It shifts the burden on the employer to make an alternative assessment of the applicant. If what they're using now isn't reliable, but convenient, why would any alternative be?
In a hypothetical future where there is no degree requirement, whatever they’re doing now to assess applicants is not relevant. In that scenario, the system has fundamentally changed, and I think this strongly implies that employers will now need to look for ways to screen candidates other than “has degree”.
As things stand now, there is an expectation that holding a degree is in itself valuable and that the holder has already been assessed by the educational institution that granted the degree.
Put another way, the lack of a reliable process now is the point. If I’m an employer, the reliability of the signal that is the degree the applicant holds is as variable as the standards of the various institutions granting those degrees. In a world where the degree is no longer a primary signal, employers must by necessity establish some other assessment criteria, and since that criteria is set by the employer, it’s at least more reliable than making decisions based on various other organization’s assessment criteria.
Take something fairly complex like game development, say. Now: do some linear algebra, geometry, programming, etc. assessment in a wholistic way. Maybe a quick quiz for initial filter, then a hackathon with applicants (or w/e).
People filtered by the quiz can be directed to the now many resources for self-study (you can easily do an entire degree via MIT lectures, etc. -- i know i did, i barely attended lectures and just watched stanford/MIT classes; gilbert strang's LA course several times).
If you really want to be a game dev, and can't self-study after a failed attempt and a year or so of reflection then go to university. Now you know it's for you, that it really will help, etc. They're providing a service you actually need.
I'm more concerned about how universities have positioned themselves gatekeepers to the employment market backed by state-granted degree awarding powers.
I think this is an extremely artifical situation with extremely negative social concequences. Vast amounts of money are being funnelled into universities for little gain.
They are, if you like, the App Store of the jobs market. Taking a 30% cut on just getting hired. It's insane, unsustainable, economic madness, and social madness.
I think the answer is in the question, and boils down to: the proposal is to change the status quo. Changing the status quo here means that organizations not doing these assessments are responsible for doing so going forward.
It’s reasonable to think that an organization in the current environment is not focused on such assessments because the system is supposed to be handling this (I’m not saying this should be considered sufficient). A change that involves shifting the burden necessarily means a change in the status quo of hiring organizations regardless of their past practices around assessing candidates.
To your point, setting the expectation that the hiring organization is responsible for assessing incoming candidates is part and parcel to the broader idea. The operating environment would no longer look like the current one, and would necessitate additional steps by hiring organizations. Not taking those steps would result in poorer and poorer quality hires.
Bringing this full circle, I think it’s worth pointing out that the place this started from is: teachers who did not complete a specific training requirement are as effective as those who did. At the very least, this seems to indicate that completing the specific training requirement is not a sufficient assessment criteria, and is presumably not helping organizations bring in better people. At the same time, the requirement does reduce the pool of available candidates, with seemingly no positive effect.
At least for this particular school example, in a worst case scenario, organizations that change nothing are no worse off than they already are. The training requirement isn’t acting as a differentiating criteria, which means that the organization is already the most impactful decision maker. The proposed change just formalizes the idea that completing a specific curriculum is not by itself a good indicator of future success. Organizations relying on this signal are not worse off if it’s taken away because it never indicated much to begin with, if the data are to be believed.
The number of applicants who succeed in such cases, at getting through without formal education, will be very small. And i'd be 90% of those cases, that applicant is way above their peers in performance -- ie., worth having let it