Employers rethink college requirements, but obstacles remain
NEW YORK, UNITED STATES — As the labor market tightens, more companies are dropping four-year college degree requirements for job openings, a move seen as a way to expand the talent pool and promote diversity.
However, experts caution that simply revising job postings may not translate into meaningful hiring changes.
“I tried college for eight years, but it ultimately wasn’t for me,” Dren LaPhayne told Yahoo Finance.
LaPhayne is a 31-year-old junior data analyst apprentice who landed her current role without a degree.
“My current job is an actual dream. I’m working in a flexible environment that allows me to learn things at a pace that is feasible for me. The company is ethnically diverse, and I’m earning a salary of $60,000 a year.”
Recent reports indicate a surge in job listings that don’t mandate four-year degrees. A third of employers surveyed by Payscale said they’ve nixed degree requirements, and Indeed found that over half of January’s job postings lacked formal education prerequisites, up from 48% in 2019.
An Intelligent.com survey also revealed that approximately 45% of U.S. employers plan to eliminate bachelor’s degree requirements for certain positions in 2024.
While promising, the trend may not necessarily translate into hiring those without degrees. “That may not mean that they’re actually hiring people without degrees just because they consider them,” cautioned Amy Stewart, Payscale’s associate director.
A Harvard Business School study examining 316 million job postings found that while the number of roles without degree requirements quadrupled from 2014 to 2023, it has “made only modest inroads” in actual hiring practices.
“Simply dropping stated requirements seldom opens jobs to those who don’t have a college degree,” the report said.
“For all its fanfare, the increased opportunity promised by Skills-Based Hiring was borne out in not even 1 in 700 hires last year… the net effect is a change of only 0.14 percentage points in incremental hiring of candidates without degrees.”
Employers still highly value college degrees, according to Bradley Schurman, CEO of Human Change. “If it comes down to two applicants with equal abilities, the one with the college degree is more likely to get the job.”
Derek Newton, a former vice president at The Century Foundation, a public policy think tank with an emphasis on education, believes that dropping college education requirements is a “bad idea” that’s why it has not taken hold.
“Maybe these companies tried it, and it didn’t work. Maybe they realized that skills and experiences learned in college matter. Maybe, as employers themselves have told us for years, the socializing and broad-based learning that goes on in college are valuable,” Newton wrote in a Forbes article.
While degree-free hiring holds promise, experts argue that meaningful change will require more than just revising job postings, emphasizing the need for a genuine shift in employer mindsets and practices.
