Two people argue it properly, the reformer and the reader of Bourdieu, and the place where they collide produces something neither of them started with.
In March 2022, Maryland announced that it would stop requiring four year degrees for roughly half of its state jobs, a workforce of about 38,000 people. Pennsylvania followed: its governor's first executive order announced that 92 percent of some 65,000 commonwealth positions do not require a four-year degree, and ordered a review of the remaining 8 percent. Utah went further still: of 1,080 classified state job types, 98 percent no longer require a bachelor's degree. Three governments, tens of thousands of roles, one confident story about tearing down the paper ceiling.
Now ask what happened next. For Maryland there is one real number, and it is a real one: between May and August of 2022 the state hired 1,836 people without four-year degrees, a 41 percent increase over the same four months a year earlier, according to the state labor secretary's office. Four months, in a workforce of 38,000. For Pennsylvania and Utah, as far as I could find, there is no published outcome at all. The announcements were measured in headlines. The effects, in two of the three states, were not measured at all.
Hold that asymmetry in mind, because it turns out to be the answer to the question in the title. But first, the fight.
The question is genuinely live: should hiring abandon educational credentials? It deserves better than a strawman on either side, so here are two people arguing it properly. Call them the reformer and the reader of Bourdieu. Both are right about more than their opponents concede, and the place where they collide produces something neither of them started with.
The reformer's case
The reformer's argument starts with what a degree actually costs and what it actually tells you. Four years and, in the United States, routinely six figures of family money or debt, to produce a signal that says: this person completed a sequence of institutional requirements, most of which have nothing to do with the job in front of you. The sociologist Randall Collins made the sharp version of this point back in 1979 in The Credential Society: degrees function less as measures of productive skill than as cultural currencies that regulate access to positions. And because they are currencies, they inflate. As more people hold bachelor's degrees, employers demand them for jobs that never needed them, then demand master's degrees to stand out from the bachelor's crowd. The requirement ratchets up without the work changing at all.
Worse, says the reformer, the credential does not even price talent. It prices upbringing. The child who arrives at university comfortable with the register, the essay form, the unwritten rules of seminar behavior, arrives that way because of years of family socialization that sociologists can measure and working families cannot buy. A degree requirement on a job posting is, in expectation, a parental income requirement wearing academic robes. If you wanted to design a filter that laundered inherited advantage into the appearance of merit, you would design something very like the bachelor's degree.
And now, the reformer continues, we can finally do better, because the thing the degree was supposedly proxying has become directly measurable. Work samples, structured take homes, portfolio review, paid trial projects: the tooling for evaluating actual work has never been cheaper, and modern AI assistance makes designing and scoring these assessments cheaper still. Measure the work, not the wrapper. Real employers have acted on exactly this logic. When the Harvard Business School Project on Managing the Future of Work and the Burning Glass Institute studied the movement, the firms that genuinely moved included Koch Industries, Walmart, Apple, General Motors, Target, Cigna, Tyson Foods, ExxonMobil and Yelp, alongside public employers like the State of Minnesota and the City of Denver. This is not a fringe experiment. It is the labor market's center of gravity conceding that the degree filter was never load bearing.
The reader of Bourdieu replies
The reader of Bourdieu listens to all of this and agrees with an uncomfortable amount of it. Yes, the credential prices upbringing; Pierre Bourdieu built his career demonstrating exactly how schools convert family advantage into official certificates, a process he called the institutionalization of cultural capital. The degree does not certify what you know. It certifies what an institution recognized you as knowing, and that recognition was shaped by class from the first day of kindergarten.
But here is where the reader parts company with the reformer: the conclusion does not follow. The reformer reasons as if hiring were a physics experiment where you remove friction and motion becomes free. Hiring is not like that. Every open role gets filled through some mechanism, and if you delete one filter, you do not get filterlessness. You get whatever mechanism was standing behind it. So the honest question is never credential or no credential. It is credential compared to what.
