This state is hiring: Bachelor degree holders need not apply

The job postings that soon-to-be graduates who hope to work for the Massachusetts state government are seeing are very different from what they expected: absent is the requirement that they have spent the last four years acquiring a bachelor degree. The same is true for those graduating with associate bachelor degrees from two-year community colleges.

When Massachusetts Governor (Democrat) Maura Healey signed Executive Order No 627, “Instituting Skills-Based Hiring Practices”, she set the state with the highest per capita number of colleges and universities on the same path that 22 other states had chosen since March 2022 when (Republican) Governor Larry Hogan announced that Maryland would be ending the bachelor degree requirement for most state jobs.

Healey’s statement echoes those of other governors, including Republican governors such as Alaska’s Mike Dunleavy. In December 2022, he said: “Today people can gain knowledge skills and abilities through on-the-job experience. If we are going to address our labour shortage, we have to recognise the value that apprenticeships, on-the-job training, military training, trade schools and other experiences provides applicants. If a person can do the job, we shouldn’t be holding anyone back because they don’t have a degree.”

In an address before the Associated Industries of Massachusetts, Healey said: “As the state’s largest employer, we rely on a strong diverse workforce to deliver crucial services and programmes for Massachusetts residents, business and communities every day.

“This executive order directs our administration to focus on an applicants’ skills and experiences, rather than college credentials.”

In December 2022, appropriating the ethos behind the critical term ‘glass ceiling’, which denotes the limit to which women in business can rise, Utah’s Republican Governor Spencer Cox dubbed the degree requirement that had been in place for decades a “paper ceiling”.

At the news conference at which he announced that 98% of the state’s jobs that required a college degree at that point should not require one, Cox said: “Instead of focusing on demonstrated competence, the focus too often had been on a piece of paper. We are changing that.”

A flourishing economy

There are several drivers cited by both governors and analysts for why states are eliminating the bachelor degree requirement in what are considered ‘middle-skills jobs’ – those defined as jobs “that require more education and training than a high school diploma but less than a four-year college degree”, such as computer user support specialists, billing and posting clerks, secretaries and administrative assistants (except legal, medical and executive assistants).

The first is the historically tight labour market and its ramifications. In April unemployment in the United States was 3.8%, the 28th consecutive month that it has been at 4% or below, the working definition of “full employment”.

“Governors pretty much universally are facing ageing workforces,” said Harvard Business School Professor Joseph B Fuller, lead author of The Emerging Degree Reset: How the shift to skills-based hiring holds the key to growing the US workforce at a time of talent shortage (EDR, Burning Glass Institute, 2022). “Many of them have significant needs, across [the political] spectrum, to restock their supply of state workers,” he told University World News.

The red-hot US economy has created 829,000 jobs since the beginning of this year, a trend dating back years, which has exacerbated the phenomenon of jobs remaining vacant for many months.

Indeed, a report published by the Burning Glass Institute in 2017 noted that requiring a bachelor degree for middle skills positions led to them remaining vacant longer.

“Those extra days – for example, 12 extra days in the case of first line supervisors of mechanics, installers and repairers – represent a significant indirect cost due to degree inflation {that is, requiring a bachelor degree for a position that historically did not require one], which is often invisible to many employers,” the report states.

“We now have an economy that is flourishing; we are creating jobs at a faster pace than we can create persons to fill those positions,” said Nicole Smith, research professor and chief economist at Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. “In many locations, jobs are going unfilled for a significant number of consecutive months.

“That represents lost earnings potential: lost wages for individuals and lost taxation revenues for each level of government,” she told University World News.

Equity issues

The second reason supporters of skills-based hiring, which include large companies such as Google, Meta, the Bank of America and Microsoft, cite is equity – both in terms of education attainment and race.

“I think a lot of large employers, including state governments, have recognised that it is not necessary to possess a college degree to execute many of the jobs that have historically required a degree and for the desire to reduce or address equity issues,” said Marc Joffe, federalism and state policy analyst at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank based in Washington DC.

“Given the differences in degree attainment across certain racial and other demographic groups, these employers have decided to remove the college degree requirement for many job openings that they have,” he said.

According to Bain & Company, a consulting company based in Boston, Massachusetts, 30% fewer black Americans have jobs that pay “family sustaining wages” (US$90,000 per year) as compared to white Americans. “One key barrier to black talent obtaining these jobs is that 70% to 80% [of these jobs] require a four-year college degree, which 75% of Black Americans do not have.”

After noting the differential rate between Caucasian and Asian Americans who earn degrees and black and Hispanic Americans, Fuller also said that “the degree requirement was acting as a barrier to career advancement for those communities. Hence, state governments started to revisit the actual sense of requiring degrees as a way to open up the portal of opportunity for the people they serve”.

