What If We Hired for Skills, Not Degrees?

After a decade of ‘degree inflation,’ a growing movement offers a rebuke to a culture that exalts the bachelor’s degree

Ryan Tillman-French sat at his seventh-floor desk early on a Thursday morning, the skyscrapers of downtown Boston crowding the windows behind him.

On a laptop in the nearly empty office, he worked on code for a web page he was developing for his employer, the learning materials company Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. In half an hour, he needed to join a conference call about changes to the company’s website.

He had been at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for four months. Coding he liked. Meetings, not so much.

“That’s one thing I wasn’t warned about when it comes to the corporate world,” he said. “So many meetings.”

Ryan Tillman-French, a developer for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in Boston. Chelsea Stahl / NBC News

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Everyone needs to go to college

On the other side of the fence, for many years, the public school system has operated on the premise that everyone goes to college. It's time for EVERYONE to wake up and smell the roses. College is not for everyone, and every job does not require a four year (or more) degree. To exacerbate the problem, it seems that I am not the only one sensing that the four year degree is not what is used to be. The rate of change in technology has reached such a rate that college curricula can not stay ahead of the curve, or even remain even. At the present rate, short, immersive programs may become a necessity even for "degreed" job seekers.