The Diminishing Relevance of a College Degree
An ongoing issue for unschoolers and alternative school graduates is how some colleges and businesses have refused to admit or hire them due to their lack of a formal high school or college degree. Though there are ways around this, such as using hard proof—previous experience as a volunteer, or a portfolio of accomplishments and work products that show your creativity and abilities—it is just easier for an employer to say “No” when they compare you to a person with a college degree and the same level of skill. It’s a prejudice baked into our social structure: the more schooling one has the more intelligent and capable you are assumed to be.
In the 1980s it was often said that the reason everyone purchased IBM computers is because no one ever got fired for purchasing them; so it is with hiring college graduates. I got my Master’s degree in English and wound up working as an assistant manager and cashier for a bookstore, working for very poor wages, yet the owner insisted that every hire needed a college degree. I soon realized this was more a strategy of keeping certain types of people from applying for work there, instead of a genuine requirement for being a good bookseller. Love of books and being a good salesperson is not proven by having a degree in English (and today English majors are a rare and vanishing breed, like IBM). Indeed, a college credential might be necessary for some types of technical or specialized fields, though some of these credentials can now be earned as training certificates or through educational businesses, such as the Recurse Center. Artificial Intelligence will further reduce the need for 4-year college degrees in computer sciences and likely many other fields.
I was pleased to learn that some states are removing degree requirements from government jobs. The Brookings Institute writes:
“Over the past two years, more than 20 states have expanded access to state jobs through a simple move: assessing or removing bachelor’s degree requirements. With state, local, and federal governments employing 15% of the U.S. workforce, these actions are of enormous consequence, especially for “STARs,” or workers who are skilled through alternative routes. STARs—who have gained their skills through community college, the military, partial college, certification programs, and, most commonly, on-the-job training—represent over half of the nation’s workforce, and currently occupy approximately 2 million state jobs.
Government leaders see removing bachelor’s degree requirements as critical to meeting their hiring needs and public service delivery obligations. And at a time when states are struggling to fill a high number of open roles, removing these requirements can attract a larger pool of talent.
Many states already have laws or policies that forbid discrimination based on educational attainment. But in practice, hiring patterns have favored degrees, and the composition of the state workforce reflects this. While they comprise half of the workforce, STARs fill only 36% of state jobs—representing a gap of 1 million good state jobs for STARs nationwide. The explicit commitment to removing degree requirements is a signal to STARs that they are welcome to apply.”
Further, I’ve been following research and stories about college graduates being underemployed. When I revised Teach Your Own I wrote, “As of September 2020, 43.2 percent of recent college graduates and 33.8 percent of all college graduates are underemployed—defined by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as “the share of graduates working in jobs that typically do not require college degrees.”
Recent research shows “Overall, 52 percent of college graduates were underemployed one year after degree completion. That is, they were working in jobs that don’t typically require a bachelor’s degree to obtain. For those initially-underemployed workers with ten years of data, 45 percent of them were still underemployed after a decade, even given the post-pandemic labor market conditions that favored workers.”
I hope this is the beginning of a shift from viewing higher education as a process all citizens should complete in order to get a good job to realizing that people learn all the time and that other less costly methods and opportunities can achieve many of the same goals that a 4-year college degree claims to achieve.