And we know what the what is. It is the network. Referrals are one of the largest hiring channels that exists; across studies the estimates for the share of hires arriving through referral run from roughly 25 percent to as high as 60 percent, a range so wide it is itself a warning about how poorly this channel is measured. And referral networks have a thoroughly documented property: homophily. People refer people like themselves. The research here is unusually concrete. Even after conditioning on where workers live, employees refer candidates of similar age, ethnicity, gender, marital status, and even smoking status. People refer within their own race, gender, ethnic group and national origin. A referral program left unguarded does not select for skill. It reproduces the demographics it inherits, and the literature links heavy referral reliance to inequality, blocked economic mobility, and lost productivity, because closed channels do not surface the best candidates, only the nearest ones.
Notice what the reader of Bourdieu is not claiming. The tempting sentence here, that networks are more class locked than universities ever were, is a sentence nobody can currently back; the homophily evidence and the credential evidence exist, but a study that directly compares the closure of the two systems does not, or at least I could not find one. The argument does not need it. It runs on substitution under uncertainty: the reform removes a filter whose class correlation is measured and visible, and hiring then leans harder on a channel whose class correlation is also real but mostly uncounted. You have not removed the gate. You have moved it somewhere darker.
Granovetter showed half a century ago that jobs travel through acquaintances more than through close friends, which means the network channel is not a corruption of hiring. It is hiring, and it always has been. The degree requirement, whatever its sins, was at least a gate a stranger could pass through. Delete it without building anything in its place and the default gatekeeper is the org chart's address book.
The evidence both of them have to survive
So far this could end in a polite stalemate: the credential is classed, the network is classed, pick your poison. What breaks the symmetry is the study both voices have been circling. In 2024, the Harvard and Burning Glass team examined 11,300 roles at large firms that had publicly embraced skills based hiring. The headline findings look like a demolition of the reformer. Only 3.6 percent of the roles studied actually dropped a degree requirement. Within those roles, the share of workers hired without a bachelor's rose about three and a half percentage points. Scaled against the economy, the researchers put the net effect at roughly 97,000 additional workers out of 77 million hires in 2023. That is fewer than one hire in 700 touched by the loudest hiring reform of the decade.
The reader of Bourdieu is entitled to a moment of grim satisfaction here, because this is what announcement without instrumentation looks like: theatre measured in press releases. Recall Pennsylvania and Utah, where the scope of the announcement is known to the percentage point and the outcome is not known at all.
But the same study contains a second finding that cuts the other way, and it is the most important number in this essay. The near-zero aggregate is not a uniform near-zero. Roughly a third of the firms that changed their postings produced almost all of the movement, and those firms increased their share of workers without degrees by close to 20 percent. Two thirds changed the words and changed nothing else; one third changed the words and then actually changed their screening, their interviewing, their manager expectations, and got a fifth more non-degree hires. That distribution is bimodal, and the difference between the humps is not belief in the reform. It is implementation.
Read correctly, the study is not evidence that skills based hiring fails. It is evidence that it works when a company does the unglamorous follow through and that most companies do not. An execution finding, not an efficacy finding. The reformer gets to keep the claim that the reform is real, with named companies proving it. What the reformer loses is the comfortable story that deleting a line from the job posting accomplishes anything by itself.
And the reader of Bourdieu has to answer the 37 percent. If the reform were structurally doomed, if removing the credential simply handed hiring to the address book everywhere, the movers should not exist. They do exist, at a fifth of their hiring. What the reader can say, and should, is that the movers succeeded precisely by not leaving a vacuum: they replaced the degree filter with designed evaluation rather than with default social machinery. Which is a concession with a very interesting shape, because it means the fight was never really about the credential.
What the fight was actually about
Step back and ask a strange question: how do we know any of the numbers above? How do we know the reform underdelivered by a factor of 700? Because a degree is countable. It is legible, binary, recorded in applicant tracking systems and resumes and census data. A researcher can look at 11,300 roles and say with confidence which required a degree, which dropped the requirement, and who was hired without one. The degree's failure was measurable because the degree is measurable.
Now try to run the same audit on the network. Publish the study that says referral hiring underdelivered, or overdelivered, by one in 700. You cannot. Nobody can, and it is not for lack of trying; the 25 to 60 percent range for referral share is what measurement looks like when the object resists counting. There is no clean record of who was hired because a manager already knew them, no counterfactual file of the strangers who were never considered because the role was filled from inside a network before it was ever really open. The channel that would inherit hiring from the credential is the channel about which our knowledge is a rumor with error bars.
