Companies asking applicants to leave off university names in the pursuit of ‘equity’

There are many fronts in the culture war working toward similar destructive ends with one being the war on merit that has stretched beyond the halls of academia and is now damaging the workforce as employers have altered hiring practices in the name of equity.

Oft-repeated lines like “go woke, go broke” and “everything woke turns to sh*t” have become commonplace because of the readily apparent failures seen in the implementation of the progressive agenda. Like the United States military which fell short of its recruiting target in 2022, even after it was lowered, companies in the private sector may be setting themselves up for disaster with “school-blind hiring.”

New York Post editor and columnist David Christopher Kaufman recently took a look at postings on job boards and found a growing number of companies are asking applicants to leave out the names of their alma maters and only list the degree received to create a more equitable playing field for candidates.

“A LinkedIn posting by HR&A Advisors, the TriBeCa-based real estate consultancy, asked applicants for the $121,668- to $138,432-a-year position to remove ‘all undergraduate and graduate school name references’ from their résumés and only cite the degree itself,” Kaufman wrote. “A quick spin through a few other HR&A job postings confirmed that this policy extends company-wide as part of their ‘ongoing work to build a hiring system that is free from bias and based on candidate merit and performance.'”

As he pointed out, this new trend follows the already degrading education system that has seen a majority of colleges, including once prestigious universities like Harvard and Stanford, abandoning SAT requirements, the LSAT becoming a thing of the past for law school admissions, and others calling for an end to the MCAT for medical school applicants, “all in the name of racial equity.”

“There’s no doubt that access to fancy schools and pricy education has historically shut out racial and economic minorities from many employment arenas,” Kaufman wrote, speaking from experience as an African-American who attended Brandeis and New York University (NYU) “far above my family’s affordability level.”

“But,” he noted, “obscuring education histories won’t solve these inequities. It simply creates new ones.”

Previously, American Wire News had covered the decision by NYU to fire chemistry professor Maitland Jones Jr. after students signed a petition complaining that his course was too difficult. Elicia Brand, the founder of Army of Parents, reacted to the news with disdain, contending, “When paying for an education at a reputable university, we should expect quality professors to intellectually challenge our students, helping them grow by pushing them to stretch beyond what is convenient and comfortable. Doing anything less, will not result in positive outcome.”

“Instead of firing professors like Maitland Jones Jr., we should be hiring more like him in order to stave off the soft bigotry of low expectations that is infecting academia today and pushing our students to reach their fullest potential,” she went on. “Let us never forget that today’s student will be tomorrow’s decision maker, impacting all of our lives.”

Recently, Brand highlighted the war on merit again as it pertains to schools in Fairfax County, Virginia after parents there alleged the school intentionally delayed notifying students that they had been recognized by the National Merit Scholarship Corporation. That school district, author Asra Nomani said, was in a “race to the bottom” as it utilized an equitable grading policy awarding students at least 50 percent without them even turning in an assignment.

“Policies like HR&As are not just punitive, they’re downright lazy,” Kaufman wrote. “Telling young people–particularly the young people-of-color this ‘school-blind hiring’ purports to benefit–that academic prestige doesn’t matter literally reinforces the worst stereotypes of minority cultures. It says academic prestige doesn’t matter to them.”

“This is why school-blind hiring feels so frustrating–and phony. In this period of quiet-quitting and mass resignations, it offers already unmotivated workers one less tick off while burnishing their anti-bias credentials for literally doing nothing,” he concluded in part.

Kevin Haggerty

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