Tag Archives: jobs

Stop requiring college degrees for jobs that don’t need them

Originally published in Vox.com on March 19, 2023.
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When President Joe Biden recently touted the hundreds of billions of dollars invested into American manufacturing in the last two years, he included a talking point that previous Democratic presidents might not have bragged about. New factories in Ohio, he said, could offer thousands of “jobs paying $130,000 a year, and many don’t require a college degree.”

When Biden highlighted those non-college jobs at the State of the Union, it was just three weeks after Pennsylvania’s new Democratic governor Josh Shapiro eliminated the requirement of a four-year college degree for the bulk of jobs in Pennsylvania state’s government, two months after Utah’s Republican governor Spencer Cox did the same, and nearly one year after Maryland’s Republican governor Larry Hogan set off the trend. Since the president’s State of the Union, Alaska’s Republican governor Mike Dunleavy has also followed suit.

Maryland’s newly elected Democratic governor, Wes Moore, plans to continue opening up state jobs to non-college-educated workers, confirmed his spokesperson.

For liberal politicians like Moore, Shapiro, and Biden, promoting policies to help the more than 70 million American workers who never graduated from college is rooted partly in politics, as Democrats have struggled recently to earn support from non-college-educated voters, especially men. After decades of prioritizing college attendance, the Democratic Party has been scrambling to figure out how to change the widespread perception that its leaders are out of touch with the struggles of average people.

But the announcements we’ve seen haven’t just come from Democrats looking to appeal to voters or just from elected officials. And they’re not even mere reactions to the heightened competition for workers, though that’s part of it.

The moves are the result of a concerted effort, backed by staggering research and a multi-million-dollar advertising campaign, to educate employers on broken hiring practices that have needlessly locked two-thirds of the workforce out of higher-paying American jobs. For decades, more and more job postings have reflexively required college degrees. Now it’s finally being recognized this was a mistake.

Why so many jobs started requiring college degrees that didn’t before

The story of college degree requirement creep begins back in the 1980s, as employers started to hire globally for workers and tech automation started to change the nature of many domestic jobs in America. As routinized factory work began to be replaced by machines or outsourced to other countries, one consequence was a shift toward expecting workers to handle more social tasks, with so-called “soft skills” that facilitate collaboration like conscientiousness and the ability to make small talk.

Between 1980 and 2012, jobs requiring high levels of social interaction grew by nearly 12 percentage points as a share of the US labor force, according to Harvard education researcher David Deming. As a hiring proxy for this, companies started to turn to four-year college degrees.

These trends accelerated during the Great Recession, when employers had a labor surplus to choose from. Of the 11.6 million jobs created between 2010 and 2016, three out of four required at least a bachelor’s degree, and just one out of every 100 required a high school diploma or less.

These changes were documented in a 2017 study led by researchers at Harvard Business School. Their report, “Dismissed by Degrees,” found more than 60 percent of employers rejected otherwise qualified candidates in terms of skills or experience simply because they did not have a college diploma, and that the imperfect BA proxy had many negative consequences for workers and companies alike.

One of the researchers’ most revealing findings was that millions of job postings listed college degree requirements for positions that were currently held by workers without them. For example, in 2015, 67 percent of production supervisor job postings asked for a four-year college degree, even though just 16 percent of employed production supervisors had graduated from college. Many of these so-called “middle-skill” jobs, like sales representatives, inspectors, truckers, administrative assistants, and plumbers, were facing unprecedented “degree inflation.”

The report pointed to employer surveys that showed workers without college degrees were often considered just as productive on the job as their college-educated counterparts. They were also less likely to turnover and less expensive for companies to hire. Degree inflation was particularly harmful to Black and Hispanic job applicants, the researchers noted, since they’re less likely than white applicants to have college diplomas.

“That report was a wakeup call for companies but it definitely took some time to get out there,” said Elyse Rosenblum, the founder of Grads of Life, a nonprofit that backed the study and encourages businesses to adopt more diverse hiring practices.

