A job listing that requires a bachelor’s degree immediately eliminates 62% of American adults. It also boxes out 70% of Black Americans and 80% of Hispanic Americans. Suffice it to say, diversity of thought and background is “not going to happen” so long as a college degree requirement is included on the list of must-haves. That’s according to Carrie Varoquiers, the chief philanthropy officer at SaaS company Workday.
Varoquiers appeared alongside Lisa Gevelber, VP at Google and founder of Grow with Google, and LaFawn Davis, chief people and sustainability officer at Indeed, on a panel centered on skills-based hiring at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women conference in California on Tuesday.
The conversation, moderated by Fortune’s Kristin Stoller, acknowledged the dire state of untapped talent in the U.S., particularly in jobs that anyone—college grad or not—can do after some basic training.
It’s no longer a controversial take. Everyone from former IBM CEO Ginni Rometty to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the chief executives of Microsoft and LinkedIn have extolled the virtue of hiring for skills instead of connections or an Ivy League degree.
Granted, “I want my doctor to go to medical school,” Varoquiers said. “But not all jobs require it. And if we can start to shift to a skills assessment process versus using a degree as a proxy for those skills, we can really change the world for the better.”
For the much better: An infusion of non-degree-holding workers stands to greatly benefit both a company’s bottom line and the larger economy.
STAR power
Davis, the Indeed executive, told the crowd she calls herself a STAR, which stands for Skilled Through Alternative Routes. “As we think about skills that are needed, it’s really about what someone can do for the job. It’s not about their degree. I think it’s important to focus on those hard skills to do the job; none of the rest of the stuff matters.”
It doesn’t matter what your last name is or which school you attended, she said. The only pertinent question is, “Can you do a job or not?” Hiring managers “need to be able to do that instead say, what exactly does this person need to do to fulfill your role? And that’s what you should be hiring for. Everything else should be blank.”
Gevelber started the Grow with Google program in 2017, which shares the foundational approach that Davis and Varoquiers espouse. “The whole idea [was] that the opportunities created by technology aren’t available to everyone,” Gevelber said. “We actually picked this societal problem to work on, specifically the fact that—as Carrie said—most Americans don’t have a college degree, but most good-paying jobs in our country require one.”
Even college professors know what’s coming
None of the panelists, despite their work to move away from degrees-based hiring, are anti-degree.
“Certainly having a college degree can be life changing,” Gevelber said. “We just believe it shouldn’t be the only way to change your life, so we decided to create a pathway to getting those jobs.”
The “pathway” Gevelber is referring to is the Google Career Certificate program, which trains workers—with any educational or work background—for entry-level jobs in high-demand fields like cybersecurity, data analytics, and IT support. It’s about to graduate its millionth student.
Even higher-ed professionals have conceded that bachelor’s and master’s degrees are unlikely to reign supreme for long. “Do I think white-collar work will inevitably require a college degree? Absolutely not,” Harvard Business School professor Joseph Fuller told Fortune last year. “It will require certain types of technical or hard skills not necessarily indicated by college.”
Philip Cohen, a sociology professor at the University of Maryland–College Park, last year told Fortune much the same—and even currently enrolled college students can admit. “To be sure, pursuing education and a career is still a safer bet for your future,” Cohen said, while acknowledging that plenty of data finds advanced degree holders tend to get better paying and more stable jobs. But those benefits are “just not a guarantee anymore.”
