Thanks for compiling this, Trace. Very well-summed up!
My only question is this… “But this is not a fundamentally partisan issue.”
I either don’t buy that or don’t understand what you mean. This seems like the DEI/Affirmative Action chickens coming home to roost, right? Aside from the black CTI grads left out of the class action lawsuit.
1. First, this is an excellent piece. Well done Trace.
2. While I could do the standard “this is why DEI/AA bad” post, I don’t think it will add much.
3. You mention in a different comment that Buttegieg is basically being pushed by a very loud but small portion of the Dem base. In your opinion, what is the best way to have normies (eg those not into racial identitarianism or disparitism) sideline the racial rent seekers?
4. Number 3, but for cases where it isn’t immediately obvious, such as the FAA?
5. Your previous article “the GOP is doomed” shows why the GOP will have trouble implementing its priorities. Assuming that a GOP administration would not stand for such racial rent seeking (from the parties in question here at least), what is the solution? Electing Dems means getting people sympathetic to the malefactors.
Thanks as always Trace for doing the legwork and posting receipts. I will pay you the highest compliment I can think of: When I saw the long tweets, I thought "Hell yeah, a long Trace tweet."
My stance on most diversity quotas and such is, yeah it sucks, but if it stops you, you ought to reconsider. I agree this is a special interest story outside of the public eye, that would lose by supermajority in any vote.
That being said... did this really take a decade to get to federal court? It's shocking to me that something so open-and-shut, and also so crucial to public wellbeing, could just get run over by a guy who's emailing "This is to reduce competition" and "Do you see the pattern here". This is something that any supermajority of voters would destroy. It is obviously illegal. It is obviously bad, preposterously bad that it summons The Worst People You Know to Make a Good Point.
When people talk about the hazards of industry, they correctly worry about the future harms. There's something funny about the opposite harm in government: "Work in government to make a big impact, because no matter what you do it takes a decade to fix it if it's wrong."
Trace -- good article. But not sure I understand the relevance of your conclusion here:
"People will turn this into a culture war issue, and in one sense, that is perfectly fair: it represents a decades-long process of institutional failure at every level . . . . But this is not a fundamentally partisan issue. Virtually nobody, looking dispassionately at that questionnaire, wants to defend it."
Seems like you're absolving someone of responsibility here. And maybe it is true that no one person is at fault; I agree with you that the current Secretary of DoT can hardly be responsible for changes that occurred in the Obama Administration.
But this debacle did not emerge out of thin air. It flourished in a certain kind of political climate that has in turn received tremendous support from one side of the ideological spectrum. Be their fruits ye shall know them.
This is probably one of the more absurd instances of a kind of affirmative action -- but I'd suggest it isn't exactly unique. Elevation of diversity over competence (or in this case, potential for competence) is a theme running through numerous private and public initiatives. And while some may harp that "we can have both, how dare you suggest otherwise," the proof seems to be in the pudding.
Few people think that it would be bad, all things taken together, to have more black doctors or air traffic controllers or software engineers. Or women, or disabled people or [insert preferred class here]. But the process-oriented liberal mind fixates on juking the stats at the end of the pipeline -- rather than abandoning these bizarre obsessions and focusing on substantive reforms.
ETA: In sum, sure, this isn't a partisan issue. But this problem is directly related to a certain, specific, obvious ideology.
I think this scandal is not likely confined to the specific case at hand here regarding hiring air traffic controllers. The most significant quote for me was the Team 7 document describing "multiple hurdles" as a known approach with the quote "research has demonstrated that this approach maximizes diversity". The implication is clear: this underhanded method of (a) screening out most candidates based on an upfront litmus test of select candidate characteristics that can favor members of desirable groups (with limited or no evidence of job relevance), followed by (b) screening on core aptitudes and qualifications with a now lowered standard, had already been implemented in other areas. Likely many times in federal government hiring, both before and after this change to the ATC process.