Rosenblum’s group grew out of work that began during the Obama administration to help so-called “disconnected youth” — referring to the roughly 4 million young adults, ages 16-24, who were neither working nor in school. These efforts led to a national 2014 “Grads of Life” ad campaign, followed soon after by a national organization with the same name.

Another major player focused on degree inflation is Opportunity@Work, a group founded in 2015 originally to support an Obama White House initiative dedicated to expanding the tech hiring pipelines. In 2019, Opportunity@Work turned its full attention to helping all 70 million workers without four-year degrees. To refer to these workers, they coined the term “STARs”, an acronym for Skilled Through Alternative Routes.

“We felt it was important to name this talent category for what it is, a skilled talent group,” explained the group’s chief operating officer, Shad Ahmed.

Opportunity@Work helped bring about more discourse-shifting research. Working with Peter Blair, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, in March 2020 they published their first study, “Reach for the STARs,” which found that workers in low-wage jobs often have skills that are in high demand by higher-wage employers. Over 5 million workers without college degrees, they noted, were already in jobs paying at least $77,000 per year, proving “that a bachelor’s degree is not the only route to gain skills for higher wages.”

Nine months later, Opportunity@Work published a second report, looking at mobility barriers among high-skilled non-degree holders, and launched a hiring database to help connect STARs with local employers.

The tightening labor market, George Floyd’s murder, and the pandemic all sped up hiring reform

Years before governors and the president started talking about degree inflation, some companies were already ahead of the curve. Perhaps the most widely recognized leader is the technology conglomerate IBM, which back in the Great Recession realized it needed to loosen its hiring requirements to stay competitive.

“They say necessity is the mother of invention, and that’s essentially where we found ourselves about 10 years ago,” explained IBM’s chief human resources officer, Nickle LaMoreaux, pointing to the shortage of skilled tech workers, the “half-life” of tech skills, and the fact that two-thirds of US adults lacked bachelor’s degrees. By 2021, half of IBM’s US jobs no longer required a college degree.

Ahmed said in addition to a tightening labor market, George Floyd’s murder and the attention that brought to structural racism in America generated new focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion in businesses.

“Nonessential degree requirements aren’t race-neutral,” Ahmed and Blair wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 2020. “They embed into the labor market the legacy of black exclusion from the U.S. education system—namely, the antiliteracy laws that made it illegal for blacks to learn to read, the separate and unequal schools that kept them from catching up, and the limited progress since then on policies designed to remedy racial discrimination.”

In December 2020, in response to Floyd’s death, business leaders launched the OneTen coalition with the goal of placing 1 million Black Americans without college degrees in “family-sustaining jobs” over the next decade. The high-profile effort was led by IBM’s executive chairman and Merck’s chief executive, and included leaders from companies like Cisco, Nike, Target, and American Express. One year later, the coalition announced it had expanded to include 60 member companies. Part of their work involves identifying alternative ways to discern whether workers possess the skills they need.

This past September, a new chapter in this broader culture-shifting work began. Developed in partnership between Opportunity@Work and the Ad Council, a nonprofit that sponsors public service advertisements across the country, a campaign to “tear the paper ceiling” launched, focused on removing barriers to workers without college degrees. Nearly 50 national groups participated in the campaign’s launch at an event co-hosted with LinkedIn.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=9mbcJkuScOw%3Frel%3D0

There’s evidence of an “emerging degree reset”

The hard work is starting to pay off. Earlier this year, the New York Times editorial board published a piece that praised the work of companies like IBM and governors like Josh Shapiro for expanding their hiring practices to include individuals without college diplomas. “Making college more affordable is important, but there are other keys to the doors of opportunity as well,” they wrote.

