Common sense might suggest that the better controllers would be more educated–but the FAA found that fully half the top-ranked controllers had no formal education beyond high school. Many of them had come directly to the FAA for rigorous technical training specifically related to the jobs they were expected to do. Berg said,
Because it was “stuck with” less educated men … the FAA became a little laboratory in which the relevance of education for attainment of, and achievement in, important managerial and technical positions would be examined. Education proves not to be a factor in the daily performance of one of the most demanding decision-making jobs in America.
The implication of examples such as these is not that talent is equally distributed or that minds are limitlessly malleable or that advanced training is always destructive. A liberal education is good for its own sake, and schooling of any sort can impart a broad perspective that can help in any job. Rather, the charge against credential requirements is that they are simultaneously too restrictive and too lax. They are too restrictive in giving a huge advantage to those who booked early passage on the IQ train and too lax in their sloppy relation to the skills that truly make for competence. No nurse is allowed to hang out a shingle and collect professional fees for the many medical functions she can competently perform; any psychiatrist is legally entitled to perform open-heart surgery or read x-rays of your knee. If sports were run like the meritocracy, the Miami Dolphins would choose their starting lineup on the basis of high-school times in the forty-yard dash and analyses of the players’ muscle tissues to see who had the highest proportion of “quick-twitch” fibers. If the Dolphins actually did this, they’d face a long losing season: the coach cares about speed but finally chooses the players who have proved they can catch the ball or stop the run.
via The Case Against Credentialism – James Fallows.