Employers dropped the degree requirement — hiring barely moved

A 2024 study by Harvard Business School and the Burning Glass Institute tracked more than 11,000 roles at large U.S. employers from 2014 to 2023. It found that even after companies publicly dropped four-year-degree requirements, fewer than 1 in 700 new hires got the job because of that change — most of the shift showed up in the job posting, not in who actually got picked.

Does dropping the degree requirement actually change who gets hired?

Barely, according to the numbers. Among roles where employers formally removed the requirement, the share of new hires without a bachelor's degree rose by 3.5 percentage points. But once researchers adjusted for people who would have been hired anyway, the real effect shrank to under a single percentage point.

The scale of the gap is what stands out. A study by Joseph Fuller, a Harvard Business School professor of management practice, and the Burning Glass Institute put a number on it: of the roughly 77 million people hired in the U.S. in a given year, only about 97,000 landed a job specifically because a degree requirement had been dropped. That's fewer than 1 in 700 — a rounding error next to the roughly two-thirds of American adults who don't hold a four-year degree.

The researchers' explanation isn't that skills-based hiring is a fiction. It's that most employers stopped at the posting. Rewriting a job ad is a one-line policy change; retraining recruiters, resetting applicant-tracking-system filters, and coaching hiring managers to actually screen for skills instead of a diploma is a much longer project, and most companies didn't finish it.

Which employers actually became skills-based hirers, and which just changed the wording?

The Fuller/Burning Glass analysis sorted large employers into three groups by what happened after they dropped degree requirements, and the split was uneven: a minority followed through, most didn't change much at all, and a smaller group backslid.

Employer type	What they did	Result, per the study
Committed adopters	Removed the requirement and changed screening and recruiting to match	Hired non-degree workers into affected roles at a rate about 18 percentage points higher, on average
In-name-only	Announced the change, updated postings	No measurable shift in who was actually hired
Backsliders	Made short-term gains hiring non-degree workers	Gains didn't hold; non-degree hiring later fell back down

Employers named in the research as following through — among them Apple, General Motors, Target, Walmart, Minnesota's state government, and the City of Denver — hired non-degree workers into previously degree-required roles at meaningfully higher rates than the rest of the sample. The report is blunt about why most employers land in the other two groups: "successful adoption of skills-based hiring involves more than simply stripping language from job postings."

What happened when a state government tried it at scale?

Maryland offers the clearest public-sector test case. In March 2022, then-Gov. Larry Hogan signed an executive order eliminating four-year-degree requirements for thousands of state jobs, on the reasoning that "people shouldn't be compensated based on their years of education, but what their skills are to do the job."

Maryland employed roughly 38,000 people at the time, and the state estimated nearly half of its jobs could be done by someone without a four-year degree — IT, administrative, and customer-service roles among them. Within three months, according to reporting on the order, more than 300 open state positions no longer listed a degree requirement. The state also partnered with the nonprofit Opportunity@Work, whose CEO Byron Auguste described the goal plainly: "We really want an economy that if you can do the job, you can get the job." Opportunity@Work refers to qualified non-degree candidates as STARs — Skilled Through Alternative Routes.

Maryland's move is a single state's policy, not a national verdict — it shows what's operationally possible inside one large employer with the will to follow through, not what most employers, public or private, actually did.

Do the workers who do get hired without a degree perform once they're in the job?

Here's the counterweight to the discouraging headline numbers: for the small group who did get hired without a degree into roles that used to require one, the outcomes were strong. The Fuller/Burning Glass research found this group had a retention rate about 10 percentage points higher than colleagues with degrees in the same roles, and earned an average salary increase of 25% by moving into the previously degree-gated position.

That's a real signal about the workers themselves, not proof that skills-based hiring at large is working. The sample of people who benefited is small precisely because so few employers changed their actual practice — but among that small group, the bet on skills over credentials paid off, for the worker and, on the retention numbers, for the employer too.

None of this is career, hiring, or legal advice — individual outcomes depend heavily on employer, industry, and role, and the research here covers large U.S. employers, not the labor market as a whole.

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