In today’s news: the FAA

Last updated on: May 27, 2014 at 8:35 am by Jane the Actuary

In today’s news: the FAA 2014-05-27T08:35:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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“FAA’s hiring diverts from recruit pipeline; Air traffic control jobs going to general public over college trainees.”

That’s the headline in today’s Tribune. The story: after developing the Air Traffic Collegiate Training Initiative Program in which college students prepare for traffic controller employment by majoring in the subject at college, some 25 years ago, the FAA abruptly changed approaches to hire from the general public — anyone with a high school diploma — instead.

What’s more, the first step in the hiring process is a biographical assessment, which only about 2,400 of the 28,000 applicants passed, so that large numbers of college graduates were excluded from hiring solely on this basis. And this assessment looks to me to be a lot of pseudoscience. The Tribune includes some sample questions:

More classmates would remember me as:
humble.
dominant.

The number of different high school sports I participated in was:
4 or More.
3.
2.
1.
Didn’t play sports.

They also cite a question on “the age at which the person started to earn money.”

Which means that — almost certainly — the FAA is excluding large numbers of qualified candidates based on junk science (and I think that any claims that you can determine someone’s future success in an occupation by their answers to such a personality test, are nothing other than junk science), and ignoring the qualifications of the college graduates in favor of some notion that they can find the candidates with the highest degree of aptitude.

And why? The FAA denies this, but the strong suspicion on the part of advocates for the collegiate programs and their students, is that this change has the intention of bumping up the number of minority hires. (Correspondingly, the hiring process had favored military hires, so that eliminating this could boost the number of women.)

And this is not just a matter of “so what? government policies just change over time.” The capriciousness of this change has, well, screwed over the recent graduates of and enrollees in these collegiate training programs, individuals who enrolled in good faith believing that there would be jobs for them. Even if the FAA’s research shows that the collegiate programs don’t actually provide any benefit, it’s still highly unethical, at best, to create training programs, require students to attend them on their own dime, and then change their minds with no warning. Are there grounds for a class-action lawsuit? I don’t know whether the government is sufficiently insulated from liability.

And if they end up, in the end, with air traffic controllers who aren’t up to snuff, or if there’s a significantly greater washout rate, it’ll be the American public who suffers.

But the bottom line is that this is just another example of the capriciousness of government power and bureaucrats’ disregard for the impact of their actions on people’s lives.

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