Last year, researchers from Harvard Business School and the Burning Glass Institute found evidence of what they called “an emerging degree reset” in hiring. By analyzing over 51 million job postings dating back to 2014, the researchers found that between 2017 and 2019 roughly 46 percent of “middle-skill” and 37 percent of “high-skill” occupations no longer asked for a bachelor’s degree, and instead had job postings listing technical and social skills instead. The report concluded that based on the trends they were observing, an additional 1.4 million jobs could open to workers without college degrees in the next five years.

“Jobs do not require four-year college degrees,” the report’s authors wrote. “Employers do.”

Getting more employers to rethink their degree requirements will take hard work. Rosenblum, of Grads of Life, said one of the biggest barriers is just changing mindsets. “Employers have grown up in a system where the four-year degree is the proxy and there’s a perception that it’s risky to do something different,” she said.

So far, there is no perfect, universal alternative assessment to identify the professional skills employers have previously relied on a Bachelor’s degree to signal. But Rosenblum and Ahmed from Opportunity@Work say there’s a lot of work happening right now to develop those tools, such as creating micro-credentials for individual industries. Software developers reflect a good example of an industry that has embraced new hiring practices, partly because employers have found other ways to verify the quality of someone’s coding skills, making college degrees less relevant. The challenge is finding out how to create comparable assessments for other fields.

Ahmed said there’s still a lot of work to do to get managers to realize that STARs are half of the talent pool. “Many just do not know, we’re all in our own cocoons,” he said.

New data released this month suggests employers are hiring at a slower rate, and economists still warn of a possible recession this year as inflation persists. Advocates for hiring workers without college degrees say it’s critical that employers don’t revert to the same flawed hiring proxies they adopted following the last big economic downturn.

“I do have frankly a lot of concern,” said Rosenblum. “We’re having a lot of change in our labor market, things are weakening, and we’re seeing companies doing hiring freezes and layoffs. We’re spending a lot of time talking with business leaders about the need to make sure we don’t go back to what happened in the 2008 recession.”

A Debate Over Carbon Capture in the Infrastructure Bill Could Test the Labor-Climate Alliance

Originally published in In These Times on April 15, 2021.
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n late March, President Joe Biden unveiled a $2.3 trillion infrastructure package, the American Jobs Plan, that his administration hopes to move forward this year. The plan would make major investments in improving physical infrastructure such as roads, schools and bridges while also creating good-paying jobs, expanding collective bargaining rights and funding long-term care services under Medicaid. 

The president’s plan also endorsed another proposal that a group of bipartisan lawmakers hope makes it into a final bill: expanding carbon-capture utilization and storage (CCUS) in the United States. The SCALE Act, introduced in mid-March by eleven senators and six House representatives, represents the country’s first comprehensive CO2 infrastructure and jobs bill. In describing the president’s infrastructure plan, the White House said it ​“will support large-scale sequestration efforts” that are ​“in line with the bipartisan SCALE Act.” 

The legislation, which would authorize $4.9 billion in spending over five years, would create programs to transport and store carbon underground. Its provisions include establishing low-interest loan programs modeled off of federal highway development programs, increasing EPA funding for permitting carbon storage wells, and providing grants to states to create their own permitting programs. Advocates point to countries such as Canada, Norway and Australia where elected officials have made similar investments in carbon storage infrastructure. 

The SCALE Act is notable both for the support it has, and hasn’t, received. Its early endorsers include a half-dozen industrial labor unions, centrist climate groups like the National Wildlife Federation, and energy companies like GE Gas Power and Calpine. Fossil fuel industry support for carbon-capture has historically been a top reason why progressive climate groups, meanwhile, remain skeptical of the idea, wary of subsidizing anything that amounts to corporate giveaways to some of the world’s worst polluters. While carbon-capture has long been a flashpoint in Democratic climate politics, most critics of the policy have stayed quiet on the SCALE Act for now.

Modeling released in December by the Princeton Net-Zero America Project found that construction of nearly 12,000 miles of pipelines capable of storing 65 million tons of CO2 per year would be needed by 2030 for the United States to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 — a stated goal of the Biden administration. The Clean Air Task Force, a climate advocacy group, says the SCALE Act programs are ​“consistent” with the quantity and timeline of infrastructure deployment needed to meet those goals.

