despite employers increasingly dropping degree requirements, there remains hesitation in hiring based solely on skills. Many firms still prefer candidates with a college degree, and skills-based hiring is happening at a slower pace than anticipated. While research shows that hiring for skills can lead to better job performance and retention, traditional filters like degrees remain a significant barrier. More changes in hiring practices are needed to open opportunities for workers without degrees.

Kevin Dykema highlights the urgent need for data science and literacy education in U.S. K-12 schools. He argues that data skills are essential across all industries, yet American students lag in these areas. To prepare students for a data-driven future, Dykema calls for integrating data literacy into all school subjects, starting early, and engaging teachers in this effort. The goal is to equip all students, not just a select few, with the skills to navigate and succeed in a data-centric world.

Chipotle, Lowe’s, and Walgreens have been identified as the best large companies for high school graduates, offering significant opportunities for quick hiring and promotion. According to the American Opportunity Index, these firms are notably more likely to hire and promote individuals with high school diplomas compared to other major companies. This ranking provides valuable insights for high school graduates seeking to enter the workforce directly and advance their careers without a college degree.

Peter Coy's opinion piece in The New York Times highlights the harsh reality facing the college class of 2024: a tough job market. According to a report by the Burning Glass Institute, 52% of recent graduates are underemployed, working in jobs that don't require their degrees. Five years out, 88% of these individuals remain in roles far below their qualifications. Despite the challenges, certain majors like computer science and engineering are still in demand. Coy suggests that graduates should focus on developing a mix of technical and people skills to stand out in a competitive job market.

A new report from the Burning Glass Institute highlights the top colleges producing graduates with lucrative careers in finance, tech, and consulting. While Ivy League schools and top public universities predictably lead the list, surprising names like Baruch College, San Jose State University, and the U.S. Naval Academy also feature prominently. Proximity to industry hubs and rigorous curricula play key roles in their success. For instance, MIT graduates in finance earn around $175,000 annually within the first 10 years, significantly above the median. This report emphasizes the substantial impact of a college’s network and location on graduates' earning potential.

A new study by the Burning Glass Institute and Strada Education Foundation reveals that nearly half of recent college graduates are underemployed, working in jobs that do not require a degree. Tracking over 10 million career paths from the past decade, the study highlights the long-term effects of underemployment on earnings and career progression. It emphasizes the importance of a graduate’s first job and the significant role internships play in securing college-level employment. Despite the value of a degree, many graduates remain in roles that underutilize their skills, fueling the debate over the rising costs of higher education.

For more details, read the full article here.

A new report from the Burning Glass Institute and SHRM (formerly the Society for Human Resource Management) highlights that generative AI, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, is set to have its most significant impact on white-collar jobs within banking and tech industries. The research reveals that companies in finance and technology, including giants like Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Google, and Microsoft, allocate a substantial portion of their payroll to roles highly susceptible to AI disruption. These positions, often held by affluent college graduates, include business analysts, marketing managers, software developers, database administrators, project managers, and lawyers.

For more detailed insights, you can read the full article here.

Over the past decade, California cities, counties, and the state government have been changing the job descriptions for thousands of employees — either by removing the requirement for a high school, college, or graduate-level degree or by detailing alternative ways that candidates can gain the same skills. More changes are on the horizon. Read on to learn how skills-based hiring is playing out in California

The nation's unemployment rate is low, but some big companies are laying off workers and requiring people to return to the office. Guy Berger, director of economic research at the Burning Glass Institute, joined CBS News to assess the state of the labor market.

‘“If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today,” the commission declared, “we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” At a time when Japanese cars were widely perceived as being superior to American models, the Germans were stealing away U.S. market share in machine tools and the Koreans were making inroads in steel, it was a warning that resonated.

Elevate academic standards in our K-12 schools, the commission implored, or we would soon be swamped by a “rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future.”

But by ushering in these academic reforms, the report’s greatest legacy may well have been this: It reinforced the idea that unless every student wound up going to college, we had failed them — and they had failed themselves….

