Employers are finally tearing down the “paper ceiling” in hiring.
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.
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.”
The John Birch Society pushed a darker, more conspiratorial politics in the ’50s and ’60s — and looms large over today’s GOP, argues historian Matthew Dallek.
On December 8, 1958, a group of 12 well-to-do businessmen gathered in the living room of an upscale, Tudor-style home in Indianapolis, Indiana, to save the United States from an imminent communist takeover.
Or at least that’s what the group’s host — a former candy manufacturing executive turned anti-communist agitator named Robert W. Welch Jr. — told them they were there to do.
Welch had summoned the group to recruit them for a new organization dedicated to exposing what he believed to be a far-reaching communist plot to overthrow the US government. According to Welch, communist agents had infiltrated every level of the government and had seized control of both the Democratic and Republican parties. Even Dwight Eisenhower, the former five-star general who had cruised to a second term in the White House as a moderate Republican in 1956, was suspected of being a communist agent.
What was needed to combat this massive plot, Welch told the group, was a new “national education program,” via pamphlets, speeches, and the like, that could teach average Americans about the communist threat. The men enthusiastically agreed, and they resolved to serve as the vanguard of that movement.
They called themselves the John Birch Society, taking their name from a Baptist missionary who had been killed in China by communist forces in 1945 — the first recognized casualty of the nascent Cold War.
As the historian Matthew Dallek documents in his new book, Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the Far Right, the group would go on to grow from a small club of far-right businessmen into a sprawling, nationwide organization that claimed up to 100,000 members across hundreds of state and local chapters. Over time, the John Birch Society would leave its imprint on the Republican Party, pushing it to embrace more hardline positions on anti-communism, white supremacy, isolationism, and nativism.
Six decades after that initial gathering in Indianapolis, it’s tempting to conclude that the Birchers accomplished that mission. Since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, many historians and pundits have pointed to the history of the John Birch Society as the throughline that connects Trumpism to the birth of the conservative movement, casting Trump as the logical culmination of the movement rather than as its gravedigger.
But according to Dallek, who studies the history of American conservatism at George Washington University, the story of the Birchers’ role in the radicalization of the GOP is a bit more complicated.
“What I’ve tried to do is to draw not too straight a line from the 1950s to today, and to show — as historians try to do — that the radicalization of the GOP was contingent,” Dallek told me when I spoke with him recently. The Birchers’ ideas “were not really ripe in 1970 or [the] ’80s or ’90s, but they became ripe in the past 15 years. They were there for the taking, and as we know, people took them up and ran with them in very powerful ways.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Ian Ward
Historians sometimes cite the John Birch Society as an early instance of far-right populism, but the men who formed the society in 1958 were hardly marginal figures within American society. Who were the group’s founders?
Matthew Dallek
The founders were a group of 12 men — all men — and almost all of them were very wealthy industrialists. Many of them knew each other from their time together in the National Association of Manufacturers, and they admired Robert Welch as a truth-teller who was speaking out about the communist threat inside the United States. They had one foot very much planted in the mainstream, and they had benefited enormously from the rules and arrangements of the mid-20th-century capitalist system.
The great irony, of course, is that they viewed themselves as outsiders. They were colossi bestriding the world, but they also saw themselves as dissidents who were being hounded on the margins of the dominant ideas in America.
Ian Ward
Who did the founders see as their target audience, especially in the organization’s early days?
Matthew Dallek
Initially, their vision was to recruit “A1 men” — other men like them. Welch at one point said, “I do not want to recruit people who think differently from us. I don’t want it to be a debating society.” So the initial recruits tended to be wealthy, white, and mostly men, although Welch realized the value of women members early on.
Within the first couple of years, though, they slowly widened their recruitment, and they began to recruit more professionals: upwardly mobile, middle-class doctors, lawyers, dentists, engineers, and the like.
Ian Ward
How did the founders relate to the Republican Party?
Matthew Dallek
It was a very complicated relationship. Some of them viewed the Eisenhower Republican Party as one of the greatest threats to the country. Welch wrote in a letter to his friends that Dwight Eisenhower was a dedicated agent of the communist conspiracy. Looking back to what happened to Joe McCarthy and to Robert Taft — two of their heroes — they saw the modern Republican Party as un-American.
But they had a relationship with the GOP. Welch ran for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts as a Republican in 1950. Bill Grede, who was an industrialist from Wisconsin and a founding member of the society, had fundraised for Eisenhower’s campaign in 1956 and served on a labor management committee that was appointed by Eisenhower.
Ian Ward
What sort of tactics did the Birchers use in their early days to mobilize the conservative grassroots outside of the party apparatus of the GOP?
Matthew Dallek
Their mission throughout the 1960s was to try to educate the American people about the communist conspiracy, and many of the Birchers — not all, but many — were suspicious of the two-party system.
They didn’t like democracy, and they believed the only way to save the country was through a kind of shock education — through controlling the kinds of texts that kids and college students and other Americans were exposed to — and through direct action: setting up front groups and committees that could attack what they saw as the weak points in the communist line.
