Essentially, as a society, we have put a “pay to play” barrier on the path to good jobs — and we have put the certification of prospective employees in the hands of colleges, organizations often distant from employers. Perhaps it’s a sensible barrier. After all, people who graduate from college probably, on average, display more tenacity, work ethic, and intelligence than people who don’t.
Then again, anyone who studies this topic runs across puzzling and depressing examples. Enterprise Holdings, which runs a car-rental company, strongly favors applicants who have a college degree. The job can become a life raft for college graduates who floundered. When I rented a car from Enterprise a few months ago, the young branch manager who filled out my rental contract told me her story: She had earned a degree in elementary education from Towson University, a public institution in Maryland, but discovered within the first few months in the classroom that she hated being a teacher.
“I knew that Enterprise hired college grads, so I applied here,” she said with a shrug. Her husband, who also held an education degree from Towson and discovered he didn’t like teaching, drove trucks that deliver recycled oil.
Status as a signal
A college degree is merely a signal, and an increasing number of people question what that signal means. Of course, one part of that signal is the status of your alma mater. In September, Gallup and the Strada Education Network released survey results suggesting that 90 percent of employers focus on experience and skills, not college rankings, in hiring. That could be true for the vast array of companies out there.
But conversations with hiring managers at top-ranked companies reveal that those businesses often hire from elite colleges — and, in fact, solidify their hiring pipelines by building relationships with those institutions. For the most desirable jobs, prestige still matters.
We’ve all known people, much like the reader’s sister, who display innate intelligence, a solid work ethic, and mastery of relevant skills acquired through years of work. They can outperform colleagues with fancy pedigrees, yet their lack of formal education — or merely the last few credits that would earn them a degree — diminishes their standing among managers.
It makes for an odd paradox
Employers prefer applicants who have college degrees, but they complain that college graduates do not bring skills relevant to the jobs they seek.
And does that degree really represent the skills, work ethic, and thoughtfulness it’s supposed to? The public is aware that employers and colleges use opaque and expensive certifications to judge a person’s employment potential, and it’s a big source of the resentment and skepticism about higher education’s value today.
It’s also a driving force behind the phenomena of “helicopter” or “snowplow” parents. Parents realize that a credential is the coin of the realm in the job market, and that while failures or detours might offer valuable lessons, they also represent huge risks to middle-class kids, who have an equal chance of doing better financially — or worse — than their parents did.
So is that pattern changing? Recent research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows that non-college-educated workers are switching jobs at the highest rate in the past four years, perhaps suggesting that employers are less concerned about an employee’s credentials. But while job satisfaction among those workers seems to be rising, the bank’s economists observed, salaries are not.
More employers are considering programs that blend work experience and formal education, with apprenticeships standing out as a leading example. Those arrangements give experience more equal standing with education, although they still require students to earn that credential.
A “people-analytics revolution”
Ryan Craig, managing director of the University Ventures investment fund and the author of A New U: Faster + Cheaper Alternatives to College, sees a “people-analytics revolution” coming to the work world. Assessments will identify the key drivers of high-performing employees, he says, then correlate those qualities to people on internal career paths or new applicants. Those characteristics would be valued over “big, broad signals, like degrees,” he says.
The problem, for the time being, is that those kinds of assessments might run afoul of labor laws in the United States if done improperly, Craig writes in a recent column, and doing them well can be labor-intensive. So for now, he says, employers have passed them up, opting instead for degree requirements.
But once the pressure to hire and promote high-performing employees becomes urgent, and once students and prospective employees discover other ways to demonstrate their skills, I think the college-to-career landscape will change radically.
