Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force
One possible solution is cognitive screening – the use of tests such as the Wonderlic, SAT/ACT, or Wechsler to find prospective employees who can learn quickly and have good critical thinking skills (and thus would benefit the most from on-site training for technical tasks. training obviously costs money), but unfortunately something called ‘disparate impact’ makes this difficult to implement, so employers instead have to let colleges do the screening, turning the ‘Advanced Degree’ into a very overpriced, time consuming ‘IQ test’. Some people are more concerned about hurt feelings than providing equal opportunities. The left’s ‘logic’ is if the tests expose a reality that isn’t politically correct, we must do away with the test, so the result is more student loan debt, a worse labor market, and more credentialism.
Trying disprove disparate impact can be time-consuming and expensive, especially with the litigation (which costs businesses $64 billion a year), and that’s why only large companies and municipalities can use these tests. One problem according to business surveys is the skills mismatch, which is that employers can’t find enough qualified employees to fill open spots. Maybe the labor market would be better if these tests were made more readily available so employers can screen for talent that would benefit the most from on-site training, but most businesses don’t have the resources to disprove disparate impact should a lawsuit arise, nor the compiled data to show there isn’t discriminatory hiring . Even if the plaintiff’s case is without merit, it still costs the employer time and money to disprove the case. And it’s not like the defendant can recover from a frivolous lawsuit.
The same liberals who whine about student debt being too high oppose solutions that would substantially lower costs, instead blaming colleges, ‘greedy’ rich people, employers, Republicans – everyone but themselves.
Related: IQ and SAT Scores as a Solution to the Student Loan Crisis