…“There are some hints of progress. More than 15 states have eliminated the need for a four-year degree for most government agency jobs. Several prominent companies, including IBM and Accenture, have started to look for skills, instead of credentials, in their hiring. Such moves prompted the Burning Glass Institute, which conducts research into learning and work, to proclaim last year an “emerging degree reset.“

In his forthcoming book, "The Career Arts," Ben Wildavsky argues against the misconception that liberal education and career training are mutually exclusive. Despite rising skepticism about the value of a college degree, Wildavsky highlights that the best careers require both targeted, profession-specific skills and transferable skills like critical thinking and communication. He points out that institutions like Colorado Mountain College and other "dual-mission" schools successfully integrate liberal arts and practical training, producing graduates well-equipped for the job market. The article underscores the lasting value of a college degree in building social capital and long-term career success.

Despite growing public skepticism about the value of college, the cost of obtaining a degree from any of the University of North Carolina System’s 16 universities is worth it, according to a study evaluating the financial outcomes of graduates of the system.

Graduates who complete an undergraduate degree at one of the UNC System’s universities have a median lifetime return on investment of $500,000 compared to North Carolinians without undergraduate degrees. And completing a degree resulted in upward economic mobility for nearly 90 percent of low-income students.

These are some of the highlights of the results of a study the system released earlier this month that examined return on investment between 2015 and 2020 for the 724 undergraduate programs and 575 graduate programs across the UNC System. The study also found that students who complete graduate degrees had a median lifetime return on investment of $938,000 compared to those with just a bachelor’s degree.

The North Carolina General Assembly commissioned and funded the study. Over the past year-and-a-half, Deloitte, a private research firm, worked with consulting firms rpk Group and The Burning Glass Institute to analyze decades of wage data for graduates living in-state to calculate the return on investment for each degree, which was defined as lifetime earnings minus the costs of obtaining the degree.

The Seattle area has the highest proportion of advanced tech workers in the country relative to cities with similarly sized tech workforces, a new ranking from the Burning Glass Institute shows. Home to Amazon.com and Microsoft MSFT-1.40% .., , Seattle bested other West Coast hubs in attracting talent with cutting-edge skills, while cities weighed down by legacy tech jobs fell further behind.

What makes a cutting-edge city? Burning Glass ranked established and aspiring tech hubs across the U.S. by the share of their tech workforce that boasts a set of cutting-edge skills: those that are most in-demand and most well-paid.

The resulting ranking shows which cities across the country are fertile ground for companies looking to hire for roles requiring advanced skills or expand into new markets. At the opposite end of the spectrum are cities where finding highly skilled workers is becoming more difficult.

"This ranking has a lot of really important lessons here for cities and some warning signs," says Matt Sigelman, president of the Burning Glass Institute. "You can be a city with a relatively large tech workforce, but if that tech workforce doesn't have the same concentration of the most valuable talent, of the most valuable skills, then you can lose your edge very quickly."

Pittsburgh, whose prosperity once relied heavily on Andrew Carnegie’s steel mills, now draws much of its vibrancy from another legacy of the Scottish industrialist: Carnegie Mellon University.

CMU’s expertise in computer science and robotics is helping to draw high-tech jobs to the Pittsburgh metro area, as shown in a new study by the Burning Glass Institute ranking cities in terms of the “future readiness” of their labor forces.

Pittsburgh ranks fifth among large metro areas in the “momentum” category—or the growth in the number of technology workers and demand for advanced skills, according to the Burning Glass study. In that category, the Pittsburgh metro area trailed only those of Seattle; San Jose, Calif.; San Francisco; and Austin, Texas. The institute cited demand for software skills, including cybersecurity. Much of the demand for those skills comes from a growing array of tech companies and the presence of two major banks, Bank of New York Mellon and PNC Financial Services Group.

Despite the many clickbaity headlines and apocalyptic fearmongering around AI and job automation, the data are rather clear: As I highlight in my latest book, I, Human: AI, Automation, and the Quest to Reclaim What Makes Us Unique, you are less likely to lose your job to AI than to another human using AI, especially if you don’t use AI yourself. In that sense, there’s nothing new about the AI age; just like previous disruptive technologies, AI is eliminating some jobs but creating many more new jobs in turn, which desperately require humans.

