Umm, wrong. I am arguing with the "minimal value of a degree as a credential outside the Professions". I have made that clear, by statements to the effect of "granting the professions are a different case."
I am saying -- I have limited evidence for causality in the effect of a degree (outside the professions), and you have no evidence for the absence of causality .
It's all good though...
Ok? Stipulated? Now what?
So ... retract your argument that college has no credentialling value in getting a white collar job (outside of the professions) ;) You have no evidence.
(Heuristically, I have evidence, but it is poor. But poor is better than none.)
My evidence, to be fair, is the graphs I have vaguely seen associating educational outcomes with salary and "higher" job classifications.
Not much directly. Even in engineering, entry-level work is usually scutwork, so they probably won't get the chance to break anything important.
But hiring a flake can cause a lot of damage indirectly. If they lose an important document or attach the wrong appendix to the marketing proposal, you could lose a lot of money.
So if you're a big company with complicated procedures and a lot to lose -- what if that lost document is important because of a lawsuit? -- hiring dependable people trumps almost everything else. Bachelor's degrees are a great way to certify that someone can show up on time, follow directions, meet deadlines, and pay attention to one thing for four years at a time.
People make this observation all the time, but I'm guessing that even the most diligent students who make it showed up late to class often enough that they'd have gotten disciplined had class been a real job.