We are only hearing about this specific process because the unfairness to the CTI college grads cost them so much time and money that it has triggered a lawsuit, in addition to the biographical test being so blatantly absurd. And even then, non-conservative media cannot be bothered to report the story! Go digging, and I would bet you will find many similar hiring process changes over the last 15+ years that have perversely deprived the public of being served in government by many of the best applicants for these jobs or discouraged them from applying altogether. One might start by asking, which other agencies have Herbert Wong and associates ever advised?
We already know one other example of the two step screening tactic being implemented in recent years; the use of DEI statements in academic hiring works in exactly the same fashion. Multiple institutions are confirmed to use these statements as an upfront screen that must be passed before they even look at a candidate's resume. STEP 1: You rid your candidate pool of most of the wrong race, sex, etc., candidates through this farcically subjective DEI statement. As an added bonus, you also screen out some of "right" identity candidates that might not be quite onboard with your ideological program as revealed by their tone-deaf references to color blindness or other outdated concepts (in the ATC context, you drop some of those black candidates who didn't have the political instincts to become student members of NBCFAE). STEP 2: You evaluate research and teaching records of a smaller, less competitive, pool of remaining candidates (i.e., academic bar lowered). This nonsense is just as much as a scandal as the air traffic controller biographical test.
On a final note, I would observe that the FAA's astonishing clearance of NBCFAE and Snow of wrongdoing tells us that this behavior by identity based advocacy groups in the federal public service is considered unremarkable. It certainly is not in any way punished. So, we can be sure that sharing of inside information on hiring processes, rigging resume screens with keywords and blatant favoritism on in-person hiring "panels" are all happening in earnest in government hiring.
Excellent post, particularly on the issue of the defensiveness of the left on the effectiveness, risks, harms and trade-offs on various "DEI" initiatives as any critique of being "racist" (and often is trumpeted by very racist persons as you so well noted!) cedes the issue to the racist right. When more becomes publicly known and reported (assuming it will be reported!), that the FAA has been putting perhaps under-qualified applicants into air traffic control using a test specifically designed to seek out traits of "under-qualified-ness" as *actual qualifications*, with the coinciding reporting on the increases of near misses and incidents with air traffic control, where will the public side with? The "left" which has been running interference on these policies and at times, gaslighting the public about the trade-offs of merit to other considerations? Or the right, which, in this case, has been revealing the issue? And which side should a rational center want to trust more with resolving the issue? The racist right that will take this as evidence to move forward on a lot of other racist social engineering and policies? Or the center-left that *should* be more interested in less ham-fisted approaches to achieving diversity that doesn't eliminate completely "merit" from the equation (but which has been neglectfully absent in this role in the pursuit of "racial justice uber alles")?
The left is doing itself no favors in continuing to champion DEI bureaucratic "interventions" and policies that are increasingly being revealed as ineffective, harmful and quite frankly, unpopular - even within the groups they propose to champion. Guess what - Black people fly too! And I'm guessing they would feel better about ATC being staffed by the most qualified individuals and less concerned about the racial and gender percentages of!
Secondly though - why is the solution to improving and increasing diversity never to move the push back towards the education and training and preparation of targeted demographics in the first place? If "under-represented" demographics have a lower pass rate of the original screening exam, why not put the resources and effort into providing better training and preparation to produce more "diverse" applicants who can pass that screening when they're ready to take it? It's the same problem with "diversity quotas" at the career and higher education levels - at that point it is just a shuffling of the requirements to allow a larger proportion of applicants who would not meet the traditional bars of application a path to entry - but does nothing to ensure their actual success and competence.
