Suppose you graduate this spring with a 4.0 from the most famous university in America, and you apply for a job at a software company owned by Vista Equity Partners. Before anyone reads your resume with much interest, you will sit the Criteria Cognitive Aptitude Test: fifty questions, fifteen minutes. You’ll also complete a personality profile. Everyone does. When Vista buys a company, every employee and every applicant takes the test (at the last public count, roughly 125,000 test-takers for 6,000 hires). And if your score comes back looking too good, they may ask you to sit it again, in a room, with someone watching.
A reader, Frank Hecker, pointed me to Vista in the comments on The Sanctioned Hack, and I really haven’t found a better image for where higher education actually stands. A private equity firm looks at a Harvard transcript — the most expensive quality signal American civilization produces — and declines to believe it.
So it built its own credential. Then it looks at its own credential and declines to fully believe that, which is why the retest exists. Somewhere in that hiring workflow is everything this piece is about.
When a credential stops signaling, the signal doesn’t disappear. It migrates.
Right now it’s migrating in two directions at once, and the fight over which direction wins (more precisely: who gets stuck with which) runs underneath a month of higher-ed news that’s mostly been covered as separate items.
My argument: they’re one item.