If you were asked to describe the typical route through young adulthood, the answer would likely include the sequence “finish high school, go to college, get a degree, and find a job.” But Connecticut is considering new initiatives that could change this sequence by recognizing non-college skills and experience in its hiring processes.
But despite waning public perception and documented inequities, college remains a reliable path to economic stability. We need to be cautious about de-emphasizing college when such programs remain unproven.
About 62 percent of U.S. high school graduates in 2021 immediately started college — down from 70 percent which was typical between 2010 and 2018. This route is typical because we believe that additional education confers, or at least indicates, skills that employers value.
But college degrees are increasingly expensive to obtain, with student debt now totaling $1.77 trillion. And degree completion rates have stagnated in recent years. About 38 percent of the U.S. population currently holds a four-year degree or more. Notably, people of color and those from low-income backgrounds are less likely to start and complete college. These challenges affect the supply side of workforce development.
On the demand side, employers are experiencing vacancies. A recent Connecticut Business and Industry Association survey identified a lack of skilled applicants as the most common factor hampering business growth. While private sector employment has returned to pre-pandemic levels, state and local governments have been slower to recover, particularly in key sectors like Information Technology (IT). At the same time, many governments are also feeling pressure to hire more equitably, and using degrees as a screen for employment reinforces existing inequalities by race and social class.
[Source: U.S. Census Bureau]
These supply and demand forces have led many states to implement or explore policies that de-emphasize college degree requirements and prioritize alternative measures of applicants’ competencies. Skills-based hiring (SBH), and Learning and Employment Records (LERs) are two such policies.
Effectively, this pivot can be seen in the relationship between the applicant’s résumé and the firm or state’s job posting. In its most simplified form, SBH encourages hiring managers to consider educational credentials and work experiences as comparable in a job posting (counting a bachelor’s degree as four years of work experience). A more sophisticated version of SBH would consider whether candidates have verified records of discrete skills on their résumés, like industry-recognized credentials in IT and health care skills, or verified soft skills like Education Design Lab’s 21st Century Skills.
LERs complement SBH; they are secured and verified digital records of the skills a person possesses and/or the jobs they’ve held. North Dakota has a well-developed LER system, which allows all state residents to document their high school transcripts and any digital badges they’ve earned in a shareable digital wallet.
The first state to publicly shift toward SBH was Maryland in March of 2022. Since then, at least 19 other states have followed suit. Connecticut began studying the feasibility of SBH in June 2023 with the passage of SB 1124. Both nonprofit organizations and federal programs have been driving this policy shift. The National Governor’s Association created the Skills-Driven State Community of Practice to help states prepare the necessary data systems and policies to move toward SBH and implement LERs. Skills FWD is a grant program jointly funded by several philanthropic organizations to support states’ development of LERs. Connecticut participated in Phase 1 of the initiative, and its newly founded Office of Workforce Strategy is one of the inaugural cohort of Skills FWD grantees.
Pressure to de-emphasize degree requirements has been driven by a real or perceived lack of candidates with those credentials. Unemployment has remained at or below 4 percent nationally and in Connecticut since 2022. Recent analysis from the Burning Glass Institute indicated that public and private sector employers were removing the nominal degree requirements from an increasing number of job postings.
Importantly, however, this change affected only a small fraction (3.6 percent) of job postings overall. Further, their research indicated that many private-sector firms that made strong pronouncements about SBH ultimately saw no change in the proportion of workers without a bachelor’s degree. My analysis of six states showed that shifts toward SBH and LERs are being driven by governors’ offices with support from federal and/or foundation grants rather than by legislatures. Thus, changes in leadership or the end of program funding could render efforts to implement SBH and LERs short-lived.
The limited evidence we have so far suggests that skills-based hiring has made rhetorical progress among industry leaders and policymakers, both nationally and in Connecticut. But it has yet to make serious inroads into the labor market.
As a state, Connecticut is home to 43 colleges and universities and seems to be leading the regional charge toward SBH. In this context we must consider at least two things. First the rhetorical shift toward SBH may harm public perceptions of the value of college — which are at historic lows even as the college earnings premium remains high, and correlates with non-economic benefits.
Policymakers should consider how a pivot to SBH can be used to steer students into colleges, rather than away from them. Second, we must carefully monitor the economic impacts of SBH/LERs for residents without degrees. While this pivot has great potential to decrease occupational and wage stratification, and to improve the lives of people who do not complete college, it has not yet produced results and requires further study.
Daniel Douglas is a Lecturer in Sociology and a member, CT Scholars Strategy Network.