That asymmetry is the essay's finding, and notice that it was derived, not asserted: the strongest critique of the credential system that exists, the Harvard and Burning Glass audit, was only possible because credentials leave records. The degree requirement's most defensible property turns out to be not that it measures skill. It plainly does not. It is that it makes the gate visible enough to criticize. A bad filter you can see, count, and litigate against beats a comparably biased filter that dissolves into a thousand private judgments the moment you look at it, because the visible filter can be caught failing. The Maryland number, for all its missing denominator, exists. The equivalent number for network hiring in Maryland does not and cannot.
So both voices were right, and both were aiming at the wrong target. The reformer is right that the credential is a poor proxy that prices parental income; the reader of Bourdieu is right that deleting it does not produce meritocracy, it produces succession, with the network as heir. The question that actually decides outcomes is the one neither started with: which gatekeeper is auditable.
One more honest note. The two halves of this argument are each well covered territory. Bourdieu on credentials is textbook sociology; the underdelivery of skills based hiring is trade press wallpaper. What I could not find anywhere, and I looked, is anyone joining them: a treatment of degree requirement removal that asks what fills the vacated gate and whether the replacement can be audited. The two literatures run past each other. That gap is the only novelty this essay claims.
What to do with this on Monday
For anyone who actually hires, the finding converts into practice directly.
First, if you remove the degree requirement, instrument the replacement the same week. The 37 percent who moved did not just delete a sentence; they built the thing that stands where the sentence stood. Decide explicitly what your new gate is, and make sure it writes records: who entered the funnel, through which channel, evaluated by what.
Second, prefer gates that leave audit trails. A structured work sample with a rubric committed before the candidate is seen, scored with the name removed, is not just fairer than vibes. It is checkable in a way vibes never are: you can go back, recount, and catch your own gate failing, which is the property the degree accidentally had and your intuition never will.
Third, treat referrals as a measured channel, not a default. Referrals are not evil; they are unpriced. Log the source of every hire, put the referral share on a dashboard next to its demographics, and decide on purpose how much of your hiring you want flowing through a channel that reproduces whatever your org chart already looks like.
The paper ceiling is real, and worth tearing. Just remember what the paper was doing: it was the part of the wall you could see. Kill the credential if you replace it with something you can count. Kill it without that, and you have not opened the gate. You have painted it invisible.
Sources
Harvard Business School Project on Managing the Future of Work and the Burning Glass Institute, Skills-Based Hiring: The Long Road from Pronouncements to Practice (2024); HBS Institute for Business in Global Society summary of the degree gap research.
HR Dive, "Employers are failing at skills-based hiring" (2024) and "Pennsylvania ends four-year degree requirement for majority of state jobs" (2023).
Maryland's outcome figure (1,836 hires without four-year degrees between May and August 2022, a 41 percent year-over-year increase) is attributed to the Maryland labor secretary's office, as reported by Stateline, NewsNation and ACCT; Pennsylvania's 92 percent of ~65,000 positions is from Governor Shapiro's Executive Order 2023-03 and the accompanying 18 January 2023 announcement, which also ordered a review of the remaining 8 percent.
Brookings Institution, "States are leading the way in tearing the paper ceiling" (2023); National Conference of State Legislatures brief on states eliminating degree requirements; BestColleges reporting on state degree requirement removals.
Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (1977); Pierre Bourdieu, "The Forms of Capital" (1986).
Randall Collins, The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification (1979).
Mark Granovetter, "The Strength of Weak Ties," American Journal of Sociology (1973).
Labour Economics (ScienceDirect), study of gender homophily in employee job referrals (2024); Zeltzer et al., "Job Referrals and Economic Immobility" (arXiv, 2020); Columbia Business School working paper on hiring through referrals; Carrier Management summary of referral homophily findings (2016).
A bad filter you can see beats a comparably biased filter you cannot.
That is a provenance argument, and it generalises well past hiring. Chain of Consciousness is the machinery for the version that applies to systems: a tamper-evident record of what was decided and on what basis, written at the moment of the decision rather than reconstructed afterward under pressure, so the gate can be caught failing by someone who was not in the room and does not have to trust you.
pip install chain-of-consciousness · npm install chain-of-consciousness
Or the whole stack, provenance and ratings and verification together: pip install agent-trust-stack / npm install agent-trust-stack.
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