Companies Waive Four-Year Degree Requirements For New Hires

From the UK Daily Mail:

Nearly half of US companies intend to eliminate Bachelor's degree requirements for some job positions next year, a new survey has revealed.

And 55 percent said they'd already eliminated degree requirements this year, according to an Intelligent.com survey of 800 US employers, carried out in November.

It comes after Walmart, IBM, Accenture, Bank of America and Google announced similar plans.

The survey found that the same employers that have already eliminated Bachelor's degree requirements were far more likely to continue doing so.

The Daily Mail title starts with "How the college degree lost its value", and the story implies this is a new trend. My own experience in the job market as a refugee from academia suggests the trend isn't quite so novel. Reflecting on my career path, after I left graduate work and low-level teaching, I went almost exclusively into jobs that simply hadn't existed before the computer age in the 1960s, with even more created by the rise of desktops and distributed computing in the 1980s.

These included programming, software technical writing, corporate computer operations, information security, and contingency planning. I began to work these jobs in the mid-1970s, and from the start, the education requirement was always four-year degree "or equivalent experience". But it took a long time for universities to come up with courses and major programs that matched what the new jobs needed, so HR departments had no choice but to hire anyone who seemed remotely capable of doing the new work, and very few of my colleagues ever had four-year degrees.

In fact, I would say those who had any sort of formal experience with things like punch card operations had picked it up in in enlisted roles in the armed forces. Everyone else just learned it on the job, the same way I did. One positive effect of this trend was that it basically took HR out of the loop; sure, you had to interview with HR and try to demonstrate whatever they thought they wanted to see, but the hiring managers would always override their reservations and insist no one else had even the remotest qualifications.

HR would ask me questions like, "Where do you see yourself in five years?" and I would give answers like, "This job I'm interviewing for didn't exist five years ago. I can't predict what jobs will be needed five years from now, so I can't really give you a good answer." The sour expressions of the HR reps are branded in my memory. I didn't get a lot of those jobs, but there were a lot of jobs open. I was almost always hired over HR's objections.

But this is a trend that's been going on at least since I went into the IT job market in the 1970s, it's nothing new. One thing I discovered while teaching as a graduate assistant before I switched careers was that universities are something of a racket -- their market is the socially mobile bourgeoisie that wants the chachet of a four-year degree as a class distinction. This is why parents tolerate their kids majoring in things like creative writing or ethnic studies, while they won't tolerate any uncertainty about their graduation. The job of low-level faculty is to bless this process. (The exceptions tend to be from Asian families who expect their kids to become doctors.)

If the rest of the middle class want their kids to have useful careers, they need to send their kids to local community colleges that offer courses in IT or law enforcement -- they won't get them at a liberal arts school. In fact, the young graduates my wife and I know have to find their way into low-pay internship-type programs with corporations after they get their degrees to have any hope of building careers there. So why bother with the four-year degree at all?

At the same time, corporations are recognizing that salary levels that allow employees to pay off student debts from four-year degrees aren't cost effective when students without that debt level but without the degree can do the job just as well -- what on earth does reading liberal-arts chestnuts like Coming of Age in Samoa or any of its contemporary successors qualify anyone to do?

These are the sorts of questions Mike Rowe has been asking for some time.