Many Large Companies Now Ditching College Degree as Job Requirement
“This is a significant change.”
College degrees used to have much more value. It’s no surprise that some companies no longer care.
The Washington Examiner reports:
More and more companies ditch college degree requirements for jobs
Big companies like Google, Apple, and IBM are no longer requiring applicants to hold a college degree.
This is a significant change. Historically, employers have required a college degree whether or not it was necessary to do the job.
Is this because colleges are no longer teaching the needed skills, or because there are so many job openings to fill that standards are dropping? Could it be that vocational training and self-taught skills are enough for certain jobs in the modern-day economy?
IBM is now looking at candidates with experience in non-traditional education, such as coding boot camps or industry-related vocational classes.
Glassdoor compiled an August list of 15 big companies that no longer require a degree to apply:
- Ernst & Young
- Penguin Random House
- Costco Wholesale
- Whole Foods
- Hilton
- Publix
- Apple
- Starbucks
- Nordstrom
- Home Depot
- IBM
- Bank of America
- Chipotle
- Lowe’s
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Comments
I’m in higher ed. As a whole, we have no one but ourselves to blame for insulating ourselves from the business world.
However, I will say that many of these companies that don’t require a degree haven’t for some time. I also would be willing to bet that the higher paying jobs still require a degree along with other attractors (internship, volunteering, some kind of experience, etc.)
How many of those required a degree in the first place? I can’t imagine needing a college degree to work at a grocery store or burrito joint.
The modern job market requires many educated employees to move around the country in order to stay employed. In the past, a degree in a field of study from a university was the only way to prove the education of a person across those distances. Today, by using the internet, those transcripts can be compiled from many organizations to prove education levels. The restrictions for transferring credits between universities and specialty schools are making those degrees obsolete.
For 30 years or more it has been stated that most jobs would only require 2 year associate degrees.
For that length of time or longer the degree requirements were only a weeding out tool.
Many companies now do testing of applicants or require some certification such Microsoft certification with no degree requirements.
So yes I can see a lot of jobs really would not require any college degree at all.
Ernst & Young Removes University Degree Classification From Entry Criteria As There’s ‘No Evidence’ It Equals Success (UK)
Link in that article Mike referenced.
I went back to college at forty-ish about 30 years ago. Among other things I was amazed to discover was that I was the ONLY student in the entire Chemistry department at any level who could do a quadratic equation – and I hadn’t seen an algebra book at that point in 25 years other than to help my own child with beginning algebra after she was assigned a “teacher” who had to copy the answers out of the back of the textbook, since he couldn’t do algebra himself.
Even when I graduated 30 years ago a college degree did not guarantee that a student knew even as much as I was required to know in order to graduate high school in the 60s. And that was before universities completely dumbed down their content with trigger warnings, coloring books and touchy-feely.