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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Case for Making Professional Degrees Undergraduate Degrees, published by ColdButtonIssues on July 8, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Cross-posted from Cold Button Issues In the United States, there are many professions that are generally impossible to enter without both a graduate professional degree and an undergraduate degree, which may be in a completely unrelated field. Examples of these professions are physicians, attorneys, pharmacists, and physical therapists. Such requirements are unnecessary, as demonstrated by many developed countries that operate successfully without such a two-degree requirement. I estimate that these superfluous undergraduate degree requirements cost 730,000 person-years of work annually and foregone wages and salaries equal to 0.8% of all U.S. wages and salaries. In the United States, occupational licensing is a state-level responsibility. These legal requirements for superfluous undergraduate degrees could be abolished in many states using ballot initiatives. Using data on costs from recent statewide ballot initiatives, I estimate that this intervention would meet Open Philanthropy’s threshold for cost-effectiveness in some but not all states. Why It’s Important Research generally shows that adding additional educational requirements to enter professions produces no benefits. Barrios (2021) showed that requiring accountants to achieve 150 semester hours instead of the traditional 120 hours is linked to fewer new accountants but not to higher ability in new accountants. Timmons and Mills (2018) showed that introducing optician licensing in the United States raised the salaries of opticians, but did not improve quality. In 2015, the Obama Administration’s Council of Economic Advisors concluded that: Licensing laws also lead to higher prices for goods and services, with research showing effects on prices of between 3 and 16 percent. Moreover, in a number of other studies, licensing did not increase the quality of goods and services, suggesting that consumers are sometimes paying higher prices without getting improved goods or services. More qualitatively, we can observe that these education requirements were considered unneeded in years past in the United States and are still considered unneeded in many countries around the world. For instance, a pharmacy degree used to be an undergraduate degree but has now been replaced by a professional doctorate in the United States and some other countries. In the United Kingdom, medical school is an undergraduate program. The American practice of requiring an undergraduate degree before entering many professional schools generates tremendous waste. To estimate the lost years of work caused by required undergraduate degrees prior to professional education across the United States, I obtained the number of professional degrees granted in the 2018-2019 academic year from the National Center for Education Statistics that are generally used to enter licensed professions and that follow undergraduate degrees. I then multiplied the number of degrees granted by four, which represents the normative length of an undergraduate degree in the United States. This is not a precise estimate as some students take more or less than four years to graduate, some schools offer joint undergraduate-professional degrees to slightly speed the total time in education, some earn professional degrees but do not enter the profession, and some licenses require a certain number of credit hours rather than a specific degree. To estimate the lost wages/salary, for each profession, I multiplied the estimated lost years of work by the median salary for that profession. I estimate that $67 billion in wages and salary is lost each year, which is roughly 0.8% of total U.S wages and salary. This also does not include any benefi...