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Career Coach Says College Degrees Are Becoming Irrelevant

Career Coach Says College Degrees Are Becoming Irrelevant

“On-the-job training is replacing the college diploma”

This trend has been building for a while, and that’s not a bad thing.

The College Fix reports:

College degrees are becoming irrelevant, career coach says

Employers have started to look at training on the job as a better measure of skills than a college degree, according to one career expert.

Ken Coleman (pictured), a career coach and podcaster with Ramsey Solutions, told The College Fix recently that he expects the number of job listings that require a college degree to continue to decline.

“On-the-job training is replacing the college diploma,” Coleman told The Fix through a spokesperson. “To put it simply, the ‘knowledge’ that comes with a degree isn’t relevant to the job.”

The Fix asked Coleman to explain why he believed degrees were becoming less relevant, a point he made during a recent episode of his show.

“62 percent of U.S. adults over the age of 25 do not have a bachelor’s degree,” Coleman said on his show. He said even he thought the number would be lower.

He said on his show that in 2017, 51 percent of job listings required at least a 4-year degree. However, by 2021, that number declined to 44 percent, a 7 percent drop. The numbers come from a report by the Burning Glass Institute, a labor research firm.

“These numbers are going to continue to shift,” Coleman said on his show. He said in five years he could see the number of jobs that require a college degree drop to 25 percent.

Other career fields could eventually require fewer years of education. He gave the example of the possibility that someone will create a shorter medical or law degree. “It will happen,” he said.

“They are going to shrink what has been traditionally required in an undergrad degree, is going to be shrunk down,” Coleman said on his show.

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Comments

henrybowman | June 4, 2022 at 5:26 pm

Love to see Mike Rowe start a chain of trade schools.

healthguyfsu | June 4, 2022 at 11:45 pm

Since college degrees employ a ton of career coaches, then by extension, that position will also become irrelevant.

I’m surprised. Part of the reason for the rise in degree requirements is court rulings making written tests impossible for employers to administer without lawsuits. Instead the colleges administer those tests as their proxy. Colleges are not yet subject to lawsuits for failing too many non-white students.

If you go back to “on the job training” the employer now has the same problem: at some point you have to start evaluating trainees, and if too many non-white trainees get fired the same lawsuits will ensure.