Overeducated liberal media fret as more governors drop college degree requirements to fill state jobs
Timothy P. Carney
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On the surface, it has the typical markings of Trump-era partisan class warfare.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) abolished the college degree requirement for most state jobs, and a few overeducated media liberals got angry.
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“They hate education because the educated know better than to vote for them,” journalism professor Jeff Jarvis wrote. The objection makes sense, given the source: Jarvis is a public employee whose job is based on convincing college graduates that they need a master’s degree before they can become reporters. The last thing he wants is folks doubting the need for credentials.
But folks in power are increasingly questioning degree requirements, and this trend is not merely among Republicans.
After centrist Republican Larry Hogan, then the governor of Maryland, led the way in opening most state jobs to noncollege employees, Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) did the same. Count Gov. Mike Dunleavy (R-AK) and Gov. Spencer Cox (R-UT) in this movement, too.
The liberal opinion outlet Vox ran an op-ed headlined “Stop requiring college degrees for jobs that don’t need them,” and former President Barack Obama praised it. “Here’s an example of a smart policy that gets rid of unnecessary college degree requirements and reduces barriers to good paying jobs,” he tweeted. “I hope other states follow suit!”
Some of this shift is just a matter of necessity: It’s harder to find and hire college grads. We’ve already hit peak college graduate, and we’re descending a long downslope. College enrollment dropped by 8% from 2019 to 2022, and colleges are already bracing for the demographic tidal wave that will hit when America’s “baby bust,” which began in 2008, turns 18: Beginning in 2026, there will be fewer college-aged people every year for the foreseeable future.
It’s also a long-needed reform. For most new jobs created in the years after the Great Recession, employers required a college degree even though the work didn’t really require a college education.
Harvard Business School researchers called this “degree inflation,” which they defined as “the rising demand for a four-year college degree for jobs that previously did not require one.” Degree inflation “is a substantive and widespread phenomenon that is making the U.S. labor market more inefficient,” according to the HBS researchers — no mouth-breathing MAGA Republicans.
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States are the laboratories of democracy, and nobody knows what the experiments in Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Alaska, and Utah will reveal. But don’t be surprised if the degree inflation of the 2010s deflates nationwide over the coming decade.
Be sure to check on Jarvis if he happens to cross through Pennsylvania and encounters a park ranger who never finished college.