If we truly want to see more diverse cohorts in these areas, the remedy is at the primary and secondary educational levels, let alone on addressing the myriad external factors that tend to produce disparate impacts of poverty and community and family dysfunction in mostly minority areas, or lack of access to rigorous education that has standards and expectations for personal conduct and achievement. Instead, minorities are not only subject to more dysfunctional communities and poverty, but the public schools they attend are often also spending a lot of time mis-educating them (the scandal around the reading education contrasting a program popular with teachers that yet failed to teach kids to actually read must have profound impacts on these disparities on the cohorts that came up under those programs - since the 90's until fairly recently in most states - so we're talking a lot of Millennials and older Gen Z's were taught barely literate reading skills which of course impacts the rest of their education - wealthier/stable household children had access to external options (tutoring, parental intervention, private schools that taught traditional reading pedagogy, etc) to correct what wasn't being taught properly in schools, poorer children did not have those alternatives and were instead failed, majorly, by the only educational systems they did have access to.
Basically, and TLDR - more time spent on addressing the roots of under-representation and under-performance on high stakes/high achievement exams and no more rigging at the point of the entry. And the "left" *and* "center" needs to get real about this - propose some real solutions and stop ceding the truth of the issue to the racist Right, or we will get "solutions" all right :(
Wow, 10/10 investigative work! I too would have lost my bets on this if I had made any. I expected the diversity push to be a consequence of their personnel shortage, not the reason thereof. And I had expected that some time during the 8 years that this has been happening, someone in charge would have steered the bus off the cliff.
Please keep mirroring those Twitter threads here, by the way; Twitter has again become invisible to non-registered users.
Hi there! You should check out the RECAP plugin, a browser plugin which allows PACER users to automatically share documents with one another. If another user has already purchased a document, that document will show up as a free download in your PACER searches. Conversely, if you purchase a PACER document, it will be automatically uploaded to the archive so other users don't need to pay for it. There's also a searchable archive available on the web. Here is the docket page for this case: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4542755/brigida-v-united-states-department-of-transportation/
Did many current Air Traffic Controllers surreptitiously take the biographical assessment and get rejected? (Yes)
Did the FAA tell people as late as October 2013 on their website the only way to become a controller was CTI or military despite having a change in plans in the works for months? (Yes)
If I am understanding correctly, what the FAA did was unjust, unethical, and illegal—but did not result in the acceptance of substandard air traffic controllers. The key point is that there is a vast pool of people with the interest and aptitude to do the job, much greater than the number of positions available. This means that there is going to be some luck involved in getting selected, even if you are good enough. The FAA decided to bias that "luck" towards their preferred groups, and that bias had to be heavy due to the disparity in aptitude test scores. So they developed an arbitrary and capricious screening step that could be gamed through back channel communications to ensure that the pool of applicants was extremely lopsided in favor of their preferred minority groups. Then they required them to pass the test that ensured they were smart enough to handle the job. You almost have the admire the evil genius of it—it's not a scheme that could be replicated in most other settings.
Thanks for digging into this. I'm confused about one thig. You say "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." Has the old process been restored entirely? Do the lawsuits related only to those candidates who were excluded in 2014-16?
I'd like to add some (slightly historical) perspective here: the college training initiative (CTI) is a *very weird* way to get a job. First you get a degree at a two year or four year college, then you take the AT-SAT and if all goes well, you get an offer.
What's weird here is that you invest first in a degree that has almost no other use other than air traffic control, in the hope that a single employer will be hiring. The FAA's hiring pipeline sometimes stops, and if this happens when it's your year, your degree might be useless. I don't know about some of the other, more expensive four year CTI programs, but my guess (based on how the program worked two decades ago) is that the only lateral move for a CTI grad if the FAA won't take you is to go back for more training to become a pilot, which would be expensive as a CTI grad targeting ATC would not have already paid for the expense of flight hours. (In the program I was in, there was course overlap between the ATC and commercial pilot track.)
My own experience: 20 years ago I already had a bachelors, so in one year I did the CTI coarse work at Mt Sac to qualify for ATC hiring. This was about the least expensive way to become qualified, but we all had two things hanging over us: (1) would we pass the ATSAT (I think almost everyone did) and (2) would the FAA be hiring.
