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Questioning whether college degrees should be required for employment often draws accusations of dismissing higher education entirely. In response to my article “Do Degrees and Credentials Actually Prove Competence at Work?,” Jonathan commented, “If you think it’s all a waste, do everyone a favor and stay away.”
This reaction misses the point. It is reasonable to ask if a degree should be a prerequisite for gainful employment and whether the labor market must rely on academia for job training.
[RELATED: Higher Education Fuels Corporate Profits at the Expense of American Workers]
The answer isn’t unknowable—just contested. In Texas, education leaders push college as a workforce pipeline, especially for fields like computer science. (I disagree with the push to steer students into computer science, as it appears to be a degree track that doesn’t deliver the promised career prospects, especially as American students will increasingly face competition from H-1B visa holders for these jobs.) Meanwhile, other states are shifting toward skills-based hiring, reflecting growing skepticism about higher education’s effectiveness.
I side with states removing degree requirements. Outside of fields where a degree is truly essential, it serves as little more than an arbitrary barrier. My reasoning—anecdotal but revealing—is twofold: (1) Until I switched to journalism, I never needed my history degree—not even in politics. (2) Even when credentials matter, the exams that grant them often test on things completely unrelated to the job.
Do Degrees and Credentials Actually Prove Competence at Work?
— Jared Gould (@J_Gould_) February 24, 2025
Does pointing this out make me a conservative troll? I don’t think so. Nor does it mean I believe higher education is a “waste of time.”
A strong liberal arts education, for example, cultivates civic virtue, self-government, and responsibility. As Liza Libes notes in “Conservatives Must Save the Liberal Arts,” a liberal arts education also develops one’s “critical thinking prowess and cultural awareness.” Developing these skills and values is not a waste of time.
[RELATED: If You Want Young Adults to Grow Up, Don’t Bar Them from Serious Work]
But this is where we need to consider two ideas simultaneously.
A good education has intrinsic value, but that doesn’t mean employers should require it. The misalignment between education and the workforce is too great to claim that degrees reliably signal job readiness. Education’s worth extends beyond job prospects: it enriches thought, strengthens civic engagement, and deepens our understanding of the world. These are noble aims—but they are not prerequisites for work.
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Image: “Woman Filling Out a Job Application” by Amtec Photos on Flickr
Jared, what you are missing is the US Supreme Court Case of Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424 (1971) — and the subsequent regs that the US EEOC wrote in response to it.
Without going into the weeds, private employers were told that they could not have aptitude exams for either employment or management positions if the results of these exams had a disparate impact on minorities (i.e. fewer Blacks passed them).
However, you could require a college degree — in anything, from anywhere — in lieu of an aptitude exam and that’s what employers immediately did. (And the colleges loved it.)
And that’s how you got college degrees being required for jobs that had never required them before…
“… other states are shifting toward skills-based hiring.>/i>
State governments, as employers, were completely exempt from EEOC oversight until recently and even now it’s a complicated question as to EEOC jurisdiction over state employment. States also have sovereign immunity protections — and usually such extensive affirmative retribution programs that they dis proportionally hire me
What’s more relevant is that the international accounting giant Ernst and Young stopped requiring college degrees in England a decade ago — but not in the US!
Anything that requires any sort of state-issued license, e.g. health professions, isn’t an issue because those without a license aren’t qualified, it’s against state law to hire them.
But outside of that, the only thing that will change things in the private sector without an assurance that the EEOC won’t come after them for not hiring the percentages that the EEOC thinks it should.
And the ultimate irony here is that no one anticipated that Black male college enrollment, which had dramatically increased in the late 1960s, would not continue to increase after the Vietnam draft ended in the early 1970s. Griggs now winds up helping women at the expense of the Black males it was intended to help…