Work experience. Even the federal government mostly recognizes enough years of work experience as equivalent to an undergraduate degree, although the paygrade specs tend to want a 2-1 ratio (i.e. 8 years of work experience is considered equivalent to an undergraduate degree). It's hard to articulate many position-relevant benefits of an undergraduate education that people won't also gain from sufficient years working in the field.
It is rare to gain relevant work experience without having a basic framework for the said work, and consistency to measure that basic framework from a pool of candidates, both which come from college/university education.
Equivalency can be established for senior positions, not entry level ones. I assume the staffers do have entry level positions. Can a plumber or an electrician claim to possess experience to become a staffer? I doubt it.
What is going to happen is most staffing positions will be filled by senior work equivalency, while entry level positions will be eliminated. Fast forward a few decades, and there will be no eligible candidates for staffer positions.
Honestly, tradework like plumbing or electrical might be a surprisingly good qualification for entry-level congressional staff positions. Project management, scheduling, finance, and perhaps most importantly dealing with (sometimes pissed off) customers/constituents and the tradeoffs of what is possible, versus feasible, versus affordable.
Realistically a lot of the function of undergraduate degrees (in fields without specific technical education expectations) is to filter for people who have a basic ability to plan and complete work, meet requirements, etc. A huge range of entry-level jobs require these same skills. Many high-school educated office assistants have delivered larger projects under more pressure than a typical college graduate, and usually gained more applied knowledge in business/public administration while doing so.
The main function that degrees tend to offer here is just easy comparability, but I think practical experience hiring in many fields shows that college degrees do not actually reflect the level of consistency in outcomes that hiring managers wish they did. College degrees do have some advantage, and not requiring them will probably mean that you interview more candidates to find a fit, but I don't think either of those effects are as big as you might think.
For any hiring, there is required to be a minimum baseline. That has been college education so far, since it yields consistent and repeatable results (less work for hiring managers when they know someone has a 4 year engineering degree, as opposed to someone who has been educated in the school of life, don't you think?)
However way you look at it, hiring managers are going to require some baseline. What that baseline should be is debatable, and you can actually expand it to include trades like plumbing and electrical (many requirements do that).
But removing the college education requirement entirely is basically (a) increasing the burden on hiring manager, and (b) solving the wrong problem.
The real problem highlighted by the article is cost of college education, which needs to be addressed. Instead the proposal is let's hire highschool dropouts.
Let me ask this -- if college education is made affordable, will your position still be the same?
I'm not talking about positions that require a 4-year education in a technical field like engineering, they're a fairly different situation. What you see in areas like government roles are positions that require any 4-year degree, but most applicants will probably have a liberal arts degree. It's not that these degrees offer nothing of value, but the hiring manager isn't expecting any particular baseline education beyond reading and writing anyway.
I tend to think that more of the problem here is romanticization of congressional staffers. While there are positions that rely on more background knowledge like policy analysis, a lot of congressional staff members are essentially just customer service representatives and learn most of what they need to know on the job. Anyone who can keep track of a few different things and deal with customers should be a good fit.
I disagree, it is the baffling romantization of plumbers and tradesmen as some kind of a social panacea that is the problem. Here you have already predefined for yourself what plumbers are and how they should function, and so you employ this biased construction of plumbers for your post, where it is nothing but fantasy.
Don't be too hard on yourself though, you are only subject to the current shibboleths of pining for these fantastical tradesmen (possibly a result of some kind of desire for a safe simplicity), and so you only regurgitate these popular sentiments (that feel so good!) without being able to consciously check your delusions.
