Glenn Harlan Reynolds

For some time now, activists have been waging a “ban the box” campaign to promote equality. The box they want to ban is the one on employment applications that asks whether the applicant has a criminal history. The idea is that asking about criminal history disadvantages minority applicants who are more likely to have criminal records.

There’s something to that. Sure, as an employer I’d want to know if a prospective employee is a rapist, murderer or robber. Felonies used to be limited to serious crimes like those. But nowadays there are so many felonies that the average American commits three felonies a day without even knowing it, as Harvey Silverglate estimates.

Some studies suggest that the “ban the box” approach does more harm than good since it doesn’t allow applicants with clean records to let employers know about that. But if you really want to promote equality on job applications, then there’s another box that we should be banning: The one about education.

College is sold as a source of social mobility because getting an education improves your chance of getting a job. But there’s another way of looking at things: College isn’t so much a source of mobility as the lack of college is a barrier to moving up, a barrier that disproportionately affects the poor.

College is expensive. Four years of college, even in-state at a public university, can easily cost $100,000 — and many students take five or six years to graduate, not four. So far, most efforts to remedy this have focused on making college cheaper or giving students more financial aid. But those aren’t enough.

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Even if tuition is free, other expenses are big. And even if students get a full-ride scholarship — tuition and expenses — it’s a huge commitment of time and a serious burden on those who need to support or care for children, parents or other loved ones. Put simply, if you have to go to college to move up in the world, a lot of people aren’t going to move up.

Worse yet, of course, all colleges are not created equal. People who attended Ivy League schools have a huge employment advantage over people who didn’t, even if they coasted through without learning anything (which, given grade inflation these days, is very possible). Just the sight of Harvard or Columbia on a job application may give the applicant an unfair boost over others.

So if you want equality, the best thing to do is to ban employers from asking students where they went to school and, perhaps, even if they went to college at all.

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This might seem absurd to some readers, but the fact is that higher education, and especially elite higher education, is probably the single biggest perpetuator of privilege in our society. Americans sport college stickers on their cars and encourage their kids to sweat those college essays for a reason. (The old joke is, you can always tell a Harvard man, and if you can’t, don’t worry because he’ll tell you within 90 seconds).

Without relying on colleges as a foundation for credentialism, we’d have to find some other way to assess candidates. But odds are it would be something more closely associated with actual performance on the job: A competency test, for example, or an apprenticeship program. These kinds of credentials would be faster and easier to acquire — and less tied to pre-existing privilege — than college degrees are now, and less likely to promote old-boy (or -girl) networks that freeze out newcomers. They’d probably work better for employers, too.

So if we’re serious about promoting equality and removing barriers that keep the less fortunate from getting ahead, let’s ban the box: The college box.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

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