Overall, there is a mismatch between the number of jobs that require a bachelor degree and the number of Americans who hold bachelors, said Blair Corcoran de Castillo, senior director of the STARS Policy Project, an initiative of Opportunity@Work, a non-governmental organisation with the mission to “Rally public, private and nonprofit partners to rewire the labour market so that everyone can contribute their skills, talent and energy in pursuit of a better life.”

The STARS – Skilled Through Alternative Routes – project is devoted to developing pathways into employment for people who have attained skills in the military or on the job, for example.

“We’ve studied 130 million job transitions over the past 10 years,” said Corcoran de Castillo. “And what we’ve learned is that over the past 30 years STARS [candidates] have lost access to jobs they previously had access to. What we’ve also seen is that degree requirements have increased in these roles.

“Seventy percent of new jobs added to the labour market in the past decade are the ones where employers have frequently required a degree. Yet, we know that only 50% of the workforce has a degree or less than that. So there’s a mismatch in the available talent and the requirements that are being drawn,” she said.

Degree inflation

While the gap between positions requiring degrees and degree holders – degree inflation – existed before the ‘jobless recovery’ that followed the 2008 recession, often called the Great Recession, the percent of job listings that indicated a bachelor degree was required rose by 10%. One reason for this, said Corcoran de Castillo, was the advent of online applications.

“It wasn’t by a great design; it was kind of by accident. They [human resource departments] needed a way to go through this new influx of applicants, now that people could apply online. So, often their applicant tracking systems can give either a zero or one, and they would do that based on degrees. This helped them because the degree was seen as a proxy for a set of skills,” she told University World News.

Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, according to Burning Glass’s EDR report, the bachelor stood as a proxy not for technical or intellectual skills but rather as a proxy for soft or social skills.

“[C]ompanies previously associated having a degree with superior social and soft skills, ranging from those that are more easily evaluated, such as written and oral communications, to those less easily defined, such as commitment, self-discipline, and the ability to participate effectively in unfamiliar groups. This validates that degrees served in large part as a reassuring proxy for employers in terms of the breadth, depth, and durability of social skills they could expect from a graduate,” the report notes.

Even sceptics about skills-based hiring like Dr Mike Nietzel, a former president of Missouri State University, agreed that “a college degree is to a certain extent a proxy for perseverance, for a certain amount of discipline and longer perspective. So, set aside the content that you learn, there are some habits that a college degree probably certifies that are valuable to most employers”.

Defining the skills needed

Skills-based hiring requires that employers, public or private, rework job descriptions so that they clearly indicate what skills or knowledge is necessary in that position, with the Silicon Valley mantra: “We don’t care if you have a degree, we just care if you can code”, being something of the gold standard, as is the stepped certification that Microsoft offers its workers.

Healey’s executive order directs hiring managers to “align job requirements and position prerequisites with the skills needed to accomplish a position’s job duties”.

Corcoran de Castillo explained that the STARS programme works with public and private companies to help them understand how to think about attracting the talent they need by tapping into the skills needed to do the job.

“We have tools and data that help them understand the skills they need for the job, where they can access STARS with the skills needed for their jobs. We show them how to build a talent and hiring strategy that is inclusive and would enable STARS to get through. We show them how to make sure they are not screening STARS out before they can assess the skills,” Corcoran de Castillo said.

Additionally, the STARS programme helps employers develop in-house training and helps STARS candidates access training they need in, for example, short targeted programmes run by community colleges.

It is worth noting that in the Undergraduate Degree Earners Report released on 11 April, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center found that the certificate earners were the only category of post-secondary students that increased in 2022/23. These students, who typically take a 15-week highly specialised course, rose by 3.9% while four-year bachelor and two-year associate bachelor students fell by 3% and 7.3%, respectively.

According to Corcoran de Castillo, the American Association of Community College Trustees is preparing a guide to support community colleges to build training programmes that are more responsive to public sector needs.

The press release that announced Healey’s executive order quoted the president of North Essex Community College, Lane Glenn, and the president of Western New England University (Springfield, Massachusetts), Dr Robert E Johnson, in support of the governor’s initiative: “At Western New England University, we understand the transformative power of skills and the importance of recognising diverse talents. This executive order is a significant step towards breaking down unnecessary barriers and creating equal opportunities for all in today’s dynamic job market.”

College: Nice but not always necessary

There is not, however, wall-to-wall support for either skills-based hiring or the criticism of college education implied by the supporters of skills-based hiring. Indeed, some supporters of skills-based hiring are explicit in their criticism of university education.

Joffe, for instance, answered my question about whether skills-based hiring was a rebuke to traditional college and university education by stating that he didn’t really use a lot of what he learned in college (New York University) in his first job doing cost analysis. It involved a great deal of arithmetic and “completing a lot of manual spreadsheets, and then migrating that over to the predecessors of Microsoft Excel”, he said.

During his time at NYU, he said, and even now, college emphasises a liberal education. “So you take a lot of classes that are actually unrelated to what you’re ultimately going to end up doing.

