Byron Auguste: prediction

Transcript context

…If it’s the latter, you should be extremely optimistic, right? Well, it is both, but it’s definitely the latter. In other words, because you say privately, “We’re overvaluing the college degree” — again, if you unpack that, at the level of a hiring transaction, absolutely in most cases employers overvalue a college degree. But you’ve got to thin-slice it. I’m not saying that doctors shouldn’t have medical degrees or perhaps even that you need a civil engineering degree to be building a bridge. But we are requiring bachelor’s degrees for jobs in sales, in general management, in IT operations, where you can easily see whether someone has the skills or not. Millions of employers for millions of jobs — you’re adding these degree requirements. Yes, at the individual level, I think we are overvaluing degrees and we are undervaluing the skills of people who are skilled through alternative routes, or STARs. But at a system level, it’s incredibly destructive math. If 70 percent of new jobs in the 10 years to COVID were ones that employers said, “Oh, you need a bachelor’s degree,” but only 40 percent of American workers have a bachelor’s degree, well, then obviously, that math doesn’t work. It’s absolutely self-harm at a system level. It is a market problem, but it’s a collective-action problem too. The collective-action-problem version of your hypothesis seems much more plausible to me. As you know, putting aside pandemic times, employers are demanding not only more four-year degrees but master’s degrees or more for a lot of jobs. So the market has decided in a big way to move in the other direction. The level of market failure —…

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