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Degree inflation': How the four-year degree became required

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  • Degree inflation': How the four-year degree became required

    Source: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article...ecame-required

    Degree inflation': How the four-year degree became required
    By Kate Morgan28th January 2021
    How did a four-year degree become compulsory for nearly every job – and could the need to reboot the economy help tackle this problem?

    Eleven years ago, Allie Cornett realized she wasn’t ready for college, and had lost interest in the geology degree she was pursuing at a university in Hawaii. She left school, and went to work in the hospitality industry as a tour guide. For the next decade, she found herself repeatedly running into the same wall.

    “I have been told multiple times that I have a great resum?, and lots of experience, but no degree… so no potential for upward movement,” says Cornett, 33. At the last company she worked for, she applied for open managerial positions constantly over five years, “only to not get them because someone with less experience, but who had a degree, did”.

    Cornett is a victim of a phenomenon called ‘degree inflation’: the rising demand for bachelor’s degrees in jobs that didn’t always require one, and probably don’t actually require one now.

    It’s a widespread problem, says Manjari Raman, director of Harvard Business School’s project on Managing the Future of Work. According to a 2017 paper Raman co-authored, “the degree gap – the discrepancy between the demand for a college degree in job postings and the employees who are currently in that job who have a college degree – is significant. For example, in 2015, 67% of production supervisor job postings asked for a college degree, while only 16% of employed production supervisors had one.”

    In other words, the people currently doing the work don’t have degrees, but as they retire or leave their positions, their replacements will be expected to. This creates a system where companies struggle to fill jobs and incur unnecessary costs, all the while leaving experienced, willing workers out in the cold. Degree inflation has been a major problem in the labour market for decades, but the issue is even more pressing as we face a post-pandemic economy in need of a serious – and swift – reboot...

    ....“Compared to 2015, in 2021 there’s far greater acknowledgement and understanding that packing more BAs into your company is not positive,” she says. “Pre-Covid, we knew degree inflation was something that’s not good for companies and not good for workers. Post-Covid, we have to remember that and rebuild the economy in such a way that it doesn’t just work for people who have a four-year college degree, but also for the many hundreds of thousands of people who don’t, but who have experience, qualifications and are eager to work.”


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