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My proposal is this: have academia severely limit the amount of information available to industry, on which industry might base misguided hiring decisions. Let the GPA be for internal use only. Have two transcripts: the internal one, with whatever information academia wants to pass around about students’ performance, and an external one, which provides minimal information. Already, a student’s grades cannot be shared without the student’s consent. Make it so that grades cannot (officially) be shared even with the student’s consent! An employer will have no reason to believe that a student had a 4.0 GPA, and there will be no penalty for a student’s saying they did, even if they have a 2.0. There would be no way to prove or disprove it, at least without the threat of people getting in lots of trouble if they were caught.*</p>
<p>This is neither deceitful nor outrageous. It is simply academia telling industry that such detailed information on students’ academic performance should not be used to make hiring decisions. I find MIT’s policy more ethically ambiguous than my proposal, since they are effectively endorsing the academia/industry disconnect and helping to perpetuate a system which makes of academia a numbers game.</p>
<p>My proposal might also serve to make industry more wary of academia in general, so that jobs which used not to require a college education might stop requiring it (after all, if it’s harder to tell which college graduates are best, it might make more sense to consider cheap and trainable high school graduates as well). This might result in fewer people going to college, and some colleges shutting down or consolidating. The people still going to colleges, and the colleges that stay open, might be statistically superior to the ones which would be lost. Society might recognize that reduced emphasis on postsecondary education makes reforming high-school education that much more important.</p>
<p>For professions like engineering, education and business - which are primarily applied - there might be more of a move to an apprenticeship-based system, where minimal training is required after high school and the majority comes through on-the-job training. As you said yourself, there is little use in making all engineers learn about PDEs before they ever get a job. Most engineers can be trained to do work, even if it involves PDEs, far more efficiently on the job. Perhaps they wouldn’t be able to pass a final from a math major’s PDEs course, but why should they be able to?</p>
<p>A trend has been for academia to bow to the demands of industry to produce competent workers. I feel like it’s high time for academia to make a comeback.</p>