Controlling for IQ, Does Higher Education Send a Negative Signal?

In validation studies, when controlled for IQ, years of education have a dampening effect on employee performance criteria, such as supervisory ratings.  What has occurred with American colleges in recent years--the dumbing down of and politicization of the social sciences and humanities, the increasing emphasis on identity politics, claims of microaggessions, demands for safety blankets and safe spaces, student violence, Antifa, and the linkage of higher education with terrorism--may be increasingly offsetting the traditional signaling value of higher education. College degrees may be a worse predictor of job performance and a worse signal to employers than a two dollar IQ test.  Employers may be beginning to favor high-IQ job applicants without college degrees to applicants with degrees, especially if the degrees are in politicized fields like gender studies.

One of the chief impediments to understanding the effects of education is the traditional research approach of combining all majors into a single variable called "education." In fact, gender studies education has zero to do with mathematics education.  One is political, the other is intellectually demanding.  Saying that students who have been exposed to four years of gender studies education have had an experience equal to students who have studied mathematics or engineering is incorrect.

The traditional debate between human capital and signaling theories of education can likely be resolved by disambiguating different fields of study.  The high-wage fields like engineering, science, and mathematics probably do provide human capital.  The low-wage fields like politicized humanities and social sciences, and especially the studies fields, likely provide no human capital. What may be occurring is that the zero-added-human capital fields like gender studies have reduced the signaling effect of education to zero, and the chief reason for returns to education is the human capital effects in the rigorous fields.