Credentialism & "hiring blind"

This is interesting.

According to the Wall Street Journal, some companies are hiring "blind":

Compose is among a handful of companies trying to judge potential hires by their abilities, not their résumés. So-called “blind hiring” redacts information like a person’s name or alma mater, so that hiring managers form opinions based only on that person’s work. In other cases, companies invite job candidates to perform a challenge—writing a software program, say—and bring the top performers in for interviews or, eventually, job offers.

Bosses say blind hiring reveals true talents and results in more diverse hires. And the notion that career success could stem from what you know, and not who you know, is a tantalizing one....

In Hiring without signals, David Henderson raises the possibility that hiring blind could put a dent in credentialism. If companies hire without knowing whether a new employee had a college degree, will college degrees become optional?

I hope so.

One of the more horrifying aspects of the crash and the economic stagnation that has followed, at least for me, has been the brave new world young people must navigate:

a) credential inflation -- jobs that didn't require college degrees before the crash now do (nursing being one example) probably because employers had so many hundreds of applicants for each job that they used college degrees as a sorting mechanism
b) tuition inflation at state universities because tax revenues collapsed
c) higher debt loads for new graduates
d) far lower inflation than in times gone by, with the result that today's college graduate will be repaying student loans in more expensive dollars (and with lower raises) than previous generations

Put those four together, and we have a generation of college students forced to go into debt that's higher and harder to repay than the debt taken on by previous generations, all for the sake of acquiring a job previous generations could hold without going to college at all.

Could blind hiring change this?