A study of 51 million job postings shows a trend of companies moving away from degree requirements for many roles.
Two decades ago, companies began adding degree requirements to job descriptions, even though the jobs themselves hadn’t changed. After the Great Recession, many organizations began trying to back away from those requirements. To learn how the effort is going, the authors studied more than 50 million recent job announcements. The bottom line: Many companies are moving away from degree requirements and toward skills-based hiring, especially in middle-skill jobs, which good for both workers and employers. But more work remains to be done.
Buy CopiesEarly in the 2000s, a significant number of employers began adding degree requirements to the descriptions of jobs that hadn’t previously required degrees, even though the jobs themselves hadn’t changed. The trend — sometimes known as “degree inflation” — became particularly pronounced after the Great Recession of 2008-2009, at which point leaders in government, business, and community-based organizations recognized that a reset was in order. Many large corporations soon announced that they would eliminate degree requirements in much of their hiring.
Read more on Human resource management or related topic Hiring and recruitmentJoseph Fuller is a professor of management practice and a faculty cochair of the Project on Managing the Future of Work at Harvard Business School.
Christina Langer is a visiting research fellow at the Project on Workforce, at Harvard University; a PhD candidate at the Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt; and a guest researcher at the ifo institute, in Munich.
Matt Sigelman is the president of the Burning Glass Institute, which advances data-driven research and practice on the future of work and learning. He is also a senior advisor at the Project on Workforce at Harvard.
