It isn't about political correctness (this word has really lost its meaning lately) its about eliminating tools that companies use to illegally discriminate against a protected class. It depends on its intent and its effect. The company must demonstrate the job requirement that has a disparate impact is job-related and consistent with business needs. A strength test might have a disparate impact on women and those with disabilities but that's ok as long as the job actually requires heavy lifting.

Tests have been used as a tool to weed out the undesirables, this is a fact. Look at literacy requirements for voting, for example. If this wasn't the case we wouldn't be facing this issue.

That being said - its a huge can of worms that needs more clarifying. It has a spotty judicial history, to put it lightly.

It is also questionable that requiring a college degree for many jobs is actually legal anyway and it is consistent with precedent such a practice is actually illegal.

Griggs v. Duke Power was a big Supreme Court case in this area. The Duke Power Company had explicitly segregated its workforce when it was legal to do so reserving the low paying jobs for blacks and the high paying jobs for whites. When it became illegal to do so they changed "you have to be white" to "you have to have a high school diploma or pass an IQ test."

Duke lost the case.

See here: http://www.popecenter.org/commentaries/article.html?id=3118

>Furthermore, the company’s lawyers argued, the legislative history of the Civil Rights Act clearly showed that it was not intended to interfere with bona fide aptitude testing, widely used in business at that time. During Senate debate on the bill, opponents argued that it could be used to attack employment testing, which had in fact occurred in a case in Illinois involving Motorola. A state official had ruled the company’s testing illegal under state law because it was “unfair to disadvantaged groups.”

>Bill sponsors, including Senator Hubert Humphrey, replied that nothing in the language of the statute could be construed that way, but to head off objections, they included a new section, 703(h). That makes it legal for an employer to use a “professionally designed ability test” if it is not “designed, intended or used to discriminate….”

>You might think the Court would have ruled in Duke Power’s favor. Wrong—it ruled unanimously against it. The justices ignored the legislative history and gave deference to the federal agency charged with enforcing the law, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

>But there was also a delayed consequence. With actual intelligence testing now an invitation to costly litigation, “many employers made the college degree a de facto intelligence test and focused only on hiring applicants who possessed it.”

>O’Keefe and Vedder raise that question: “If challenged, could employers who have set the college degree as a requirement show that it has anything at all to do with ‘business necessity’ or are ‘job related’? That is very doubtful.”

>Suppose that someone who’d been turned away from a sales job for lack of college degree took the company to court, claiming that its educational requirement had a disparate impact, screening out people who could succeed in the job. That would appear to be a strong case.

>I have never heard of such a case, attacking an employer’s college degree requirement on disparate impact grounds. But nothing would more rapidly deflate the college bubble than if the Court were to hear such a case and rule consistently with Griggs.

Intention doesn't match with reality. Honestly, we need to revisit the issue and so something differently. However, political correctness has nothing to do with it.

(I am also not convinced such tests actually have much to do with intelligence anyways...)