For example, they set up the Committee Against Summit Entanglements, which was a direct action protest against the Khrushchev-Eisenhower summit in 1959, and they set up the campaign to impeach Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren, because they saw Warren as a communist.
So it was a combination of trying to create a space where they could spread an alternative message about this alleged conspiracy, but also to shock their enemies and mobilize the public to attack what they saw as their communist foes.
Ian Ward
The Birchers gradually became more willing to work within Republican Party politics in the early 1960s. They were involved, for instance, in the 1962 midterm campaigns, and many of them supported Barry Goldwater’s campaign for president in 1964. What convinced them that they could work within Republican politics?
Matthew Dallek
I think a lot of them did see being active in Republican politics as a viable path because they had longstanding Republican ties, and some of them saw the Republican Party as an anti-big government vehicle. But they also flirted with third parties as well. That third-party option rarely went off the table, even if they never fully pursued it.
Also, because of their orientation, the Birchers were very careful to say, “Wait a second, we are not officially endorsing anybody, even though we know — wink, wink — that everyone’s going for Goldwater.” But Goldwater did inspire a lot of them. Arizona had a lot of Birchers, and Goldwater said some nice things about the Birchers being decent people, even as he was criticizing Welch. They saw a lot to like in his policies, but it was never a very comfortable fit.
Ian Ward
There’s a famous episode in conservative history where William F. Buckley Jr. — the editor of National Review and the intellectual godfather of modern conservatism — “excommunicated” the Birchers through a series of critical editorials in National Review. That episode has become a sort of symbol of so-called “responsible Republicans” policing their right flank from incursions by more fringe movements — but you argue that that story leaves something important out.
Matthew Dallek
Several very good historians have started to argue over the past 10 years that the idea that Buckley excommunicated the Birchers and police the boundaries of the conservative movement is a myth — and I basically agree with that take.
Buckley was in a real bind. On the one hand, he had relationships and rapport with a number of fringe figures, including some Birchers. Buckley realized that a lot of Birch members were real conservatives. They were subscribers to National Review. Buckley’s mother supported the Birch Society.
At the same time, though, Buckley did think that Welch and his cockamamie conspiracy theories about Eisenhower and fluoridation in the water supply were not helpful to the conservative cause. Much of his fire was concentrated on Welch in particular.
But Buckley and his colleagues at National Review did struggle with what to say and how to react to the Birchers. Some of them said, “We do need to push back harder,” but others said — and Buckley himself said — “When did I call them kooks? I never said that.”
In the process, Buckley alienated a lot of Bircher leaders, even as he was saying, “I didn’t criticize all Birchers.” A lot of them said that Buckley was doing damage to the conservative cause and to the unity of conservatism.
Ian Ward
Even as their influence faded in the 1970s, the Birchers’ ideological legacy was clear, both in the groups that took up its ideological mantle, like the Moral Majority and George Wallace’s American Independent Party, and in the Republican Party’s gradual drift toward a more conspiratorial style of politics.
But what has been the Birchers’ primary legacy at the level of political tactics and strategy?
Matthew Dallek
One of their big tactical legacies is rhetorical. It’s what I described as an apocalyptic mindset — the sense that liberals and establishment Republicans are not just those with a difference of opinion about policy.
The Birchers helped to entrench this idea that the establishment was the enemy, that the institutional arrangements in American politics and American society were stacked against true Americans. That was a rhetorical strategy that you see some hardline Republicans pick up on intermittently.
On top of that, I do think that the Birchers helped show the power of shocking grassroots direct action taken up against a single cause —like Obamacare or gun rights or gay marriage or abortion. The Birchers showed that this could be quite effective at mobilizing people, and that a relatively small number of people who are 110 percent devoted to a cause can have an outsize impact — and maybe even a much greater impact than even hundreds of thousands of voters.
Ian Ward
Since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, some historians have looked back at groups like the Birchers and said, “We ignored these groups for too long, but they’ve always been at the core of the conservative movement.” You push back against that reading a bit in the book. Why?
Matthew Dallek
There is a risk of flattening out the history. What I’ve tried to do is to draw not too straight a line from the 1950s to today, and to show — as historians try to do — that the radicalization of the GOP was contingent.
I also think that by giving the fringe too much credit in the last third of the 20th century, we risk distorting the tensions within the Republican Party, as well as twisting what the Republican Party and mainstream conservatives stood for.
On some issues, the fringe and the Republican establishment aligned, especially on culture war issues. But most of the time, the Birchers and their successors were very frustrated. They loathed Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and some Birchers even said that Ronald Reagan was never to be trusted. On immigration reform, on internationalism, on military interventions, on free trade agreements, on conspiracy theories, and on the degree of explicit racism versus more coded or implicit racism, there were significant fissures.
So even though the fringe was part of the Republican coalition — especially during campaigns — we don’t want to oversell their power historically. The MAGA phenomenon is a more recent development, and I try to explain how our contemporary far right essentially adopted the Birchers’ ideological legacy as an alternative political tradition and eventually took over the Republican Party.
