Diversity in the skies: US Federal Aviation Administration’s controversial shift in air traffic controller hiring

Apparently the FAA decided to encourage people to get college degrees for air traffic controller jobs in 1997 and changed their minds during the Obama administration. In principle, that seems like a good thing, since there are too many jobs that unnecessarily require a college degree.

There’s no indication that unqualified people have become controllers because of hiring practice changes. These hires don’t just have to go through extensive training, they also need to get signed off on before being released into duty. If anything, indications are that this process is too strenuous, not that it’s too lax.

Moreover, leaving behind qualified applicants isn’t why we don’t have more controllers. The FAA doesn’t have enough spots to train people.

But the transition was messy:

Facing pressure to diversify an overwhelmingly white workforce, the FAA began using a biographical test as a first screen of candidates.

Meanwhile, minority candidates were fed “buzz words” to bump their resumes up to top priority. Apparently saying your worst subject in school was science served as a golden ticket. Correct answers to the take-home biographical questionnaire were given in their entirety. These questionnaires were later banned.

The people who got college degrees expecting to become air controllers got passed over, resulting in a class action lawsuit. Much more detail about that here.

In 2016, Congress passed Public Law 114-190, which among other things banned the use of biographical assessments as a first-line hiring tool for air traffic controllers. People snubbed by the process filed dozens of lawsuits as a result, culminating in the class-action suit now underway as Brigida v. Buttigieg. In arguing to deny class certification, the defendants argued that the "underlying grievance—that they pursued college degrees in reliance on their perception that the role of the CTI program in the FAA's hiring process would never change—is not actionable." In a moment with a certain bitter irony, black CTI graduates who were left adrift by this process are the only demographic left out of the class: while the plaintiffs tried to include them initially, the court denied certification until they were excluded.

I doubt this is something the general public needs to be concerned about, but it does seem like an interesting example of a diversity initiative gone wrong.