Originally Posted by Longhornmaniac8

Bingo. There will be some in the class who don't have the luxury of being able to turn it down. We need to be realistic about the makeup of our classes going forward. If the current hiring trends are any indication, it will be a lot of LCC folks who jumped from right seat to right seat, military guys with no 121 experience, and the majority of the remainder will be regional guys. Granted, most of the regional folks, but not all by any means, will have been in the left seat.

The overwhelming majority of guys will either A) have the good sense to know they're not immediately ready for the left seat at United as a new hire, and/or B) realize that their QOL will be terrible for the entire 2 years they're forced to be in the left seat. Which means the majority of these slots will fall to the youngest guys in the class. While age is not perfectly correlated with experience, I'd hazard that the majority of older folks will have more meaningful experience that the majority of younger folks. Again, I recognize that isn't universally true (there have been 8 Balls that were LCAs), but on the average it probably is more true than not.

The key is exactly as you described it, it should be a choice, not a requirement for employment.