Posted on 11/26/2022 7:38:37 AM PST by karpov
The tight labor market is prompting more employers to eliminate one of the biggest requirements for many higher-paying jobs: the need for a college degree.
Companies such as Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Delta Air Lines Inc. and International Business Machines Corp. have reduced educational requirements for certain positions and shifted hiring to focus more on skills and experience. Maryland this year cut college-degree requirements for many state jobs—leading to a surge in hiring—and incoming Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro campaigned on a similar initiative.
U.S. job postings requiring at least a bachelor’s degree were 41% in November, down from 46% at the start of 2019 ahead of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to an analysis by the Burning Glass Institute, a think tank that studies the future of work. Degree requirements dropped even more early in the pandemic. They have grown since then but remain below prepandemic levels.
The shift comes as demand for workers remains high and unemployment is low. Job postings far outpace the number of unemployed people looking for work—10.7 million openings in September compared with 5.8 million unemployed—creating unusually stiff competition for workers.
The persistently tight labor market has accelerated the trend that builds on a debate about the benefits and drawbacks of encouraging more people to attend four-year colleges and as organizations try to address racial disparities in the workplace.
Some occupations have universal degree requirements, such as doctors and engineers, while others typically have no higher education requirements, such as retail workers. There is a middle ground, such as tech positions, that have varying degree requirements depending on the industry, company and strength of the labor market and economy.
Lucy Mathis won a scholarship to attend a women in computer science conference.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
Many workers with relevant work experience, expertise even, are commonly bypassed by little or no experience workers with college degrees, and in most cases, the degree isn’t even directly related to the actual work performed.
Boomers had it right. They paid less respect to credentials and educated and promoted from within. People with only high school diplomas were given a chance, often excelled, and were trained on the job.
We are an over credentialed society. Untalented, low motivation workers LOVE credentials, especially now that everyone seems to graduate with near perfect grades. Credentials are a way to exclude other more talented and motivated workers, plus credentialed workers have a vested interest in maintaining and increasing credential requirements.
This in no way is meant to demean credentials. We need highly trained people in certain jobs, like engineers or doctors. It is meant to point out the negative effects of a system where people with years or decades of real world experience are bypassed by college grads simply because of a degree, especially a non-essential, unrelated one.
Keep in mind that the computer industry, especially software, grew from people with a talent and interest in the field rather than certifications and degrees. Those came later.
So much for that degree in Transgender Studies...
Exactly right, because in most jobs, employees won’t have the necessary skills based solely on a degree and will need to be taught the specifics of a given job.
Education does not equal skill, aptitude or ambition. You can be a total imbecile and still have multiple university degrees. For example, look at what passes for a professor.
EEGator, your comment was spot on. The HR folks have no idea of what constitutes a great engineer. Anecdotally, HR is a drain on productivity and works at cross purposes to management. They depend on credentials, because they have no other way to objectively measure potential. In the real world, everyone knows who the really talented folks are. Pareto’s principle: 20% do 80% of the work. Those 20% are well known within the actual work community.
The U.S. Military has recruited and trained millions of people for a lot of different, and critical, specialties. And many of those millions did not have a college degree. And the Military didn't need a fat woman as a recruiter.
I wonder if the Walmart in Chesapeake Virginia did that.
Diversity? I’ll tell you about employment “diversity.” It’s about company after company being purchased by a minority and suddenly the entire staff is that same minority. I see it ALL the time.
In the small business world at least, minorities hire minorities. I have watched a local Popeyes go from all black, to all Hispanic, to all Indian. Each time, it was triggered by a change in owners. Everyone discriminates, and I actually respect the right of an owner to employ who they want, but anti-discrimination laws only go one way in my experience.
Better than a human out playing grab ass when they should be watching the dial... So yes, like a watch dog much more trust in dedication to stay on the job as trained.
Recent college graduates aren’t qualified or experienced for positions I hire for, so they are never candidates.
When vancanies occur in faculty positions at the colleges I taught at, a search committee consisting of faculty members mostly from the department that the vancies occurred in is formed. In some cases a student will be appointed to the committe as well as a faculty member from another department.
The committee writes the vancancy notice subject to approval from HR. Applications are collected by the HR department and sent on to the search committee. HR will schedule interviews for the finalists selected by the committee. HR people do not have any input into the person hired.
A question: in the corporate world do HR officials decide who is hired for line positions and not the managers or senior executives?
In my industry, electrical distribution, HR must approve.
I know a former HR person, white male, with 25 years with the company.
He was fired for hiring a white male which he was told not to do.
He wound up suing and signing a NDA. He doesn’t have to work anymore.
Yup, when you lower all the requirements for a job that you once had high requirements for, then you get fewer positive results. High level jobs call for those with the education to accomplish the mission of that job. Take me. I would not be a good candidate for being a nuke scientist or a heart surgeon. But, seeing how they have lowered the standards to be president of this Republic, with the current moron in the White House, now I could be president. I am not as far gone into La La land as ole dummy Joe is!!!
