrance exams). That alone makes your borrowed mantra about "grade inflation" largely vacuous. In addition, plenty of students still fail out of college. Plus, many of the dropouts who don't fail lots of courses, still drop out because getting passing grades is too hard and takes too much work, which falsifies your notion that anyone can pass without actually learning anything (which is the only sense in which "grade inflation" would have any meaning worth being concerned about or relevant to the discussion).
When a college degree is a de facto union card that employers check for in order to help them plow through the pile of resumes, teenagers who lack either the academic chops or the family wealth to get a rigorous degree will have a need to get that union card; and while academia as a whole has an incentive to play cartel and keep standards up in order to minimize the number of competitors, each individual institution has an incentive to defect and lower its standards to get paying students in the door by offering them an easy route to that union card.
Then why do most public colleges reject so many students? They have students pounding at the door begging to give them thousands of dollars, and yet they turn them away. Yes, some public schools have lower standards of entry than others (none lower than for-profit schools). But those public schools also have lower college GPAs and higher failure rates than more selective schools, because despite letting less qualified people in the door, they still hold them to minimal standards of learning that more of these lower qualified students do not achieve. Also, employers learn about schools with lower admission standards but also low fail out rates and devalue those degree, just as they do and rationally should devalue the application of anyone with a college degree at all, because degrees are an indicator of cognitive knowledge and skills.
The people making the admissions decisions at public colleges (and their supervisors) gain virtually nothing by admitting more students. In fact they hurt themselves, because the instructors quite rightly have considerable collective power (unlike profit schools where they have zero power and are just hourly wage earners). Instructors can and would rail against administrators who ruined the quality of instruction by allowing anyone willing to pay into their classrooms. All of that extra tuition income would just go towards having to build new buildings or hire new instructors. It doesn't go directly into anyone's personal bank account or market shares, unlike for profit schools where the people at the top get most of that added tuition in the form of personal profit, and they pay their subordinate hourly wage earners commission and bonuses tied to each extra student "admitted" (which isn't the right word since anyone willing is let in the door).
In sum, yes incentives matter, but incentives means the people deciding who and how many get in are personally profiting in direct proportion to number of students, and that is only true of for-profit schools.
The fact that a university isn't making a profit doesn't change the fact that it needs the money; academic policy is decided by committees of professors and the professors know where their salaries are coming from.
Their salaries do not come from more students. The number of students per class varies all the time, and has no impact on the pay of the professor teaching it.
Besides, most classes at most respectable colleges are at capacity. Bringing in many more students would just require hiring more faculty, which actually hurts the future pay of existing faculty. Public schools need money in order to teach the students that they admit. The more they admit, the more money they need. Student tuition at public colleges does not cover the expense of the student. IF anything public colleges spend energy resisting outside pressure to lower their standards and admit more students from the local community. They resist because they know it will lower the quality of education and because they personally gain nothing from admitting more students (again, unlike for profit schools where decision makers gain directly from every dollar of tuition paid).
So as long as employers are discriminating against people who learned their skills by reading textbooks on their own time
Employers have no way of knowing how much your read textbooks on your own. Also, college courses are not just about reading textbooks. There are lectures, discussions, assignments, and tests. BTW, graded course assignments and tests not only evaluate what you learned to that point, they also cause you to learn more and have deeper understanding of what you learned. There is a growing body of experimental research showing this. Even something as simple and "shallow" as a memory test for definitions depends people's conceptual understanding of the underlying ideas and their ability to apply them in problem solving. College is formal acts of acquiring and practice using various types of knowledge and thinking skills. While far from perfect, college grades and degrees are still often the most reliable on-paper indicator of whether an applicant has relevant knowledge and skills, even more than past job experience in a market where the narrow specific skills one learns on the job in one place often do not transfer to emerging job opportunities (and again, it is easier and more common for people to lie about prior work experience than college experience).
or by paying attention to their skilled supervisors and co-workers,
See above. Not only is it easier and more common to lie about past work experience, but past job experience is less and less transferable, and harder and harder to "learn on the job" as an initially unskilled worker who can offer nothing to many modern companies.
in favor of people who learned their skills from listening to lectures on postmodern literary criticism,
Ah, can you show me a degree where student only take courses in literary criticism? First, I don't deny that the core coursework in some majors are not that useful for anything but teaching those same courses you took. But even the lamest of majors usually require general ed breadth requirements in science, math, reading comprehension, etc.. that not only convey useful knowledge but more importantly help develop thinking skills that have general utility (skills that would help you make better and more evidence-based arguments).
there are going to be a lot of institutions giving out a lot of fake credentials,
The number is exponentially increased when low qualify institutions giving out fake credentials can attract students with subsidized loans. Thus, the government should make an effort to exclude all subsidized loans from being used at institutions that do not use standards to determine who gets those credentials, and since direct profit for every students given the credential undermines using any standards, and for profit schools are by definition motivated primarily by increasing profits (and are held liable by shareholders if they do anything but increase profits), targeting those schools for loan exclusion is highly rational and will have the greatest effect in reducing college credentials fraud.
even if you choose to define those credentials as real credentials merely because the student really did learn how to write a book report with delusions of grandeur,
Again, so me a degree where that is the sole requirement.
and his teacher really was paid by somebody who didn't make a profit.
At public schools, no one involved made a profit by admitting more students, or even by passing and graduating those they admit. Thus, there is no incentive to give fake credentials and in fact strong incentives not to.
In addition, acknowledging the objective fact that profit motive is scam motive and virtually incompatible with providing a quality education that is what it claims, helps both consumers and government to identify the most likely scam schools giving out fake credentials and thus be extra cautious in going to them or allowing given loans to attend them.
You haven't offered any evidence that profit motive is scam motive.
It is true by the definition of profit and scam, and I explained why. Profit is taking from people more in value than the other party receives from you. Any motive to increase profit is thus a motive to do things that make the other party willing to give you more in value than you give them, which is psychologically implausible unless the other party wrongly believes they are getting equal or greater value than what they give. Thus, manufacturing these wrong beliefs in the other party is among the few things one can do to satisfy profit motives, and manufacturing such beliefs is the definition of a scam. That is why 99.9% of marketing is nothing other than a scam in which any objective facts about the product or what is required to get it takes a back seat (or is completely excluded) in favor of misinformation and emotional manipulation designed to lead the other party to false associations about the product and/or what they need to give up to get it.
And it seems to me it's a bit premature to declare it incompatible with providing a quality education that is what it claims, when none of the obvious measures to stop it from incentivizing low quality have been taken in education,
I said "virtually" incompatible because there is the possibility that a small % of for profit schools could actually use the generally low quality education that pervades the for profit college market, and attract students by setting themselves apart and pointing out many of the same facts about most for profit schools that this thread has focused upon. They would need to charge less than most of those schools (such as ITT's $50k for 2 years) and apply much more of a public college model of admission and graduation standards. That would mean limiting short term profit possibilities in favor of long term sustainability via an earned reputation of quality (rather than a manufactured reputation via marketing). IOW, they could be a for profit institution, but only one that is mildly profitable. The education market is just one where it isn't possible to corner and dominate the market and be the sole provider for most people who want an education. Thus massive profit isn't possible by merely selling billions of widgets at a low profit per widget. Thus, massive profits in education is only plausible if you make massive profit from each unit of education sold (i.e., each student), which is only possible if you take as much as you can while giving as little as you can get away with, and the latter mean giving little knowledge and skills and thus low quality education.
