College Graduates Deserve Much More Than Transcripts

By Kevin Carey. College transcripts are horrible. I say this not as a columnist but as an employer. Whenever my nonprofit policy group advertises a position, we get hundreds of résumés. Every applicant is a college graduate. But when it comes to winnowing the field to 10 or 15 semifinalists, we have almost no useful information about what they learned in school. Their résumés tell us if they attended a selective institution, which provides some insight into what they were like at age 17. But we're not in the market for high-school juniors. Their major suggests a broad area of interest, but if they weren't interested in my field, they wouldn't be applying for the job in the first place. Read more...