We bore the risk of the degree before resolving either of those things, and there was a class or two of graduates ahead of us who were simply _stuck waiting_ because the FAA _just wasn't hiring that year_. We were all betting that, 23 years after Reagon fired the striking controllers, there'd be people looking to retire and slots opening up.
So when I read that story, I totally understood the frustration of CTI graduates who had gone part way through the pipeline and then been ejected for (1) an arbitrary test that (2) could have been administered before they took the time to get the degree. This is "even dumber but also kinda the same" in that CTI tracks are _never_ a guaranteed pipeline to hiring. This has been a design defect of the CTI program since forever.
When I was last involved the pipeline had additional wash-out points; students could get a CTI degree, pass the AT-SAT, and then wash out in OKC when they do FAA-designed specific training. Or worse, they could pass the OKC training and then wash-out when they are learning specific sectors in real facilities, especially if they are assigned a busy, complex air-space.
If you gave me a wand and asked me to design a better pipeline,I think I would (sorry Mt Sac) dump the CTI system entirely and always hire "off the street", with the goal of creating a simulator-based aptitude test that attempted to predict whether people would wash-out in facilities.
Then you could just throw potential hires at the aptitude test, and if the problem is diversity, you could throw _a lot of diverse candidates_ at the aptitude test, with the hope that the ones that make it through end up working.
There’s is no one that can argue in good faith that anyone running exactly what the Academy does at their CTI school wouldn’t have a significant advantage of 1) passing the OKC academy screen and 2) eventually making it to CPC. This is blatant fraud waste and abuse. The CTI screwjob was so bad that it had bipartisan support to grandfather applicants in by Congress and make it so CTI grads were no longer subject to elimination by the BQ.
Many applicants were scared of reprisal that the FAA would have them washed out at the academy to discredit them. Valid concern? Not sure.
Also think of how delayed and removed eventual CTI grads were by the time they got to initial training…
Thanks for compiling this, Trace. Very well-summed up!
My only question is this… “But this is not a fundamentally partisan issue.”
I either don’t buy that or don’t understand what you mean. This seems like the DEI/Affirmative Action chickens coming home to roost, right? Aside from the black CTI grads left out of the class action lawsuit.
1. First, this is an excellent piece. Well done Trace.
2. While I could do the standard “this is why DEI/AA bad” post, I don’t think it will add much.
3. You mention in a different comment that Buttegieg is basically being pushed by a very loud but small portion of the Dem base. In your opinion, what is the best way to have normies (eg those not into racial identitarianism or disparitism) sideline the racial rent seekers?
4. Number 3, but for cases where it isn’t immediately obvious, such as the FAA?
5. Your previous article “the GOP is doomed” shows why the GOP will have trouble implementing its priorities. Assuming that a GOP administration would not stand for such racial rent seeking (from the parties in question here at least), what is the solution? Electing Dems means getting people sympathetic to the malefactors.
Thanks as always Trace for doing the legwork and posting receipts. I will pay you the highest compliment I can think of: When I saw the long tweets, I thought "Hell yeah, a long Trace tweet."
My stance on most diversity quotas and such is, yeah it sucks, but if it stops you, you ought to reconsider. I agree this is a special interest story outside of the public eye, that would lose by supermajority in any vote.
That being said... did this really take a decade to get to federal court? It's shocking to me that something so open-and-shut, and also so crucial to public wellbeing, could just get run over by a guy who's emailing "This is to reduce competition" and "Do you see the pattern here". This is something that any supermajority of voters would destroy. It is obviously illegal. It is obviously bad, preposterously bad that it summons The Worst People You Know to Make a Good Point.
When people talk about the hazards of industry, they correctly worry about the future harms. There's something funny about the opposite harm in government: "Work in government to make a big impact, because no matter what you do it takes a decade to fix it if it's wrong."
Trace -- good article. But not sure I understand the relevance of your conclusion here:
"People will turn this into a culture war issue, and in one sense, that is perfectly fair: it represents a decades-long process of institutional failure at every level . . . . But this is not a fundamentally partisan issue. Virtually nobody, looking dispassionately at that questionnaire, wants to defend it."
