No college degree? More employers than ever just don't care

Curriculum isn’t standardized, and while a noisy signal, difficultly of admission to a school can be valuable in lieu of other signals, or otherwise knowing the details of a particular school’s curriculum — top 50 vs. top 500.

Interview 1000 people uniformly sampled from the population of software engineers and get back to me if you disagree.

I feel that you’ve glossed over my example about institutional size. I don’t mean to harp, but it’s a pretty good example of something a hiring manager can use to make positive inferences about a candidate. If hiding names and cost are really that important, perhaps we could list “institutional attributes” on resumes instead, but I’m not sure how well that would work either. It’d be hard to standardize, and there are too many things that could be missed. Unfortunately, plenty of good candidates are bad at laying out their skills and achievements. Where relevant and where it doesn’t lead to flagrantly unfair and biased treatment, resumes should have more information, not less. I say this as someone who is deeply concerned about equal and just treatment and who has recently been evaluating candidates.

> Which, in turn, will incentive the schools to prioritize education quality over hyper-marketing.

Believe me, I’m game for anything that makes that happen but I don’t think this is going to do it. But for the sake of discussion, removing this information from a resume could make identifying candidates who have gone through precisely these kinds of schools more difficult to identify. Accreditation is sadly not a catch-all. Plenty of schools have had their accreditation suspended multiple times or have various other statistics/metrics e.g. marketing/promotional spend, available which one could use to evaluate education quality, but only if you have a name to start your search with.

I am not sure that you completely understand how higher education works in the US. This is understandable because it can be confusing.

Sticker price doesn't really matter, because those who cannot afford it are usually given financial aid and/or scholarships. At some places, the percentage of people receiving financial aid is over 50%.

The rhetoric that college is worthless and is solely an indication of "privilege" is harmful, especially to those who are lower income. College is still one of the best ways to acquire skills and an education, and is still one of, if not the biggest, ways for people to climb themselves and their families out of poverty.

Most students work their asses off to get into a good college, even the wealthy ones, and I think you underestimate their efforts and how hard it is to buy your way into a top school.

Also, there is definitely a significant difference, on average, between the type of student that MIT/UChicago/Stanford/etc might admit, compared to the students you might find at a top 100 college. I don't think that hiring should ever come down to where someone went to college like this (I'm sure that very rarely happens), but it does make sense most times for stretched recruiters to take into account where someone was trained because it does make a difference.