By Taylor Maag and Michael Brickman
Education has become one of America’s most significant dividing lines. Those with bachelor’s and advanced degrees have mostly prospered, while employment prospects, wages and advancement opportunities for those with less education have fallen.
Yet, with so much else dividing our country, there is a growing bipartisan consensus that we must tear “the paper ceiling” that denies opportunities to those without at least a bachelor’s degree.
Early in the 2000s, many employers began adding degree requirements to job descriptions — whether they needed them or not — using the degree as a proxy for job preparedness. As a result, workers without a bachelor’s degree were screened out of opportunities. For example, in 2015, 67 percent of production supervisor job postings asked for a four-year college degree, even though just 16 percent of employed production supervisors had graduated from college.
Research from Opportunity@Work found that because of this “degree inflation,” there is a talent pool of skilled workers being left behind in our economy. The data shows that Americans skilled through alternative routes other than a bachelor’s degree represent 50 percent of the U.S. workforce. Many of them possess skills that should qualify them for jobs with salaries at least 50 percent higher than their current job.
In other words, our current hiring practices systematically underutilize the skills of millions of U.S. workers, deepening the economic divide between those with and without college degrees.
