In an effort to level the playing field, some companies are asking job applicants to delete from their resumes the names of the colleges or universities they attended, writes David Christopher Kaufman in a New York Post commentary. Degrees are OK, but not whether the applicant went to UCLA, Cal State LA or FlybyNight College.
“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,” he writes. The policy is part of the company’s plan “to build a hiring system that is free from bias and based on candidate merit and performance.”
Racial and economic minorities have had much less “access to fancy schools and pricy education,” writes Kaufman, who is African-American. “But obscuring education histories won’t solve these inequities.”
He took out student loans to attend Brandeis and NYU “because I knew they were investments in my long-term earning potential,” he writes. He not only qualified for a good career, he developed “a strong sense of self-worth and satisfaction.”