Seems like you're absolving someone of responsibility here. And maybe it is true that no one person is at fault; I agree with you that the current Secretary of DoT can hardly be responsible for changes that occurred in the Obama Administration.
But this debacle did not emerge out of thin air. It flourished in a certain kind of political climate that has in turn received tremendous support from one side of the ideological spectrum. Be their fruits ye shall know them.
This is probably one of the more absurd instances of a kind of affirmative action -- but I'd suggest it isn't exactly unique. Elevation of diversity over competence (or in this case, potential for competence) is a theme running through numerous private and public initiatives. And while some may harp that "we can have both, how dare you suggest otherwise," the proof seems to be in the pudding.
Few people think that it would be bad, all things taken together, to have more black doctors or air traffic controllers or software engineers. Or women, or disabled people or [insert preferred class here]. But the process-oriented liberal mind fixates on juking the stats at the end of the pipeline -- rather than abandoning these bizarre obsessions and focusing on substantive reforms.
ETA: In sum, sure, this isn't a partisan issue. But this problem is directly related to a certain, specific, obvious ideology.
I think this scandal is not likely confined to the specific case at hand here regarding hiring air traffic controllers. The most significant quote for me was the Team 7 document describing "multiple hurdles" as a known approach with the quote "research has demonstrated that this approach maximizes diversity". The implication is clear: this underhanded method of (a) screening out most candidates based on an upfront litmus test of select candidate characteristics that can favor members of desirable groups (with limited or no evidence of job relevance), followed by (b) screening on core aptitudes and qualifications with a now lowered standard, had already been implemented in other areas. Likely many times in federal government hiring, both before and after this change to the ATC process.
We are only hearing about this specific process because the unfairness to the CTI college grads cost them so much time and money that it has triggered a lawsuit, in addition to the biographical test being so blatantly absurd. And even then, non-conservative media cannot be bothered to report the story! Go digging, and I would bet you will find many similar hiring process changes over the last 15+ years that have perversely deprived the public of being served in government by many of the best applicants for these jobs or discouraged them from applying altogether. One might start by asking, which other agencies have Herbert Wong and associates ever advised?
We already know one other example of the two step screening tactic being implemented in recent years; the use of DEI statements in academic hiring works in exactly the same fashion. Multiple institutions are confirmed to use these statements as an upfront screen that must be passed before they even look at a candidate's resume. STEP 1: You rid your candidate pool of most of the wrong race, sex, etc., candidates through this farcically subjective DEI statement. As an added bonus, you also screen out some of "right" identity candidates that might not be quite onboard with your ideological program as revealed by their tone-deaf references to color blindness or other outdated concepts (in the ATC context, you drop some of those black candidates who didn't have the political instincts to become student members of NBCFAE). STEP 2: You evaluate research and teaching records of a smaller, less competitive, pool of remaining candidates (i.e., academic bar lowered). This nonsense is just as much as a scandal as the air traffic controller biographical test.
On a final note, I would observe that the FAA's astonishing clearance of NBCFAE and Snow of wrongdoing tells us that this behavior by identity based advocacy groups in the federal public service is considered unremarkable. It certainly is not in any way punished. So, we can be sure that sharing of inside information on hiring processes, rigging resume screens with keywords and blatant favoritism on in-person hiring "panels" are all happening in earnest in government hiring.
