The bachelor’s degree is facing an identity crisis, contends this report from The Burning Glass Institute. In the last year and a half, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Utah have stopped requiring a four-year degree for most jobs in their state governments. The private sector, too, is moving toward skill-based hiring, with Delta, General Motors, Google, Apple, and IBM, among others, dropping the B.A. prerequisite for many positions. Even the federal government is urging its agencies to rely on job-seekers’ skills rather than the sheepskin to fill vacancies.
While some of the latest hiring moves are the result of a tight post-pandemic labor market, the trend even before COVID had been toward lowering the degree barrier. As a result, young adults are getting mixed messages about what kind of education they need after high school—and whether they need anything at all. The onus is on institutions to make the B.A. more valuable in a marketplace where it faces competition from microcredentials, industry-based certificates, and increasingly well-paying jobs that don’t require a four-year degree.
The study is divided into three sections. The first section identifies macro trends around the wage premium, the long-held concept of the B.A’.s lifetime value over the high school diploma. While that premium still holds—and is most critical to career mobility—it also varies widely by major, institutional brand, and occupation. In the second section, the study examines the skills that boost the returns on a bachelor’s degree. The third section provides a framework for colleges to make the B.A. more valuable and describes what some institutions are doing to remake the degree for the 21st-century job market.