Easing College-Degree Requirements Should Be a No-Brainer for Conservatives

I n his first move as governor of Pennsylvania, Democrat Josh Shapiro signed an executive order abolishing four-year-degree requirements for the vast majority of state government jobs. “Effective immediately, 92% of state government jobs — about 65,000 positions — do not require a four-year college degree,” he announced on Twitter. According to the executive order, state government “job postings will begin with equivalent experience needed in lieu of a college degree whenever possible.”

It’s a great idea.

The growth in the share of U.S. jobs that require a four-year college degree is partially owing to a broader shift away from physical-labor-based industries and toward information and knowledge economies. But it’s also due to a misguided, and often toxic, cultural and political trend toward viewing college degrees as a prerequisite for participation in American public life. Among technocrats on both the center-right and center-left, there’s often a flawed assumption that a central goal of U.S. education policy should be to get as many young Americans as possible into four-year programs, rather than to open up other pathways and models for success.

That assumption is reinforced by the ballooning of credentialism — often called “degree inflation” — in the American workforce. In the United States today, there is a massive swath of middle-management, white-collar jobs with unnecessary degree requirements. As of 2021, just 37.9 percent of Americans over the age of 25 held a bachelor’s degree. But a 2017 Harvard Business School study, which examined “more than 26 million job postings,” reported “that employers were increasingly inflating the educational requirements for jobs usually held by high school grads” — and “in many cases, qualified candidates never even got the chance to apply for a position.” In total, according to the study, “as many as 6.2 million workers could be affected by the practice of degree inflation.”

Of course, government jobs are only one part of the workforce. But Shapiro just opened 65,000 jobs to Pennsylvanians without a four-year degree — some 63 percent of the state population, as of 2016. This is an easy, obvious political win on numerous levels: The move lifts artificial barriers to entering the workforce, expands opportunity, and subsequently grows the economy by opening up (often well-paying) jobs to those who would have otherwise been boxed out. On a more fundamental level, it eliminates a basic unfairness that has led to a two-tiered class system.

From the conservative perspective, the move could also be framed as a potential culture-war win. One of the most fundamental divisions in American politics today is what New York magazine’s Eric Levitz dubbed the “diploma divide”: “Throughout the second half of the 20th century, Americans without college degrees were more likely than university graduates to vote Democratic,” Levitz wrote. But by 2020, Joe Biden carried 68 percent of congressional districts where 30 percent or more of the population had four-year degrees, while Donald Trump won 64 percent of those where less than 30 percent had such degrees. “College graduates in general — and Democratic college graduates in particular — tend to have different social values, cultural sensibilities, and issue priorities than the median non-college-educated voter,” Levitz noted. They “tend to be more cosmopolitan and culturally liberal, report higher levels of social trust, and are more likely to ‘attribute racial inequality, crime, and poverty to complex structural and systemic problems’ rather than ‘individualist and parochial explanations.’”

In this sense, beyond the obvious nonpartisan arguments for the idea, there’s a specifically conservative case for easing degree requirements wherever and whenever possible. Doing so would weaken the hold of a predominantly liberal class of college graduates over a large segment of the job market, including influential jobs in government agencies. And it would aid and empower the social, economic, and political influence of a class of Americans who are, increasingly, drawn to our side: the more culturally conservative cohort of working- and middle-class citizens who are strongly rooted in their communities and less likely to be tied to ideologically left-wing institutions.

But thus far, at least, only two Republican governors have signed on to the effort to counter degree inflation. In early 2022, Larry Hogan, then the governor of Maryland, launched the “first-in-the-nation workforce development initiative to formally eliminate the four-year college degree requirement from thousands of state jobs.” In December, Utah governor Spencer Cox followed suit. Other Republican states have made more limited moves in that direction — Arizona, for example, passed a law last year nixing bachelor’s-degree requirements for teachers — but have stopped short of the sweeping elimination signed by Hogan, Cox, and Shapiro.

This should be a no-brainer for the conservative governing agenda. There’s no reason it has to end at government jobs, either. Why not require that government contractors, for example, eliminate unnecessary and burdensome credentialing practices? Or give tax breaks and other incentives to private businesses that do away with them? It would be only one part of a much broader, and necessary, project to dismantle the cultural, political, and economic power of the higher-education cartel. But it would be an excellent start.