College students take classes they don’t care much about to satisfy arbitrary requirements. Many times, they do as little work as they can to get the grade they want. When asked what the most memorable parts of college were, most graduates would tell you something about their social life, not something from the classroom. Which is probably fine because most of what was taught in the classroom has little relevance to job performance anyway.
The moment students graduate, we pretend this rigamarole was some tremendous formative experience that has now produced skilled employees. Research shows that students retain little of what they learned, but many employers pretend that having earned a college degree, in and of itself, is a vital qualification for employment.
Starting with former governor Larry Hogan in Maryland, state governments are no longer pretending. Pennsylvania, Alaska, Utah, Colorado, New Jersey, and North Carolina have already joined Maryland in abolishing degree requirements for many state-government jobs. Virginia is doing the same starting July 1.
The commonwealth will be eliminating degree requirements, preferences, or both for about 90 percent of state-government jobs. Governor Glenn Youngkin (R.) said, “This landmark change in hiring practices for our state workforce will improve hiring processes, expand possibilities and career paths for job seekers and enhance our ability to deliver quality services.”
According to the Census Bureau, as of 2021, only 38 percent of Americans over the age of 25 have a bachelor’s degree or higher. Fifteen percent completed some college but did not earn a degree. Twenty-eight percent have only completed high school.
Youngkin is tired of excluding 62 percent of American adults from state employment just because they don’t have a college degree. He’s right to be.
The requirement abolitions are only for state-government jobs. Private employers should be free to decide whether they want to require degrees in job postings. (Many private employers are choosing to reduce requirements as well.) In some situations, degree requirements make sense. State governments will still require medical professionals they hire to be properly credentialed, for example.
For most state-government jobs, though, there is no reason to, by default, prefer someone with a bachelor’s degree over someone who chose to forgo college and serve in the military, or someone who only has a high-school diploma but has years of relevant job experience. The person in charge of hiring for that position should be able to exercise his or her judgment about which candidate is best qualified, without blanket prohibitions that block out most of the available workforce.
Notice that of the eight states that have championed this reform, four have done so under Republican governors and four have done so under Democratic governors. This isn’t a polarizing issue, and it’s not about ideological indoctrination in universities (which is a separate problem). It just doesn’t make much sense to needlessly exclude people from employment, especially in the current economy, which has more job vacancies than unemployed persons.
Other areas for employers to improve include their treatment of criminal records. Excluding people convicted of a serious crime, or with a demonstrated pattern of lawbreaking, can be sensible. But many people have a criminal record because of a simple arrest, a minor offense from years ago and a clean slate since then, or a crime for which they were acquitted. Those people still face many of the same employment hurdles that hardened criminals do. They’re also disproportionately men, which helps explain some of the sagging male labor-force-participation rate.
It’s one thing to bemoan lower labor-force participation. It’s another thing to actually do something about it. Youngkin is putting Virginia on the right side of this question by removing one unnecessary barrier to state-government employment. Having sat through four years of lectures is not, on its own, a qualification for much of anything.