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Conventional wisdom is that you have to have a four year degree to be qualified for most white collar jobs. We’ve seen this play out over the last 30 years as the number of people working in professional or managerial positions has more than doubled, but the share of people who enjoyed that job growth without a college degree is only 13%. This creates a two-fold problem. First, 62% of working age adults who are without a degree are effectively shut out of a large segment of the job market. Second, companies are losing out on an entire group of otherwise well-qualified candidates who could bring a wealth of learned experience and skills.
By defaulting to this way of thinking, hiring managers exclude the largest and most diverse part of the workforce. It’s not hard to understand how something like this happens: degrees and certifications are quantifiable measures that speak to the exposure an applicant has had to particular theories and training. They don’t, however, measure an applicant’s skills or ability to learn new skills.
Thankfully, there’s another quantifiable metric that can help hiring managers identify the best and brightest non-degree holding applicants: distance traveled. What is distance traveled? Distance Traveled reflects the skills, attitudes, and abilities someone has learned as a result of their lived experiences. It focuses on qualities like grit, resilience, and resourcefulness, traits that often don’t appear on a resume but are critical in today’s workplace. Employees with higher distance traveled are better able to adapt to changing circumstances and new challenges.
Non-degree holders: untapped potential
In the grand scheme of history, limiting professional and managerial opportunities to degree holders is a pretty new phenomenon. Before the mid-twentieth century, it simply wasn’t feasible: in 1960 only 7.7% of American adults had a bachelor's degree or higher. In fact only 41.1% of Americans had a high school diploma. And it wasn’t an issue; in the 1960s the United States GDP grew annually by 5% on average, and average wages grew by 32%. In the intervening six decades the percentage of adults with a college degree has risen to a staggering 37.5%.
There’s a lot of debate about how this happened, but the most common factors cited are the creation of government backed student loans and a bipartisan progressive movement that prioritized access to education.But in the last two decades, another factor emerged that created immense pressure to get a degree: degree-inflation. To quote the Harvard Business Review:
"Early in the 2000s, a significant number of employers began adding degree requirements to the descriptions of jobs that hadn’t previously required degrees, even though the jobs themselves hadn’t changed. The trend — sometimes known as “degree inflation” — became particularly pronounced after the Great Recession of 2008-2009[.]"