As illustrated in our recent ManpowerGroup report, 58% of employers see AI as a net creator of new jobs. The problem is that people who are displaced by job automation (for example, brick-and-mortar store managers) don’t automatically have access to all the new jobs that are created by technology (for example, cybersecurity analyst, digital marketer, or AI ethicist). According to the World Economic Forum, half of employees will need reskilling by 2025 to keep up with new technologies, and this figure predates the current generative AI boom…

This will also increase diversity and inclusion. As Harvard’s Joseph Fuller and Christina Langer and Burning Glass Institute’s Matt Sigelman point out: “The shift to skills-based hiring will open opportunities to a large population of potential employees who in recent years have often been excluded from consideration because of degree inflation.” If organizations complain about their inability to find diverse and creative talent, they should stop looking for talent in the same old places and ways….

“Economic growth has weakened considerably, but it’s still relatively easy for people to find jobs. That’s puzzling economists, who are used to seeing job offers disappear when growth slows. In other words, it’s a happy day for labor.

Things could get stranger. Judging from recent trends, there’s a chance that the economy slows down even more — or even shrinks — and yet the unemployment rate stays low…

I asked Gad Levanon, the chief economist of the Burning Glass Institute, if he could imagine a recession with low unemployment. “It never happened before,” he said. “But theoretically it is possible, and I think now it is as close as we ever got to it.

This chart shows an index of labor market tightness that Levanon created. It’s a composite of nine indicators, normalized so that the average value of each is zero. The data sources are the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Conference Board and the National Federation of Independent Business.”

Joining the bottom of the consulting-firm food chain typically means working 12-hour days, juggling work during vacations and fixing PowerPoint fonts late at night. These days, many rookie consultants are just hoping to be on a project—any project.

For the first time in years, recent hires have too little to do—and that’s stressing them out more than the round-the-clock work they anticipated. Some young consultants “on the bench” or “on the beach”—lingo for being between clients—say they spend downtime exercising, watching Netflix or napping, while still getting paid. Such a scenario might sound too good to be true for many in corporate America. For this cohort of high achievers, who thought they’d pull themselves up the ladder through their work on thorny business challenges, it’s far from ideal. 

Too much time on the bench makes it harder for consultants to develop the strategic-thinking and communication skills that catapult them into their next jobs, said Matt Sigelman, a former McKinsey consultant who is president of the Burning Glass Institute, a think tank focused on the future of work. 

In years past, having a college degree was required for almost every salaried job—and many hourly jobs, as well. Candidates who didn't have a degree often would lose out on opportunities and struggle to advance their careers.

Recently, widespread talent shortages and a number of other cultural shifts have prompted more employers to revisit that requirement.

About two-thirds of working-age adults (64 percent) do not hold a bachelor's degree, and undergraduate college enrollment fell by 8 percent from 2019 to 2022. The share of jobs that require a college degree fell to 44 percent last year, down from 51 percent in 2017, according to research from the Burning Glass Institute.

As a result, major employers such as Dell, IBM and Bank of America have eliminated the college degree requirement for most jobs, and many other businesses are following suit.

A four-year college education is a big and long-term investment, as the 40 million plus Americans who carry $1.6 trillion in federal student debt know all too well. Nevertheless, it can be worth it, because of the college wage premium– the extra salary graduates with four year college degrees earn over those who have only high school diplomas. In fact, one of the metrics Forbes used to rank the Top 500 Colleges for 2023, is how many months or years of excess wages it takes for alumni of a college to pay off the net cost (after scholarships and discounts) of their degrees.

With payments and interest on federal student debt about to resume after a Covid pandemic moratorium that began in March 2020, the payoff from college is front of mind these days. Which is why an analysis released this week by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco is particularly timely. It shows a flattening of the college wage premium, which grew substantially between 2000 and the 2010s.

In addition to the Census data, there’s anecdotal evidence that good workers without college degrees are in higher demand these days. Some large companies, including Google, IBM, and Accenture, now offer college degree-free ways into their operations. In 2021, IBM announced it had removed bachelor’s degree requirements for more than half of its job openings in the U.S. In 2021, just 26% of job postings for software QA engineers at Accenture required a degree, according to a report from the Burning Glass Institute. Meanwhile, Oracle required degrees for 100% of postings for the same position and Apple required degrees in 90% of them.