To date, nearly all U.S. carbon-capture projects are situated near existing CO2 pipelines and Lee Beck, the CCUS policy innovation director at the Clean Air Task Force, says the SCALE Act’s goal would be to capture emissions from multiple sources and then transport the CO2 for storage elsewhere, as is currently being carried out through Canada’s Alberta Carbon Trunk Line System and Norway’s Northern Lights Project.

Supporters point to a number of recent scientific analyses that make the case for greater investment in carbon-capture. In February, the National Academies of Sciences released a report on decarbonizing the U.S. energy system which recommends that, over next decade, officials should focus on increasing deployment of carbon-capture technologies by a factor of ten while investing in permanent CO2 storage infrastructure. In 2020, the International Energy Agency warned that it would be ​“virtually impossible” to reach net-zero emissions without carbon capture technology, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said carbon capture is likely necessary to meet global climate targets. Supporters note that renewable energy sources like wind and solar are not viable alternatives for reducing carbon emissions in the industrial sector, which account for 32 percent of the United States’ energy use and nearly a quarter of its direct greenhouse gas emissions. 

President Biden’s campaign climate plan called for accelerating development of carbon-capture and he included Brad Markell, the executive director of the AFL-CIO Industrial Union Council, on his Department of Energy transition team. Markell endorsed the SCALE Act in March and said it ​“will be crucial to meeting President Biden’s goals of reaching net-zero emissions in the power sector by 2035 and economywide by 2050.”

In addition to Biden’s support, the Congressional politics bode well for SCALE Act advocates. Introduced by Sens. Chris Coons (D‑Del.) and Bill Cassidy (R‑LA) in the Senate, the bill would first go through the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, where Joe Manchin (D‑W.V.), a co-sponsor of the bill, serves as chair. The House version of the bill was introduced by Reps. Marc Veasey (D‑TX) and David McKinley (R‑W.V.) and the chamber passed several carbon-capture bills last year. In March, Democratic governors of Pennsylvania and Louisiana (Tom Wolf and John Bel Edwards) joined the Republican governors of Oklahoma and Wyoming (Kevin Stitt and Mark Gordon), in writing a letter to Congress urging the passage of the SCALE Act in any future infrastructure package.

In an email, Sen. Coons told In These Times that he ​“appreciates [Energy] Secretary Granholm’s public statements in support of CCUS, including CCUS transport infrastructure, and am encouraged by my conversations with the Biden administration over the last several months.” 

Perhaps the biggest asset working in the SCALE Act’s favor is the support of organized labor. Biden has faced heat in the media in recent weeks over whether he can truly deliver an ambitious climate agenda while supporting unions. The SCALE Act has endorsements from labor groups including the Utility Workers Union of America, IBEW and North America’s Building Trades Unions. And the BlueGreen Alliance — a coalition of labor and environmental groups — supports CCUS, though has not yet taken a position on the bill. One analysis commissioned through the Decarb America Research Initiative estimated that the SCALE Act would generate roughly 13,000 jobs annually over the 5‑year period, though many unions are excited by the prospect of simply maintaining existing jobs.

“We see carbon-capture technology as a way to retain jobs in industries that are core sectors of our union,” said Anna Fendley, the director of Regulatory and State Policy for the United Steelworkers. ​“It feels like the conversation around reducing emissions in the U.S. has been so focused on the power sector for so long and now a lot of groups and advocates are learning more about the industrial sector.” 

A false solution?

Carbon-capture opponents have described the policy as one of several ​“false solutions” to the climate crisis. Though many of these activists typically say that we can’t afford not to invest in fighting climate change, on matters of CCUS, they argue the technologies are too expensive, too under-developed, and will detract from other important investments that government needs to make in order to transform the economy. At worst, critics fear investments in carbon-capture could prolong overall dependence on fossil fuels. 

