By Derek Newton
Reposted from Forbes, with permission
For years now, I’ve been trying to explain to colleagues, and to anyone else who shows the slightest interest, that dropping college degree requirements from job descriptions does not matter. Or rather, that it would not matter. That despite all the hype and celebration, dropping degree requirements meant next to nothing.
So, I was pleased by the findings of the new report from The Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School. Although I am sure it will depress those who thought that removing degree requirements – so-called “skills-based hiring” or “tearing the paper ceiling” – was becoming a thing.
Unsurprisingly, the new report says that despite many companies making big shows of dropping college degree requirements for jobs, not much has changed – very, very few people without college degrees are getting the jobs that once required them.
The report says, “Simply dropping stated requirements seldom opens jobs to those who don’t have a college degree.” And that, “For all its fanfare, the increased opportunity promised by Skills-Based Hiring was borne out in not even 1 in 700 hires last year.” Positions that were newly classified as not needing a degree saw a low 3.5% increase in hiring for those without one. Together, “the net effect is a change of only 0.14 percentage points in incremental hiring of candidates without degrees,” the report found.
In other words, even without a degree requirement, college graduates got the jobs anyway.
The new data is not an outlier. Many research efforts and journalism inquiries over the past several months have reached similar conclusions.
Even so, this new report is remarkable in that it came from Burning Glass – an agenda-driven organization that has been advocating for the abolition of college degrees in hiring for some time, praising and promoting the short-term credentials often provided by for-profit companies.
For example, even in this report, Burning Glass says college degrees “were perceived as indicators of persistence, of foundational skill, and of general capability” – past tense. They talk about “the presumed rigor of the college experience” and that requiring a college education for hiring, “has become increasingly difficult to justify.”
The point is that Burning Glass is an advocacy organization for expanding hiring beyond college-educated applicants. So much so, that sometimes their advocacy has even been suspect, framed as more than what it actually shows. That Burning Glass has found so-called “skills-based hiring” to be a dud, at least as far as results go, is big.
Speaking of, it’s important to point out that even the name for the phenomenon – “skills-based hiring” – is deceptive. It presumes that people with college degrees don’t have skills – that you cannot hire someone with a degree and skills, that it’s one or the other.
The new report also broke down the companies that made a show of dropping the degree mandate.
“In name only” companies were ones that announced a change but did not appear to make any changes to either their job postings or their hiring. That group composed nearly half the sample, at 45%. “Backsliders” were firms that, after they announced policy changes, made “gains” in hiring applicants without degrees but, over time, not only reverted to pre-change levels, but in some cases actually hired more job candidates with degrees than they did beforehand. Backsliders were about 20% of the sample.
Some quick math shows that somewhere around 65% of the companies that announced a drop in degree requirements hired the same amount of college graduates, or more.
Burning Glass does say that those without a college degree who are hired are more likely to persist in their jobs, reducing costly turnover. For a business, that’s good. Though the report does not say, it also seems at least possible that it’s cheaper to have non-degree holders in positions that used to require a degree – another win for business.
But the report authors do not seem to consider the major business costs of moving to “skills-based hiring,” such as determining what skills an applicant has. Developing and deploying good, fair, and safe tests is not easy or cheap. It may be why, as Burning Glass puts it, companies “revert to relying on proxies, rather than engage in the hard work of assessing an individual candidate’s strengths and skills.”
The report says of the backsliders – the companies that announced dropping degree requirements, did, but then went back to previous levels or more – that, “it seems likely that initial executive enthusiasm did not translate to necessary change in underlying systems and practices” related to hiring.
What’s shocking is that the report also does not entertain the idea that companies that dropped degree requirements and “reverted” to hiring applicants with a college degree, or those that never fully made a meaningful change in the first place, did so consciously.
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. Maybe companies know this. Maybe that’s why the idea of dropping college education requirements has not taken hold – because it’s a bad idea.
To believe otherwise, you must believe that business leaders and hiring managers don’t know what they’re doing – that they are blindly following tradition or just lazy. Even when hiring efficiency and worker productivity make a real difference in the marketplace, you’d need to believe that businesses have simply overlooked a better way to hire. That seems naïve. If removing degree requirements from jobs was really better, you should wonder why so many companies are not doing it, even after they say they will.
