I&#x27;ve actually been convinced of this stance for some years, though everyone I&#x27;ve talked to seems to think it&#x27;s nuts.<p>The thing is that education--and particularly choice of school--is tightly linked with class, which in turn is linked with race, etc. Add to that the bias of &quot;I graduated from here, therefore I favor people who graduated from similar&quot; and I&#x27;m pretty sure there&#x27;s some bad stuff that comes out of it.<p>We already recognize a little bit of this in that there&#x27;s often advice not to put the schooling dates on your resume because it implies age, but people somehow don&#x27;t make the jump to the schooling itself implying other discriminatory factors.<p>Plus the emphasis on schooling filters non-traditional learners and autodidacts. The software industry exploded in part because we historically <i>haven&#x27;t</i> done that, at least during the high-growth periods that corresponded to high-demand periods. There are obviously some sectors for which you absolutely want formal training (medicine, EIT&#x2F;PE-type engineering, etc.) but I&#x27;d argue that&#x27;s the exception and not the rule. In most jobs it just matters that you know what you&#x27;re doing.<p>We should figure out a way to evaluate and select on actual competencies rather than trying to use school as a surrogate for them. For many professions this should be relatively straightforward. Competencies are not the be-all&#x2F;end-all (as we know from programming interviews) but to the extent that we expect schools to represent them we should be able to evaluate with testing if they&#x27;re truly anywhere near objective.<p>Unfortunately, that won&#x27;t happen as long as the easy option is available.