On December 7th, 2020, California State assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer (D-Los Angeles), introduced a bill that sought to codify a condition for police hires in the state that has already become de rigueur in so many other fields—to require that all new officers have a university degree. Jones-Sawyer is not unique amongst middle class persons in recommending such prerequisites, nor is he even the first politician to propose such a requirement for police officers explicitly; several such bills have been introduced throughout the country during the last few years and some jurisdictions already require that new police officers be university-educated. Indeed, the argument that police officers should be mandated to be university-educated extends to the 1960s, after successive racial riots in American municipalities were blamed in part on police-community tensions.1 Despite the fact that university degrees are not yet explicitly mandatory, slightly more than half of all American police officers hold an associate’s degree and nearly a third hold a bachelor’s degree.2 Yet while many individual police officers have taken it upon themselves to earn degrees, …