The American Spectator reports:
The 1971 Supreme Court decision remains largely unknown, but no ruling of the past forty-five years (except for Roe v. Wade) has done more harm to the American way of life. It changed the way companies hire, pay, and promote workers, ensuring that America would be a country defined by credentials rather than merit. Griggs is why we’re wasting money and time on a dubious good like a B.S. degree—pun intended.
The saga began in 1969 when Willie Griggs, a black man born in the segregated South, decided he was overdue for a promotion. In order to get one, per Duke Power Electric Company rules, he had to pass two aptitude tests and possess a high school diploma. Griggs smelled racism. The tests surveyed employees on basic math and intelligence questions. None of Duke’s fourteen black workers passed. Griggs and twelve others sued the company for discrimination. A district court and federal appeals court accepted Duke’s claim that the tests were designed to ensure that the plant operated safely. Duke bolstered its case by pointing out that it offered to pay for employees to obtain high school diplomas and that white applicants who failed to meet the requirements were also denied promotions.
The Supreme Court wasn’t buying it. This was North Carolina after all. The court compared the tests to Aesop’s fable of the Fox and the Stork, in which a fox offers a dish full of milk to a stork, whose beak prevents it from satisfying its thirst. The implication that black and white workers were of a different species did not strike any of the justices as racist, unlike the objective tests. Griggs found that if blacks failed to meet a standard at a higher rate than whites the standard itself was racist—a legal doctrine known as disparate impact.
“What is required by Congress is the removal of artificial, arbitrary, and unnecessary barriers to employment when the barriers operate invidiously to discriminate on the basis of racial or other impermissible classification,” Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote in Griggs. “Diplomas and tests are useful servants, but Congress has mandated the common sense proposition that they are not to become masters of reality.” Burger may have intended to free America of bureaucracy, but his decision in fact bestowed that title—“masters of reality”—on college administrators.
There's more:
By the late 1970s, college graduates earned 55 percent more per year than their high school counterparts. The gap shot up to 85 percent in 2012. Fear of litigation plays a role. A company that pays based solely on performance could find itself rewarding the “wrong” person. A compensation manager at a leading technology firm told me that an engineer fresh from graduate school simply has to be paid more than a self-made engineer—the Den Black who learned the business over a twenty-year career, rising from basic laborer to accomplished engineer on his own merit. “There’s too much risk in paying a guy without a diploma more even if he is a better contributor,” she said. “God forbid the college graduate is a woman or a minority: They can sue you and claim that they were paid less because of discrimination, so we designed a system to pay people for their education, not their job.” Thus the credential becomes a force of downward mobility for the educated and uneducated alike.
The up-by-your-bootstraps mantra of America wasn’t killed by businessmen; it was killed by the lawmakers and regulators who made the diploma into the bootstrap. So why are the same politicians and pundits who condemn inequality zealously defending credentialism?
Well, for one thing, there’s money in disparate impact for the Department of Labor.
“Essentially it’s a revenue machine for the DoL,” Keith Gutstein, a labor and employment partner at a law firm in Woodbury, New York, said of new federal wage discrimination laws. “In recent years the DoL has started to insist on CMPs—civil money penalties—and that money goes to the government.”
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