“I’m not saying that that’s a bad thing. I think it’s good for people to have a liberal education. But I don’t think it’s necessary to succeed in many types of employment.”

For his part, Fuller was also critical of college programmes, like gender studies, restorative justice or philosophy, where there are high rates of unemployment for graduates who do not come out of premier universities like Princeton, Stanford or University of Texas (Austin).

By contrast and by way of an example of targeted skills-based education, he said: “If you get an associate degree in managerial accounting, you will get a job. If you get a degree in statistics, you will get a job.”

After noting that there is scepticism about the value of a college degree today and that universities need to take seriously the question, “Is the college graduate being prepared adequately for the workforce?” Nietzel said that there was something to the criticism of the skills-based hiring movement which claims it is, at least in part, an outgrowth of the culture wars being waged by Republican governors.

“I do think there are some, let’s say, right-wing, politicians who have used this as a vehicle for attacking curricula they don’t like,” Nietzel told University World News. “It’s often majors like sociology or women’s studies or African American studies that get lumped in under the ‘Woke’ category. And those are used as a symbol for college degrees that aren’t worth anything, that they’re just indoctrination.

“I think you have to separate that politically motivated attack from a more realistic view – which is: Are our students today being prepared to be successful in the workforce? These are really two different kinds of issues. And I think you see in [Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor Josh] Shapiro’s executive order a more practical concern about where to get people who will be prepared to be successful working for the state” by means of skills-based hiring.

Visiting Scholar at the University of Virginia Ben Wildavsky noted that the percentage of Americans who believe in the value of higher education has dropped from 55% a few years ago to 36% today and that one of the results of this drop is the turn towards skills-based education.

However, “this kind of narrative, that degrees have been oversold, is unhelpful”, said Wildavsky, the author of The Career Arts: Making the most of college, credentials and connections (2023, Princeton University Press).

“I think it’s important to emphasise that it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of why it is that degrees became so valuable,” he said, pushing back against the argument that they became valuable as a way to weed applicants out after the introduction of online ATS.

“I think people forget that we talked of the 20th century as the ‘human capital century’, when the economy changed in such a way that the job market rewarded higher and higher levels of skills and education, which translated into rewarding college degrees, because, of course, college degrees include skills.

“So the idea that people are so hung up on getting degrees and are trying to push for a more educated population all over the world, the idea that this is because of some sort of central planning, or some bureaucrats who have decided that degrees are going to be valuable and therefore they became valuable, is false. That’s not why degrees became valuable.

“They became valuable because of human capital. They became valuable, frankly, because of the workings of the free market which rewarded more important jobs that required more skills and needed more education,” said Wildavsky.

The same thing happened in the early part of the 20th century in the high-school-for-all movement, he said. Going back to the 1920s and 1930s, most Americans did not go to high school. Even in 1960, only about 41% of Americans had high school diplomas. That changed, he said, as the economy demanded more educated people.

“All work has dignity,” Wildavsky continued. “But it is fundamentally misleading to try to tell people that you should not strive to get as much education as you can,” he concluded.

Employee training programmes

A further problem sceptics have about skills-based hiring concerns the willingness of American companies – besides ones like Microsoft – to establish robust employee training programmes. Wildavsky will be going to Germany next month to study its well-known apprenticeship and in-service job training programmes.

For her part, even Smith, who supports skills-based hiring, shook her head when I asked if there was any evidence that American companies were interested in paying their share of the bill for training prospective and present employees.

“No. In fact, it’s even worse than the examples you’re giving. When you speak to employers, they often think all training lies in the hands of community colleges and higher education. They want people to come out with industry knowledge, with firm-specific knowledge and hit the ground running and make money for them when the onus should always be on an equal partnership between workforce and higher education to make sure we’re training these people.

“So, you’re absolutely right. We need to figure out ways of providing incentives for firms to train their workers a lot more,” she said.

An effect unevenly felt

Towards the end of our discussion, I asked Nietzel what he thought the impact that the skills-based hiring movement would have on colleges and universities in the Upper Midwest and Northeastern states, which are already on the cusp of the ‘demographic cliff’ that will see the numbers of high school graduates decline by 500,000 per year (another effect of the Great Recession).

Nietzel predicted that flagship state schools like Ohio State or University of Pennsylvania will do fine. The same is not true for the regional, comprehensive (second tier) universities and some of the small liberal arts colleges that do not have large endowments and, therefore, are reliant on tuition dollars.

“I think you are already seeing what’s going to simply be more commonplace – and that is consolidation and restriction of academic offerings that those [regional] institutions provide.

“To take Pennsylvania, for example. They went from six [regional universities] collapsed into two a few years ago. I don’t think you are going to see a lot of public regional universities collapse and fold and close. But I think you’re going to see them contract.

“As for small liberal arts colleges that are tuition dependent, they are going to be more at risk of closure,” he explained.