Griggs v. Duke Power Co.? Most people don't realized that the proliferation of expensive McDegrees and business requiring a college education for the most basic entry jobs is a direct result of government action.

Prior to Griggs companies almost universally hired people then trained and promoted from within. That's why prior to the 70s most managers and many technical folks had no more than a high school education. The methodology was to hire high school graduates (if that) and train on the job and promote capable people as the need arose. For example a quality control chemist, or even a lab manager, have no need of an undergraduate degree to do the work; it used to be that someone took a job as a lab assistant and if they were smart and hardworking, they had reasonable hope of advancing their pay and career.

Griggs v. Duke essentially ended this approach for the whole country. You see the way companies achieved the aforementioned employee selection/promotion process was using a combination of intelligence, aptitude, and knowledge testing to determine who to train and who to promote. The problem is that Griggs and other plaintiffs were not passing these exams at a rate comparable to white employees. The Griggs decision basically said that if there are racial disparities in the results of testing, using that testing is employment discrimination and that a company would be punished under federal employment law. Yes, the decision technically left open the option for testing that was "reasonably related to the job," but this left the plaintiffs of Damocles hanging over any company that wanted to rely on testing for the selection or promotion of employees.

So employers looked for other ways of choosing and promoting employees. The further the criteria were from their control, the safer employers were from employment law. What shook out was the use of college degrees as a baseline. At first this seemed great: if you had a degree you were guaranteed a job. At first. This is the boomer era of "just go to college." Then basic economics reared its head. Educational institutions were suddenly facing an unlimited supply of customers who needed their product to get a job. Universities grew, bloated their budgets, and started selling degrees that were useful only in that they were degrees. Decades of administrative and budgetary excesses and the irrelevance of the quality of the product lead to today post-secondary education environment.

So here we are. College educations are shitty AND overpriced. And its still borderline illegal to figure out who is and who is not competent, and its defiantly illegal to do anything about it.