It’s a widely held belief that education is the key to future success and financial stability.
However, is college now just a costly and outdated tradition for wealthy Americans that doesn’t necessarily lead to good jobs after a four-year degree?
According to a recent joint report by the Burning Glass Institute and Strada Institute for the Future of Work, having a college degree no longer ensures a “college-level job”—a job that needs at least a four-year degree—and only half of college grads have found such jobs within a year of graduation.
In addition, those who fail to get a college-level job usually earn 25 percent more than someone with only a high school education, which leaves them with more financial burden due to student loans.
However, many companies have begun to ignore formal education when hiring talent and are eliminating college degrees from job requirements.
In 2022, General Motors and Delta Airlines announced that they were removing the four-year degree requirement from most job descriptions.
This change in attitude has become especially common in the tech industry as a response to the lack of skilled workers—a report by Korn Ferry has forecasted a global shortage of 85.2 million skilled workers in the tech sector by 2023, which could lead to a loss of $8.5 trillion if the skills gap isn’t addressed.
Google, IBM, Apple, and Tesla have all eliminated the need for college degrees in job requirements.
A move towards hiring based on skills
As a result, hiring based on skills is now a major focus.
“Accessing any talent pool that is traditionally overlooked is essential to the tech industry growing and prospering,” suggests Julian Nicks, CEO of LaunchCode, a tech training platform that offers free part-time and full-time courses to help those without a college degree or access to further education gain new skills, so that they can pursue a career in tech.
This alternative pathway is also proving to be more fair for women who want to enter the tech industry, where only 27 percent of all positions are currently held by women.
“The reality is the demand for tech workers is growing faster than the traditional college pipeline, so it has been imperative that employers look for talent elsewhere. The way people learn tech skills has also evolved – more and more developers are self-taught or learned through accelerated, alternative training programs like LaunchCode.
“Our employer partners often prefer our ‘nontraditional’ candidates because they outperform their college degree peers. They bring more life and transferable skills such as direct industry context, customer-centricity or service mindset, passion for learning, higher adaptability to change, and more resilience in difficult situations.”
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