Job Search & Hiring
Are College Degrees Really Necessary?
Glassdoor Team
Glassdoor Team | Author & Career Expert at Glassdoor | Jul 7, 2016
What do Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Jack Dorsey have in common? These billionaire technology pioneers all dropped out of college. Yet if you apply for a position at Facebook, Microsoft, Apple or Twitter, you’ll likely need a college degree.
By 2020, employment experts predict 65 percent of jobs will require post-high school education, 30 percent some college or an associate’s degree, and 35 percent at least a bachelor’s degree. Given that 59 percent of Americans have attended some college, according to the US Census in 2015, this doesn’t seem unreasonable or problematic. But do the 41 percent who haven’t (save future tech titans) need to be eliminated from your consideration?
Like many HR questions, it depends.
When a degree might not be a requisite
The growth of any company is supported and usually led by individuals with bachelor’s and advanced degrees. However, some employers who hire recent college graduates find them lacking in skills like written and oral communication, adaptability and problem solving. Employers also report that they look at internship and job experience more closely than college performance.
Performance in college is not necessarily an indicator of job success. After all, college completion could be affected or interrupted by a myriad of factors, e.g., illness or family crisis. To top off the argument against college, some well-educated influencers have come out in favor of “school of life” education. Peter Thiel’s fellowship for young people to forego college at the age of 18 is a popular example.
For some occupations, schooling and/or certification provides the necessary knowledge for an individual the do the job. Many jobs in science, medical fields and education have minimum degree requirements. For other fields, like marketing, sales, consulting and retail, completion of a degree is less important than an employee’s ability to communicate and solve problems.
If your company regularly sources entry-level employees from universities, there’s no reason to stop. Universities are a filtering mechanism: a student’s acceptance indicates some level of achievement, and degree completion indicates the individual’s ability to stick to goals.
But if your evaluation criteria (or even your ATS) needlessly eliminates potentially qualified candidates based on a strict degree requirement, your company could be missing out on its next top performer. Additionally, looking for candidates that only have degrees in specific fields like marketing or business could limit you from highly qualified liberal arts majors, particularly those from colleges that don’t offer professional majors.
How to determine degree necessity
When you have hundreds of applicants for every position, a degree is a filtering mechanism to narrow the field. But the more work experience a candidate has after college age, the less a degree really matters.
When hiring for positions that don’t have an obvious certification or degree requirement, ask the hiring manager if a degree is absolutely necessary for the position. If not, probe into critical skills needed to perform the job. Perhaps there’s a hidden, hoped-for talent or unnamed quality that degree completion might not encompass. If so, add it to the job description or list of screening questions. Competence with detailed job tasks, subject matter expertise and communication finesse are all skills that schooling may not teach. Some employers modify job requirements to “BA or equivalent,” rightfully noting that experience matters as much as education.
If you’re concerned about an otherwise qualified candidate’s educational background, ask them about it. You might undercover surprising facts, such as an underutilized skill that could benefit your organization, or life lessons that translate into higher levels of empathy.
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In summary
With student loan debt rising, thoughtful young people may be more likely to opt out or delay their post-secondary education. They’re rightfully questioning their ability at the age of 18 to make a far-reaching (and expensive) decision to choose a field of study or career that is supposed to last a lifetime. The training they receive from their employers at that age may be just as influential as college.
If the knowledge conferred by degree isn’t an absolute requirement for a position, there’s no reason to exclude candidates without one from your consideration.
Glassdoor Team
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