Are College Degrees Worth the Paper They are Printed On?
July 2022
What are the typical hiring guidelines within your workplace these days? Is there a preference for job candidates who hold a bachelor’s or master’s degree from a key university? How would you rate the new college graduates you’ve interviewed lately, in terms of attitude, organizational skills, and business acumen?
Payscale, Money Magazine, and workplace expert Dan Schawbel partnered up a few years back to survey 63K+ hiring managers. Their 2016 Workforce-Skills Preparedness Report identified several basic skillsets hiring managers found most lacking in new college graduates.
The most lacking “hard skills” were:
Writing proficiency (44% of managers)
Public Speaking (39% of managers)
Data Analysis—such as ability to use Excel (36% of managers)
The most lacking “soft skills” were:
Critical thinking and problem-solving skills (60% of managers)
Attention to detail (56% of managers)
Communication (46% of managers)
Schwabel claimed that schools bear the responsibility for turning out students who were not prepared for the workplace. “Our school system continues to focus on topics that aren’t relevant in the professional world. Furthermore, colleges keep increasing their tuition, yet their curriculums are becoming more and more irrelevant…. Based on this data, it’s obvious that no student should be given a degree without taking both a writing and a speaking course.”
I have interviewed scores of newly minted college grads over the years, although it’s been a while since I last did so. Yet, I don’t recall ever interviewing a new grad who lacked the skills listed above—except perhaps public speaking skills. So, what’s changed in the last decade?
While interviewing C-level executives, in preparation for writing each of my books, I heard some pretty startling stories about their experiences hiring new college grads. There indeed seemed to be a divergence between company expectations and the skills and expectations of some of the recent grads seeking positions.
Wendy Johnson, former President & CEO of the Dale Carnegie franchise in Atlanta, GA shared the following insights in my book Women on Top: What’s Keeping You from Executive Leadership?
I think many young people entering the workforce have little or poor communication and relationship-building skills. Their English is truncated. They use acronyms for everything. They don’t know how to write a business letter. They do not communicate when they really need to. The reason they do not know how is because a great deal of what they have learned has been from a screen.
So, I asked Wendy, “Have you found these shortcomings to be a growing trend?”
Yes. Their bosses were sending them because they needed to learn communication and relationship skills. I will describe a scenario that we saw happening in the hiring process:
· A candidate would go through the company’s interview process.
· They would get the offer.
· They would accept the offer.
· Then they would not even show up for their first day of work.
It is called ghosting. It’s common. Clearly, this person did not possess the basic communication skills and did not understand the importance of relationship ethics.
Then you have the situation where a company manager is conducting a job interview, and the parents of the interviewee want to talk to the company manager! That is the absolute ultimate.
So, there are a lot of relationship challenges. And if you can’t build strong relationships, you can’t be an influential leader. In fact, you won’t get ahead or even get started on the first step of the ladder if you don’t show up for others.”
Of course, as I discuss repeatedly in my blogs and books, to be successful in the workplace, one must know their strengths and weaknesses, and they must show sincere interest in other people. Yet, I’m not aware of any universities that teach “self-awareness” or “relationship ethics”.
That’s said, I would expect any college freshman to be proficient in writing, data analysis, critical thinking, problem solving, attention to detail, and communication. Without basic mastery of such skills before graduating high school, how do students even get accepted to college?
It therefore comes as no surprise that several major corporations—such as Google, Apple, and IBM—no longer require employees to have a college degree. Five years ago, IBM’s then-VP of Talent told CNBC that about 15% of IBM’s hires didn’t have four-year degrees. Instead of looking exclusively at candidates who went to college, IBM was looking at candidates who had hands-on experience or had taken industry-related vocational classes. Likewise, Ginni Rometty, IBM’s then-CEO, told the Wall Street Journal that propensity to learn had become the company’s #1 hiring criterion—not pedigree.
In 2021, ZipRecruiter found only 7% of their job postings required a bachelor’s degree. Even General Motors has now dropped their four-year degree requirement for many jobs, opting instead for a skills-based, people-focused hiring process.
In my book, Heartfelt Leadership: How to Capture the Top Spot and Keep on Soaring, Colleen Barrett, President Emeritus of Southwest Airline commented, “We are a very forgiving company if you make a mistake, as long as safety is not involved. We’re a very, very forgiving company if somebody takes a little longer. It’s not just words when we say, ‘we hire for attitude, and we train for skills.’ We won’t hire a person who needs—but doesn’t have—the highly skilled technical abilities to perform the job he or she is trying to get, but we turn down highly skilled and talented people every day if something about their attitude turns us off and tells us, not necessarily they’re a bad person, but tells us they won’t fit in with our culture.”
In my book, The WOW Factor Workplace: How to Create a Best Place to Work Culture, I highlighted Bern’s Steak House in Tampa, Florida, established in the 1950’s. Founder Bern Laxer always believed in hiring for attitude, work ethic, and a yearning to learn the business. To this day, Bern’s prefers to train inexperienced employees, so they don’t have to break bad habits.
If I had a son or daughter about to graduate high school—who didn’t otherwise have a calling—I might point them to a trade / vocational school so they could discover the kinds of things they really love to do (or not) and get some real world, hands-on experience. Doing so would help them figure out where they might want to take their career, what potential employers expect, and how to become marketable. If after working for a while they then decide they want or need a certain type of degree, they would then be better able to assess the cost-benefit, and they would make that investment for the right reasons—with their head in the game.
Earning that degree should be well worth the paper it’s printed on.