Excellent post, particularly on the issue of the defensiveness of the left on the effectiveness, risks, harms and trade-offs on various "DEI" initiatives as any critique of being "racist" (and often is trumpeted by very racist persons as you so well noted!) cedes the issue to the racist right. When more becomes publicly known and reported (assuming it will be reported!), that the FAA has been putting perhaps under-qualified applicants into air traffic control using a test specifically designed to seek out traits of "under-qualified-ness" as *actual qualifications*, with the coinciding reporting on the increases of near misses and incidents with air traffic control, where will the public side with? The "left" which has been running interference on these policies and at times, gaslighting the public about the trade-offs of merit to other considerations? Or the right, which, in this case, has been revealing the issue? And which side should a rational center want to trust more with resolving the issue? The racist right that will take this as evidence to move forward on a lot of other racist social engineering and policies? Or the center-left that *should* be more interested in less ham-fisted approaches to achieving diversity that doesn't eliminate completely "merit" from the equation (but which has been neglectfully absent in this role in the pursuit of "racial justice uber alles")?
The left is doing itself no favors in continuing to champion DEI bureaucratic "interventions" and policies that are increasingly being revealed as ineffective, harmful and quite frankly, unpopular - even within the groups they propose to champion. Guess what - Black people fly too! And I'm guessing they would feel better about ATC being staffed by the most qualified individuals and less concerned about the racial and gender percentages of!
Secondly though - why is the solution to improving and increasing diversity never to move the push back towards the education and training and preparation of targeted demographics in the first place? If "under-represented" demographics have a lower pass rate of the original screening exam, why not put the resources and effort into providing better training and preparation to produce more "diverse" applicants who can pass that screening when they're ready to take it? It's the same problem with "diversity quotas" at the career and higher education levels - at that point it is just a shuffling of the requirements to allow a larger proportion of applicants who would not meet the traditional bars of application a path to entry - but does nothing to ensure their actual success and competence.
If we truly want to see more diverse cohorts in these areas, the remedy is at the primary and secondary educational levels, let alone on addressing the myriad external factors that tend to produce disparate impacts of poverty and community and family dysfunction in mostly minority areas, or lack of access to rigorous education that has standards and expectations for personal conduct and achievement. Instead, minorities are not only subject to more dysfunctional communities and poverty, but the public schools they attend are often also spending a lot of time mis-educating them (the scandal around the reading education contrasting a program popular with teachers that yet failed to teach kids to actually read must have profound impacts on these disparities on the cohorts that came up under those programs - since the 90's until fairly recently in most states - so we're talking a lot of Millennials and older Gen Z's were taught barely literate reading skills which of course impacts the rest of their education - wealthier/stable household children had access to external options (tutoring, parental intervention, private schools that taught traditional reading pedagogy, etc) to correct what wasn't being taught properly in schools, poorer children did not have those alternatives and were instead failed, majorly, by the only educational systems they did have access to.
Basically, and TLDR - more time spent on addressing the roots of under-representation and under-performance on high stakes/high achievement exams and no more rigging at the point of the entry. And the "left" *and* "center" needs to get real about this - propose some real solutions and stop ceding the truth of the issue to the racist Right, or we will get "solutions" all right :(
Incredible. Thanks for covering this despite the sensitivity.
Wow, 10/10 investigative work! I too would have lost my bets on this if I had made any. I expected the diversity push to be a consequence of their personnel shortage, not the reason thereof. And I had expected that some time during the 8 years that this has been happening, someone in charge would have steered the bus off the cliff.
Please keep mirroring those Twitter threads here, by the way; Twitter has again become invisible to non-registered users.
Hi there! You should check out the RECAP plugin, a browser plugin which allows PACER users to automatically share documents with one another. If another user has already purchased a document, that document will show up as a free download in your PACER searches. Conversely, if you purchase a PACER document, it will be automatically uploaded to the archive so other users don't need to pay for it. There's also a searchable archive available on the web. Here is the docket page for this case: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4542755/brigida-v-united-states-department-of-transportation/
Did many current Air Traffic Controllers surreptitiously take the biographical assessment and get rejected? (Yes)
Did the FAA tell people as late as October 2013 on their website the only way to become a controller was CTI or military despite having a change in plans in the works for months? (Yes)
If I am understanding correctly, what the FAA did was unjust, unethical, and illegal—but did not result in the acceptance of substandard air traffic controllers. The key point is that there is a vast pool of people with the interest and aptitude to do the job, much greater than the number of positions available. This means that there is going to be some luck involved in getting selected, even if you are good enough. The FAA decided to bias that "luck" towards their preferred groups, and that bias had to be heavy due to the disparity in aptitude test scores. So they developed an arbitrary and capricious screening step that could be gamed through back channel communications to ensure that the pool of applicants was extremely lopsided in favor of their preferred minority groups. Then they required them to pass the test that ensured they were smart enough to handle the job. You almost have the admire the evil genius of it—it's not a scheme that could be replicated in most other settings.
