Demanding a Bachelor’s Degree for a Middle-Skill Job Is Just Plain Dumb

Ever wonder why employers demand advanced credentials for jobs that don’t seem to require them? So did Joseph Fuller, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School. He co-led a study that found it’s “a substantive and widespread phenomenon that is making the U.S. labor market more inefficient.” To take one egregious example, two-thirds of job postings for production supervisors require a four-year college degree—even though only 1 in 6 people already doing the job has that credential.

Credentialism obviously harms job applicants. What’s less obvious is that employers suffer, too. They miss out on new hires who—the study found—work hard, cost less, are easier to hire, and are less likely to quit. In other words, companies are deliberately bypassing a deep pool of talent. At many human resources departments, “Everyone’s strategy is to row as close as they can to the other boats and fish there,” says Fuller.