Ian Ward
In the book, you cite a statement from Gordon Hall, an expert on extremist groups and a critic of the Birchers, who said, “No one loves America more than the John Birch Society and no one understands it less.” From our vantage point today, I’m inclined to flip that expression around and say that no one respected American democracy less than the Birchers but understood its weaknesses better.
Do you think that’s a fair analysis?
Matthew Dallek
I think that’s an interesting way to put it. The Birchers had a slogan that said, “We’re a republic, not a democracy. Let’s keep it that way.” That meant different things to different people, but they were quite opposed to the idea of multiracial democracy. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s recent comments and tweets about getting a “national divorce” and eviscerating the federal government — that does hark back to this Bircher idea that, “Hey, we’re a republic.”
I think that what Gordon Hall and a lot of liberal observers got wrong, especially over time, are the ways in which the Birch ideas were still very much alive in the country. They were not really ripe in 1970 or [the] ’80s or ’90s, but they became ripe in the past 15 years. They were there for the taking, and as we know, people took them up and ran with them in very powerful ways.
So I think that liberals forgot about the far-right opponents of democracy and of civil rights and voting rights. They were a more powerful presence than a lot of people acknowledged for many, many years — but now they’re easier to see.
The former president told his followers to “protest” ahead of a likely indictment, summoning the specter of January 6.
Former President Donald Trump on Saturday alleged via his Truth Media platform that he will be arrested on Tuesday, calling for his followers to “PROTEST” and “TAKE OUR NATION BACK” in an echo of the capitol riots of January 6, 2021.
Trump’s all-caps post at 7:26 Saturday morning puzzled some close to his campaign, according to the New York Times. Though prosecutors in the office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg have indicated that an indictment is forthcoming, Trump allies aren’t clear where the Tuesday deadline came from. But the call to arms does come ahead of a Saturday, March 25 rally in Waco, Texas — the first in Trump’s 2024 campaign — and contrasts with his posting on mainstream social media sites YouTube and Facebook.
Trump is likely facing indictment by a Manhattan grand jury for allegedly paying hush money in 2016 to porn actress Stormy Daniels to cover up an affair. According to former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, Cohen paid Daniels $130,000, for which Trump’s business, the Trump Organization, later reimbursed him; an indictment from the Manhattan District Attorney’s office would focus on the attempt to cover up the payment by falsifying records.
Trump’s social media presence was significantly curtailed after the January 6, 2021 riots; Trump and far-right mouthpieces called at the time for the former president’s followers to take action as Congress certified President Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 elections. Trump’s social media presence in particular was seen as a catalyst for the violence on that day, and Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube suspended Trump’s account in the following days and weeks.
Twitter head Elon Musk reinstated Trump’s account shortly after October 27 of last year, when he assumed control of the social media company, though Trump has yet to post there. YouTube and Meta, Facebook’s parent company, have both readmitted Trump to their sites; on Friday, his team cross-posted a video to YouTube and Facebook — a clip from CNN, early in the morning of his 2016 victory — announcing, “I’M BACK.”
YouTube’s Twitter account explained the company’s rationale for reinstating Trump’s account, saying that YouTube had “carefully evaluated the continued risk of real-world violence, while balancing the chance for voters to hear equally from major national candidates in the run up to an election.” YouTube ended Trump’s suspension from the platform on Friday. Meta released a statement January 25 saying that the company would reinstate Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts, with enhanced “guardrails” on Trump’s content, including limiting posts that reference election denial or QAnon claims.
Trump, his companies, and his associates have faced many legal problems over the years; Cohen went to prison for his role in the hush money scandal, and Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg was sentenced to five months in prison for benefiting from tax evasion efforts by the Trump Organization. Other investigations, both at the federal and state level are ongoing.
Bragg’s attempt at an indictment now, resting on the hush money, is somewhat peculiar, as Vox’s Andrew Prokop explained in January. Bragg took office after Cyrus Vance, Jr., who picked up the charges against Trump based on the hush money violating campaign finance law after the Southern District of New York dropped the charges. Bragg was initially skeptical about moving forward with the case when he took office in 2022, leading to the departure of two prosecutors in his office and a wave of criticism about being too lenient on Trump.
Bragg’s case has picked up steam in the past two months, although it’s still not clear how it will be argued or, as Prokop notes, how strong that case actually is:
This seems to pose the possibility that the hush money case is a bit of a reach, a “zombie” legal theory being resurrected now that Bragg has seemingly realized he’ll benefit more politically from being seen as trying to take Trump down — though we can’t say for sure without understanding more about his evidence and legal reasoning.
That, of course, didn’t stop Trump from using the possibility of an indictment in his favor. As Vox’s Ian Millhiser pointed out in a piece dissecting the various legal cases against Trump and related entities, “while the Justice Department will ordinarily be very tight-lipped about an ongoing investigation (and responsible state-level prosecutors will also not be especially forthcoming), Trump will not. And he is likely to tell lies and half-truths to mislead the public and rile up his supporters.”
On Truth Social, Trump followed his complaint about the alleged arrest and demand for his followers to protest with a simple request: “If you are doing poorly, as so many of you are, do not send anything. If you are doing well, which was made possible through the great policies of the Trump Administration, send your contribution to donaldjtrump.com/.”