WASHINGTON POST: Opinion: Larry Hogan’s legacy includes a bright idea for the labor force

January 18, 2023

By Charles Lane

Wednesday is Inauguration Day in Annapolis, where Democrat Wes Moore will be sworn in as the governor of Maryland, replacing Republican Larry Hogan, who was term-limited after serving two four-year stints. It’s a moment of transition from one party to another and a historic milestone: Moore, elected by a landslide in November, is the first Black man to hold the state’s highest executive office.

Yet in one significant sense it will also be a day of continuity. A Moore aide confirms to me that the new governor will maintain an innovative Hogan policy, announced in March, whereby Maryland dropped the college-degree requirement for half of its 38,000 state jobs. Hogan appears to have been the first governor to open so many positions to workers sometimes described as “Skilled Through Alternative Routes,” or STARs, a term coined by advocates of the concept.

Hogan struck a blow for the notion that a bachelor’s degree does not automatically represent job-relevant skills and experience and that there are other ways — community college, military service, apprenticeship — to obtain them. “It’s time to debunk the fiction that a prestigious degree is the only key to the American dream,” Hogan wrote in an Oct. 4 Wall Street Journal op-ed. Among adults at least 25 years old in 2021, 62.1 percent lacked a four-year degree, according to the Census Bureau.

The private sector had already noted the upside of hiring STAR workers. Major companies that have selectively dropped college-degree requirements include Google, IBM and Delta Air Lines, according to the Journal. So, to a modest degree, had the federal government. As of November, 41 percent of open positions nationwide called for a four-year degree, down from 46 percent in 2019, according to the Burning Glass Institute, a think tank that analyzes labor-market trends.

In large part, employers are expanding searches for middle- or even high-skilled workers beyond holders of bachelor’s degrees because the tight labor market is forcing them to do so.

According to a February 2022 Burning Glass study, however, the trend is probably permanent, as employers realize that — especially for middle-skilled jobs — they have been too often treating the four-year degree as what Harvard Business School labor economist Joseph Fuller calls “a proxy” for soft skills, such as a capacity to learn and succeed in a structured environment. In a 2017 study, Fuller and co-author Manjari Raman, also of Harvard, analyzed more than 26 million job postings and found significant discrepancies between companies’ routine demand for a degree and the actual educational credentials of employees who were working in those positions….

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/18/larry-hogan-job-legacy-expand-opportunity/