The first domino to fall as Civil Rights-era policies took effect was the quantitative evaluation of competency by employers using straightforward cognitive batteries. While some tests are still legally used in hiring today, several high-profile enforcement actions against employers caused a wholesale change in the tools customarily usable by employers to screen for ability.

After the early 1970s, employers responded by shifting from directly testing for ability to using the next best thing: a degree from a highly-selective university. By pushing the selection challenge to the college admissions offices, selective employers did two things: they reduced their risk of lawsuits and they turned the U.S. college application process into a high-stakes war of all against all.

Concern about another depression when some 16 million service members returned to the U.S. after the second World War spurred the passage of the 1944 GI bill. Without formal job training outside the military, many of these service members would have been unemployed. After Congress passed the legislation, then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed it into law on June 22, 1944.

The “GI Bill of Rights,” as it was dubbed, provided extensive benefits — job counseling, employment services, and tuition assistance for educational pursuits for honorably discharged veterans. These services kept veterans from flooding the job market all at once while increasing educational and employment opportunities to anyone who served after Sept. 16, 1940.

Throughout most of the Vietnam War, men who were in college could obtain deferments that delayed their eligibility for conscription. It was widely believed by contemporaneous observers that college deferment was an effective means of draft avoidance, and that draft avoidance led to a rise in the college enrollment rates of young men. We use data on the enrollment and completed education of men relative to women to estimate the effect of draft-avoidance behavior on the education choice of men who were at high risk of being drafted during the Vietnam War. We find a strong correlation be- tween the risk of induction faced bv a cohort and the relative enrollment and completed education of men. Our estimates suggest that draft avoidance raised college attendance rates by 4-6 percentage points in the late 1960's, and raised the fraction of men born in the mid-1940's with a college degree by LIPto 2 percentage points.

Completion of high school alone continued to render employees eligible for transfer to the four desirable departments from which Negroes had been excluded if the incumbent had been employed prior to the time of the new requirement. In September, 1965, the Company began to permit incumbent employees who lacked a high school education to qualify for transfer from Labor or Coal Handling to an "inside" job by passing two tests -- the Wonderlic Personnel Test, which purports to measure general intelligence, and the Bennett Mechanical Comprehension Test. Neither was directed or intended to measure the ability to learn to perform a particular job or category of jobs.