Taking old, resolved scandals - slapping a coat of culture war paint on it - and then selling it as a new scandal is already a popular MO for state-sponsored propoganda, so we should be extra wary of stories like this being massaged.
> The NBCFAE continued to pressure the FAA to diversify, with its members meeting with the DOT, FAA, Congressional Black Caucus, and others to push for increased diversity among ATCs. After years of fiddling with the research and years of pressure from the NBCFAE, the FAA landed on a strategy: by using a multistage process starting with non-cognitive factors, they could strike “an acceptable balance between minority hiring and expected performance”—a process they said would carry a “relatively small” performance loss. They openly discussed this tension in meetings, pointing to “a trade-off between diversity (adverse impact) and predicted job performance/outcomes,” asking, “How much of a change in job performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?”
This was DEI before it was called DEI. The label changed, the spirit did not.
That spirit, of sublimated racial grievance, metastasized everywhere in our society. It went from quiet, to blatant, and now to a memory hole.
The key part though is that the FAA was worried about the job performance of diverse candidates they brought in. They did not see a trade off between their staffing levels.
There are two separate arguments happening:
Did changing their application process create less qualified ATC controllers? Maybe! But no one seems to be arguing this.
Did changing their application process create a shortage of ATC controllers? Probably not! If anything, the evidence points to the FAA being worried they were going to get too many mediocre candidates.
ATC staffing is bottlenecked by the training dropout/failure rate. 1000 people a year go in, pretty sizable dropout or fail so you are left with 500. If 700 are retiring, that's -200 overall. At some point, that -200 year over year becomes impactful.
So, if you need more people, you have two options. Increase the class size but obviously that's expensive and makes the problem slightly worse up front as you are pulling qualified people into instructor roles.
Or try to filter out those who will drop/fail in hiring process so they don't occupy class slots. One of the ways FAA had done that is CTI college courses because those graduates had lower drop/fail rate.
The linked article explicitly disagrees with this opinion. In fact it comes to almost literally the opposition conclusions:
>Not only that, it shattered the pipeline the FAA had built with CTI schools, making the process towards becoming an air traffic controller less certain, undercutting many of the most passionate people working to train prospective controllers, and leading to a tense and unclear relationship between the FAA and feeder organizations.
>Did anyone truly unqualified make it all the way through the pipeline? There's no reason to think so. Did average candidate quality decrease? There's every reason to think so. Would that lead to staffing issues? Unambiguously yes.
That's not to say that you are wrong and the article is correct, but in a discussion that is started by an article, and when the article addresses exactly the points you are making, I feel that it is helpful to give explicit reasons why you think the article is mistaken.