Thanks for digging into this. I'm confused about one thig. You say "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." Has the old process been restored entirely? Do the lawsuits related only to those candidates who were excluded in 2014-16?
Bio-Q wasn’t proctored, a lot of FAA shills immediately flooded social media to downplay CTI grads.
Oh wow you're on Substack already! Great article, very well done! Sharing as a note!
READ THIS ARTICLE, EVERYBODY!
I'd like to add some (slightly historical) perspective here: the college training initiative (CTI) is a *very weird* way to get a job. First you get a degree at a two year or four year college, then you take the AT-SAT and if all goes well, you get an offer.
What's weird here is that you invest first in a degree that has almost no other use other than air traffic control, in the hope that a single employer will be hiring. The FAA's hiring pipeline sometimes stops, and if this happens when it's your year, your degree might be useless. I don't know about some of the other, more expensive four year CTI programs, but my guess (based on how the program worked two decades ago) is that the only lateral move for a CTI grad if the FAA won't take you is to go back for more training to become a pilot, which would be expensive as a CTI grad targeting ATC would not have already paid for the expense of flight hours. (In the program I was in, there was course overlap between the ATC and commercial pilot track.)
My own experience: 20 years ago I already had a bachelors, so in one year I did the CTI coarse work at Mt Sac to qualify for ATC hiring. This was about the least expensive way to become qualified, but we all had two things hanging over us: (1) would we pass the ATSAT (I think almost everyone did) and (2) would the FAA be hiring.
We bore the risk of the degree before resolving either of those things, and there was a class or two of graduates ahead of us who were simply _stuck waiting_ because the FAA _just wasn't hiring that year_. We were all betting that, 23 years after Reagon fired the striking controllers, there'd be people looking to retire and slots opening up.
So when I read that story, I totally understood the frustration of CTI graduates who had gone part way through the pipeline and then been ejected for (1) an arbitrary test that (2) could have been administered before they took the time to get the degree. This is "even dumber but also kinda the same" in that CTI tracks are _never_ a guaranteed pipeline to hiring. This has been a design defect of the CTI program since forever.
When I was last involved the pipeline had additional wash-out points; students could get a CTI degree, pass the AT-SAT, and then wash out in OKC when they do FAA-designed specific training. Or worse, they could pass the OKC training and then wash-out when they are learning specific sectors in real facilities, especially if they are assigned a busy, complex air-space.
If you gave me a wand and asked me to design a better pipeline,I think I would (sorry Mt Sac) dump the CTI system entirely and always hire "off the street", with the goal of creating a simulator-based aptitude test that attempted to predict whether people would wash-out in facilities.
Then you could just throw potential hires at the aptitude test, and if the problem is diversity, you could throw _a lot of diverse candidates_ at the aptitude test, with the hope that the ones that make it through end up working.
There’s is no one that can argue in good faith that anyone running exactly what the Academy does at their CTI school wouldn’t have a significant advantage of 1) passing the OKC academy screen and 2) eventually making it to CPC. This is blatant fraud waste and abuse. The CTI screwjob was so bad that it had bipartisan support to grandfather applicants in by Congress and make it so CTI grads were no longer subject to elimination by the BQ.
Many applicants were scared of reprisal that the FAA would have them washed out at the academy to discredit them. Valid concern? Not sure.
Also think of how delayed and removed eventual CTI grads were by the time they got to initial training…