It is time for employers to consider alternatives. Taking a broader view, we believe as many as 6.2 million workers could be affected by the practice of degree inflation. That sort of disconnect leaves many jobs unfilled, despite the fact that degree-less middle-skill workers with relevant experience may be available. In a typical middle skills job title such as production worker supervisor, we found that 67 percent of the job postings required a bachelor’s degree or higher yet just 16 percent of workers already in that position held such a degree. In many cases, qualified candidates never even got the chance to apply for a position. We also found that automated hiring tools excluded applicants with relevant experience simply because they lacked a college degree. Instead, we found that employers were increasingly inflating the educational requirements for jobs usually held by high school grads.
Get treated like trash without a college degree upgrade#
To upgrade the quality of the workforce, why not get a college grad for a middle-skill position?Īfter examining more than 26 million job postings and surveying 600 business and human resource executives, however, as part of a research project between Accenture, Grads of Life, and Harvard Business School, we concluded that this explanation was incorrect. Baristas with bachelor’s degrees became the popular image, creating the impression that degree inflation was the result of excess supply, a weak job market, and overly opportunistic human resource departments. How did this happen? During the Great Recession of 2006-2008, unemployed college graduates were willing to take jobs for which they were clearly overqualified. This combination of underachievement and misalignment hurts both US competitiveness and working-class Americans seeking a career path toward a decent standard of living. The result is a misalignment between supply and demand for these kinds of jobs.Īt the same time, college graduates filling these middle-skills positions (those that require more than a high school diploma but less than a college degree) such as supervisors, support specialists, technicians, sales representatives, data analysts, and production managers are costing companies more money to employ, tend to be less engaged in their jobs, have a higher turnover rate, and reach productivity levels only on par with high school graduates doing the same job. Only a third of the US adult population has earned a four-year degree. That said, the pool of college graduates is limited. This uptick in credentialing, or “degree inflation,” rested on the belief that these college-educated employees would be smarter, more productive, and more engaged than workers without a degree.
Over the past decade, they have begun to demand a bachelor’s degree in hiring workers for jobs that traditionally haven’t required one.
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