Charles Murray concedes that he has no remedies for the class divide he describes, but takes a stab at offering some proposals that “won’t really make a lot of substantive, immediate difference.” Here is one of his proposals that doesn’t quite add up:

Finally, we should prick the B.A. bubble. The bachelor’s degree has become a driver of class divisions at the same moment in history when it has become educationally meaningless. We don’t need legislation to fix this problem, just an energetic public interest law firm that challenges the constitutionality of the degree as a job requirement.

Murray is right that the college degrees now mean less in terms of the education received but matter far more for employment, but his suggestion doesn’t make a lot of sense. I’m not sure how the required qualifications that a private firm has for its employees can actually be ruled unconstitutional. Is Murray proposing that requiring the possession of a bachelor’s degree should be treated as an unconstitutional civil rights violation? On what grounds? There may be many firms that don’t need to make this a job requirement, but there must be quite a few that need to use this requirement as part of their hiring process. Are we really going to open firms up to lawsuits because they require this of their employees?

Murray’s argument for this proposal is weak:

After all, the Supreme Court long ago ruled that employers could not use scores on standardized tests to choose among job applicants without demonstrating a tight link between the test and actual job requirements. It can be no more constitutional for an employer to require a piece of paper called a bachelor’s degree, which doesn’t even guarantee that its possessor can write a coherent paragraph.

Think about what Murray is saying here: it is unconstitutional for a firm to require a particular kind of educational credential. Does Murray actually believe that the degree requirement is unconstitutional because the quality of a college education varies widely and can be quite poor in some cases? Possessing such a degree doesn’t guarantee the ability to write well, but it is going to make it more likely. Using the same argument, how could a firm require that its employees have at least a high school diploma or its equivalent? After all, having a piece of paper called a diploma or GED doesn’t guarantee particular skills or knowledge. It offers a prospective employer some way to distinguish between applicants. Even if the requirement were found to be unconstitutional, which seems absurd, does Murray suppose that this would keep firms from preferring to hire degree-holders over those that don’t have a degree? (As Murray says later in the op-ed, no, he doesn’t.) If bachelor’s degrees mean much less than they used to, and they do, the better remedy would seem to be in improving standards at colleges for what is required to receive these degrees.