Curious to know how that was done ...
I’m a fan of the demotivational posters.
I bet IBM retained the “coat and tie” rules. Stupid, but a flashy dresser, is the new standard.
I applied for a job where the idiots in HR required 10 years of experience with software that hadn’t even been in existence for more than 5. Needless to say I didn’t get an interview when I called them out on that.
During the Vietnam War, Robert McNamara began a program called Project 100,000. The program brought over 300,000 men to Vietnam who failed to meet minimum criteria for military service, both physically and mentally. Project 100,000 recruits were killed in disproportionate numbers and fared worse after their military service than their civilian peers, making the program one of the biggest—and possibly cruelest—mistakes of the Vietnam War.
THE ARTICLE DOWN UNDER THE ABOVE HEADLINE:
Share Project 100,000: The Vietnam War’s cruel experiment on American soldiers
For many people, joining the military is a way to lift oneself out of poverty, find better opportunities, and get a shot at a better life. It can provide a way to pay for the exorbitant cost of college, job training, a sense of discipline and purpose, all in exchange for a few years of following orders, risking one’s life, and potentially taking others’.
It’s a tradeoff, to be sure, one that not everybody is comfortable with. But for those with the aptitude and the desire, it might be a tradeoff worth taking. The problem in that last sentence, however, is that desire and aptitude don’t always go hand in hand. Sometimes, both are absent entirely. That certainly was the case with Project 100,000.
LOWERING STANDARDS
Cruelly nicknamed McNamara’s Morons, Project 100,000 was an initiative started under—you guessed it—Robert McNamara during the Vietnam War. In this project, over 320,000 men were either drafted or volunteered for service, nearly all of whom failed the Armed Forces Qualification Test, which is used to determine basic eligibility for military service.
Project 100,000 inductees placed in the lower 10th to 30th percentiles of the test, referred to as Category IV. Normally, candidates who place in Category IV are deemed unsuitable for military service and are told to return to civilian life. Project 100,000, however, was an experiment to see whether military entry requirements could be lowered.
Ostensibly, the project’s goals were to combat poverty. Lyndon B. Johnson had recently begun his War on Poverty program. Thanks to the G.I. bill and other veterans’ programs, military service can be a great way to get out of poverty. But this was a nice bonus to the project’s other purpose: The Vietnam War needed more men, and lowering recruitment standards was one way to get them.
Although about half were volunteers, the other half was drafted, and neither group had any business being in a war zone. The Armed Forces Qualification Test evaluated a variety of domains, all of which were geared toward assessing somebody’s eligibility for service. As a result, Project 100,000 brought men to the war who were ill-equipped in different ways.
Some had physical impairments, some were over- or under-weight, and, most troublingly, many had low mental aptitude—often to the point of being mentally handicapped. Many were illiterate. Since this was an experiment, a small cadre of soldiers were also admitted under the program to act as controls: these were “normal” soldiers.
Once in the military, Project 100,000 soldiers were treated as any other soldier; to do otherwise would void the experiment. Various human resource personnel wrote up anonymized monthly reports on the soldiers, documenting their progress in military life and in war. The results were not good.
A FAILED EXPERIMENT
Project 100,000 soldiers were about three times more likely to be killed in action. This is not surprising; in addition to being physically and mentally ill-equipped for war, they were unlikely to qualify for technical training that would otherwise keep them off the front lines. As a result, many of them were used as infantry soldiers.
They were also reassigned 11 times more often than their peers and were between 7 and 9 times more likely to require remedial training. Project 100,000 recruits were more likely to be arrested, too.
For the ones who survived the war, their outcomes were worse than comparable men who did not join military service. They earned $7,000 less per year than their civilian peers, equivalent to a little under $16,000 today. They were more likely to be divorced and less likely to own a business. The reasons for these differences aren’t entirely clear: it could be the trauma of war, the lack of access to social programs available in civilian life that weren’t available in military life, the possibility that they would have otherwise gone on to complete high school and college—any number of explanations can be offered. But this does show that the ostensible purpose of Project 100,000 was completely invalidated. Offering ineligible soldiers a pass in order to give them a leg up out of poverty through the military did not work.
A review of Robert McNamara’s In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam published in the Washington Post quoted Herb DeBose, a first lieutenant who served in the Vietnam War. He summed up Project 100,000 thusly: I saw [Robert McNamara] when he resigned from the World Bank, crying about the poor children of the world. But if he did not cry at all for any of those men he took in under Project 100,000 then he really doesn’t know what crying is all about. Many under me weren’t even on a fifth-grade level… I found out they could not read… no skills before, no skills after. The army was supposed to teach them a trade in something—only they didn’t.
LOL, perfect microcosm of the HR world.
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