The People Still Strong At Seventy Aren't The Ones With The Best Genetics Or The Strictest Routines.
Co-Founder and Chief Data Scientist
Fewer than 1 in 700 hires made by large U.S. employers in 2023 can be traced to a company's decision to drop a bachelor's degree requirement, according to a February 2024 analysis by the Burning Glass Institute and the Harvard Business School Project on Managing the Future of Work. Researchers Matt Sigelman, Joseph Fuller and Alex Martin tracked 11,300 roles at large firms using Lightcast job postings data and a database of 65 million U.S. career histories, and found that of the roughly 77 million annual hires the Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded that year, only about 97,000 represented genuinely new opportunity for workers without a four-year degree.
That gap sits underneath a wave of public commitments that is real at the level of the job posting. Between 2014 and 2023, the annual number of roles from which large employers removed a stated degree requirement rose almost fourfold, peaking in 2022. For a job seeker weighing whether a degree still matters at a given employer, the useful question isn't whether that employer issued a press release, but whether its actual hiring record backs it up.
A Fourfold Rise in Postings Barely Moved the Hiring Numbers
The Burning Glass Institute and Harvard team built its dataset from 769,980 distinct roles at large firms, defined as a given occupation at a given employer, going back to 2014. Only about 27,000 of those roles, or 3.6 percent, actually had a degree requirement removed during the period studied. Where a requirement was dropped, the share of hires without a bachelor's degree rose by an average of 3.5 percentage points. Multiplied across the small share of roles actually affected, that shift nets out to just 0.14 percentage points of incremental non-degreed hiring across the full labor market, the arithmetic behind the 97,000-worker, 1-in-700 estimate detailed in the full report.
A Third of Firms Account for Nearly All the Movement
The researchers sorted employers that dropped requirements into three groups. Thirty-seven percent, labeled Skills-Based Hiring Leaders, followed through, hiring an average of 18 percent more non-degreed workers into the affected roles; the group includes Walmart, Apple, General Motors, Target, Koch Industries, Cigna, Tyson Foods, ExxonMobil and Yelp, alongside the State of Minnesota and the City of Denver. Forty-five percent, classified as In Name Only, removed the posting language but showed no meaningful change in whom they hired, and at some of these firms, including Bank of America, Amazon, Oracle, Lockheed Martin, Kroger and Stellantis, the hiring mix actually tilted further toward degree holders. The remaining 18 percent, the Backsliders, made short-term gains before reverting, among them Nike, Uber, HSBC, Novartis, Delta Air Lines, Meijer, US Foods and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Even the Posting-Level Trend Has Started to Reverse
A separate, more recent data source complicates the picture further. Indeed Hiring Lab reported that the share of U.S. job postings with no formal education requirement rose to 52 percent by January 2024, up from 48 percent in 2019, while postings requiring at least a bachelor's degree fell to 17.8 percent from 20.4 percent over the same five years. That decline continued to an occupation-adjusted low of 18.5 percent in March 2024, on a 12-month moving average, then reversed. By November 2025, the unadjusted share requiring a bachelor's degree had climbed to 19.3 percent, and the mix-adjusted figure had risen to 18.6 percent, a pattern Indeed's researchers attributed to genuine increases in requirements rather than a shift in which jobs employers happened to be posting.
What Workers Gain When the Door Actually Opens
For the minority who do move into a role that once required a degree, the analysis found real financial upside: an average 25 percent salary increase, worth more than $12,400 in incremental annual earnings, and a two-year retention rate 10 percentage points higher than degreed coworkers at the same firms, 58 percent versus 48 percent, a 20 percent relative gain. The researchers estimate at least 250,000 more jobs a year, including construction managers, web developers, distribution managers and payroll clerks, could plausibly shed degree requirements given how many non-degreed workers already hold similar roles; 39 percent of construction manager postings, close to 70,000 positions, and 52 percent of web developer postings, roughly 45,000 positions, still require one.
For a workforce in which 37.7 percent of adults 25 and older held a bachelor's degree or higher as of 2022, according to Census Bureau data, up from about 8 percent in 1960, the implication is narrow but real. Dropping a degree requirement from a posting is a necessary first step, not evidence of changed behavior, and the safest assumption for a job seeker without a degree is that the listing alone says little about whether an employer is a Leader, an In Name Only case, or a Backslider.
