At many companies, having a college degree is simply the price of admission for landing a job. A Bureau of Labor Statistics report released in June 2017 found that occupations that typically require some type of post-secondary education made up nearly 37 percent of employment in May 2016. The most common requirement was a bachelor’s degree. But some labor experts say it’s time to toss degree requirements except in situations where they’re necessary.

“I think there are a couple of motivations to relax [degree requirements],” says Joseph B. Fuller, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School. “They’ll have to revisit it because the combination of what they can afford to pay and the response to that from the market for labor is not going to be a good one,” he says. Plus, many of the degree requirements demanded simply aren’t necessary to do the job.

THE DEGREE INFLATION DRAG

Degree inflation–requiring a college degree as hiring criteria for a position that doesn’t require it–is making the U.S. labor market inefficient, Fuller and his co-authors argue in “Dismissed by Degrees: How degree inflation is undermining U.S. competitiveness and hurting America’s middle class.” Companies look at a bachelor’s degree as shorthand for a variety of soft skills such as written and verbal communication, problem-solving and others. However, the increasingly tight labor market, where leaders are scrambling to find talent, may force them to take a more inclusive view, considering people who are trained through community college programs, formal and informal apprenticeships, career program partnerships with community groups and other job-training programs.

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