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Student debt is on the rise, young college graduates still face remarkably high unemployment rates, and wages are slow to rise. Despite all that, plenty of commentators (this one included) keep telling you that a college degree is worth it.
And it's still true that a college degree gives you huge advantages, both in finding work and the wages you'll get paid for that work.
But if you feel like your diploma isn't exactly living up to its promise, you're not crazy. According to a new report from labor market research firm Burning Glass, firms are "up-credentialing": asking for bachelor's degrees for jobs that traditionally have not demanded a diploma. Taken with other recent findings about the causes behind weakness in the labor market, this tells a lot about why employers just don't value a college degree like they used to.
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This guy looks worried. Maybe it's because he feels like his degree won't get him anywhere. (Getty Images)
The numbers
Burning Glass dug through millions of job postings and compared them to the Labor Department's counts of current employees in those professions. What the firm found is that many professions are asking for BAs while their current workers get by with high school diplomas. That suggests that firms are raising the bar for jobs that haven't actually changed much. Here are a few of the jobs with the widest gaps.
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Today, 65 percent of postings for executive secretarial work require bachelor's degrees, while only 19 percent of current workers in that field have four-year degrees. Likewise, processing insurance claims now requires more education: 49 percent of postings ask for bachelor's degrees, compared to the 25 percent of insurance claim processors who have them currently.
Why it's happening
There are a few reasons why this might be happening. Burning Glass didn't specifically compare wages for BA-holders versus non-BA-holders, but it's possible that employers, seeing a bevy of college grads in need of jobs, are getting college-grad workers much more cheaply than they used to, says one expert.
"I'd say the thing right now is that they aren't paying more to get the college grads. That will change if the labor market picks up," says Peter Cappelli, professor of management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Cappelli has spent a lot of time thinking about how US workers' skills match up with job openings. A recent NBER paper he wrote squares with Burning Glass's data, finding that workers are overeducated.
"The prevailing situation in the US labor market, as in most developed economies, continues to be skill mismatches where the average worker and job candidate has more education than their current job requires," he writes. Burning Glass' data suggests that employers are not only fine with that overeducation; they're seeking it out.
So you have a lot of people with a lot of knowledge, compared to a bunch of job postings that simply do not require that knowledge. Faced with all those talented applicants, employers may simply be using the college diploma "as a means of screening applicants, in a way that may not be related to job duties themselves," writes Burning Glass.
IT helpdesk positions are a prime example. Only 39 percent of computer user support specialists right now have BAs, but 60 percent of job postings currently require a bachelor's. The skills in those jobs can easily be learned with shorter training programs and indeed aren't often taught in four-year contexts, but employers persist in requiring four-year diplomas, Burning Glass writes.
Employers are using diplomas as a marker of applicants' superiority without always considering what would really make someone better suited to a position.
Still, there are a few exceptions to this trend. In some fields, the requirements have legitimately changed from yesteryear. For example, mechanical drafters now require more advanced computer skills and are also being moved into more business-oriented roles.
In addition, some fields have resisted this trend. Most pointedly, these are fields "with strong certification or licensure standards" and with "discreet, measurable skill requirements." Healthcare technicians are one good example. Whether or not you have a BA, you can get a job in radiology, assuming you're certified to do it.
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Healthcare jobs have less upcredentialing than many other fields (though nurses are a notable exception). (Getty Images)
What it means
Part of this is a function of oversupply in the labor market — lots of college graduates on top of non-college graduates who are willing to take the available jobs. As the labor market heals, it could cut down on the up-credentialing, as employers don't have their pick of all the applicants out there the way they used to. And that could come back to bite employers, as those overeducated workers go seek out more challenging jobs as soon as they're available.
Then again, a lot of this up-credentialing has happened in the shrinking category of middle-skill jobs. Here's a look at the gaps in that category:
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Middle-skill jobs have been disappearing for decades, while high- and low-skill jobs have grown much more quickly. So the trend of college graduates having to pick between the poles of high and low jobs might be here to stay.
Altogether, you could see this report as a signal of a skills gap — that there are too many English majors out there and not enough engineering majors, meaning the people who are good at dissecting poetry will just end up in low-skill jobs.
But it may also suggest a newfound laziness among employers. It's not just that firms are using bachelor's degrees as a(n imperfect) signal of a good worker; they also may be looking for ready-made workers who can perform the job duties on Day 1, with minimal training or development. A bachelor's might signal not just higher quality to an employer but lower maintenance as well (rightly or wrongly).
"Employers are increasingly keen on hiring college grads," says Matt Sigelman, CEO of Burning Glass. "But employers really are looking for people who can hit the ground running."
And that means a big problem for people just entering the labor force, as Cappelli writes in a recent Washington Post column.
"The real challenge we face is that if everyone is hiring for the ability to do a job, rather than for the potential to do it well, how does anyone get that initial experience?"
