‘Instead of focusing on demonstrated competence, the focus too often has been on a piece of paper,’ Utah governor stated

Source: Utah axes degree requirement for 98% of civil servant jobs | The College Fix

The degree became a filter:

“Degrees have become a blanketed barrier-to-entry in too many jobs,” Cox (pictured) stated in the release. “Instead of focusing on demonstrated competence, the focus too often has been on a piece of paper. We are changing that.”

The past 50 years were a weird time – with booming population, and a Vietnam War era educational draft deferment, encouraging more male college enrollees, a college degree was how we filtered the workforce. Seen as a ticket to good incomes, by the 1980s and ever since, more women than men enroll in college.

The result has become an overeducated workforce – where half the jobs do not require college degree skills.

Today, with demographic induced labor shortages among a collapsed fertility rate, the college degree is no longer needed as a filter.

This trend is in line with previous commentary:

As the baby boom blossomed, combined with Vietnam War era education draft deferments, this created an upsurge in the expectation that a 4-year degree was a requirement for “modern work”.

When the fertility rate crashed in the 1970s, this meant fewer college students 20 years later – but colleges turned their sights on importing students from abroad – and encouraging an ever-larger percent of the population to enroll in college.

  • In 1965, half of all adults in the U.S. had not graduated from college.
  • Today, about 42% of high school grads will attend a 4-year college in the fall, and about another 20% will attend a two-year college. That illustrates the massive growth in the college education industrial complex.

Now, with the fertility rate impact seen in labor markets, employers no longer need to filter out “too many” applicants – and many are now dropping college degree requirements. Many airlines have announced that a college degree is no longer a requirement (they still have plenty of other requirements).

Many universities have already expanded their international enrollments, in part because many public universities charge higher tuition to international students. This, however, causes controversy as it means fewer seats available for U.S. resident taxpayers. Regardless, this trend will continue as enrollments begin to suffer – indeed, as noted on many posts here, many colleges have seen enrollment declines. Often blamed on the pandemic, these declines were, in fact, in progress before the pandemic – the pandemic merely accelerated the trend.

Economists say we must import more international skilled workers to make up for the fertility rate decline. It is not clear that there will be sufficient skilled immigrants willing to relocate to other countries, particularly when many dozens of countries all now say they intend to import workers. To address this, of course, we will likely see expansion of international student recruitment at U.S. universities, and expansion of the percent of international students on campus coupled with government programs that “staple a green card to the diploma” for degrees earned in “in demand” fields (notably computer science, some engineering, and health care).

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