Last September, the House of Representatives passed a clean energy package, but after a coalition of progressive climate groups — including Sunrise Movement, Friends of the Earth, and the Climate Justice Alliance—protested the bill’s inclusion of pro-carbon capture provisions, 18 Democrats, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D‑N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (D‑Mich.), Ilhan Omar (D‑Minn.), and Ayanna Pressley (D‑Mass.), voted against it. In These Times reached out to a number of climate groups that have opposed carbon-capture infrastructure in the past, including Sunrise Movement, Friends of the Earth, and the Labor Network for Sustainability. Most have not spoken publicly on the SCALE Act to date and declined to comment for this story. 

Limited organizational capacity for rapid legislative analysis is one possible factor for the silence. Joe Uehlein, president of the Labor Network for Sustainability, said their group had not heard about the SCALE Act prior to In These Times’ inquiry. While noting they are ​“not in the CCUS camp,” Uehlein said the group hasn’t yet decided how it plans to respond to the bill. The Sierra Club declined the Charleston Gazette-Mail​’s request for comment on the SCALE Act. 

Some left-wing organizations, like Sunrise Movement and Evergreen Action, have previously acknowledged that industrial carbon capture could be acceptable, and others have expressed more interest in direct air capture, a method that sucks CO2 out of the atmosphere. 

Basav Sen, the Climate Justice Project Director at the Institute for Policy Studies and the co-chair of the Energy Democracy Working Group at the Climate Justice Alliance, told In These Times that rather than protesting individual pieces of carbon-capture legislation — ​“which would make it a game of whack-a-mole” — environmental justice groups in his coalition are focused on educating members of Congress and their staff on why they should avoid such ​“false solutions” altogether. He added that putting new demands on the electrical grid through CCUS, direct air capture, and even industrial production of steel and cement at current levels was misguided at this stage of the transition away from fossil fuel energy.

Sen also criticized carbon-capture advocates for citing the 2018 IPCC report as evidence that CCUS is needed, as opposed to reforestation which the IPCC also explored. Reforestation, or replanting an area with tress, is another way to remove CO2 from the air. Research suggests this solution can also offer significant short-term emissions reductions, but a 2019 IPCC report also warned that planting large-scale forests for carbon-removal efforts could lead to increased food insecurity and other environmental issues.

Beck, of the Clean Air Task Force, argued that it would be irresponsible to take any decarbonization options off the table in 2021, and emphasized that building out CO2 infrastructure would not help keep aging or non-economical facilities online. Shannon Heyck-Williams of the National Wildlife Federation agreed that ​“when it comes to coal power generation, there really is no future for coal power in America and carbon-capture doesn’t change that.”

But Beck and Heyck-Williams also maintained that, since there are so many existing natural gas facilities in the United States, it does makes sense to try and capture the carbon coming out of those plants — at least for now. ​“It would be faster to retrofit some of these facilities than expect they will be all phased out in the next decade in the current climate policy environment,” argued Beck.

SCALE Act supporters know they’ll have to tread carefully with language around CO2 pipelines, given the years of dedicated activism in the climate movement against new oil and gas pipelines. Advocates of CCUS prefer to focus on phrases like ​“CO2 infrastructure” and ​“carbon management,” which they hope will steer the conversation away from flashpoints like Keystone XL. Beck notes that carbon infrastructure includes not just pipelines but also shipping, rail and barge. ​“CO2 pipelines are very different in terms of size and safety,” added Jessie Stolark, the public policy and members relations manager for the Carbon Capture Coalition. ​“But to be completely honest, I do think we have an uphill battle in terms of reassuring people and conveying that kind of information.”

Whether progressive climate groups will choose to rally opposition to a congressional infrastructure bill that includes the SCALE Act — like they did for the clean energy package in 2020 — remains unclear. It will undoubtedly be tougher to pressure lawmakers to vote against a package that includes so many other key priorities. For now, rather than take aim at Biden’s new infrastructure plan for its support for carbon-capture, progressive climate groups have stuck to criticizing the package for committing too little spending on climate change mitigation efforts overall, with some advocates calling for a minimum of $10 trillion in spending over the next decade.

“It’s up to us to ensure that this proposal is strengthened, becomes law and that it is the first of many pieces of legislation that will address the many crises facing our generation,” said Deirdre Shelly of the Sunrise Movement. 

Where are the STEM jobs?

Originally published in the Baltimore Sun on May 24, 2013. 
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Republicans and Democrats appear to agree on at least one thing: that the United States is facing a STEM (science, technology engineering and math) crisis. In his most recent State of the Union address, President Barack Obama declared that he wants to “reward schools” that focus on STEM classes, for they are “the skills today’s employers are looking for to fill jobs right now and in the future.” And as far to the other end of the political spectrum as you can get, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas deemed May 6-12 to be the first ever “Celebration of STEM Education Week in Texas.”

I’m an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University — by all measures, a very STEM-oriented institution. I’m studying history and sociology, and it’s quite common for students like me to envy those with academic talents enabling them to major in fields like chemical engineering or neuroscience. Bleak job reports and doomsday rhetoric from our nation’s leaders reinforce this idea that maybe the remainder of us studying the liberal arts are somehow putting a drain on our society, and preventing the United States from “competing effectively” with other nations.

And yet, it turns out that the job prospects for my STEM-oriented classmates may not be so great either.

Recently, the Economic Policy Institute released a report that challenged conventional wisdom; the report says that over half of students with STEM degrees each year are unable to find STEM employment upon graduation. Additionally, STEM wages have not budged in over a decade. Stagnant wages and low rates of STEM job placement strongly indicate a surplus of STEM workers, not a dearth. The problem points to a lack of jobs, not of qualified workers.

Of course, science, technology, engineering and math are important fields, and we should aim to provide exemplary education for students interested in such subjects. But there is a danger in creating a false hope that if only we got everyone to switch from English to math, our economy would suddenly soar. Unemployment in the United States is at 7.5 percent, which is 3.2 points higher than the pre-recession low. The deep-seated unemployment in our country will require not only job training in STEM fields but also things like monetary and fiscal stimulus to boost employment during this rough period.

The alleged STEM crisis has also been a popular point of agreement among lawmakers and tech moguls as Congress struggles to draft an immigration reform bill. It’s been politically safe to say that we must carve an easy path for STEM foreign workers to come to our country in order to boost our global competitiveness — in fact, one of the few amendments accepted in the Senate “Gang of Eight” immigration bill this week was a provision to increase the number of visas for such high-skill workers. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently launched a new organization, called FWD.us, to bolster support for, among other things, an increase in the number of visas granted to foreign skilled workers.

However, Science Careers, a branch of Science magazine, reported that the bill would make already congested labor markets even more competitive with the influx of foreign workers. Additionally, STEM labor force expert Ron Hira of the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, who spoke in April at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing regarding the proposed immigration legislation, adamantly refutes the notion that there is an overall STEM shortage in the United States. He argues that H1-B and other worker visa programs have lowered wages and allowed for more labor exploitation in domestic STEM markets.

The 844-page immigration bill would quadruple or quintuple the number of high-skill visas currently allowed in the United States. As Bloomberg Businessweek’s Elizabeth Dwoskin writes, “If you’re a recent college graduate, a doctoral candidate, or a highly skilled professional who has been in the job market the past few years, you know it’s rough out there. But if the immigration overhaul proposed in the Senate … becomes law, it’s likely to get a lot rougher.”

The bill would be great for businesses like Mr. Zuckerberg’s that are looking to hire talented workers at lower prices. However, for American citizens graduating with STEM degrees and struggling to find employment today, it may not look so great.

Science, technology, engineering and math are important skills in the 21st century economy. But unfortunately, even they turn out to be no guarantee.