Indiana’s recently-elected governor is seeking to remove unnecessary college-degree requirements from state jobs.
Gov. Mike Braun, who took office this month, signed a January 15 executive order instructing the state personnel office to review job descriptions and determine which ones don’t truly need a college degree. His order points out that two-thirds of Indiana residents “do not have a postsecondary degree or higher.”
The executive order also instructs that hiring based on skills rather that degrees “can address labor shortages and provide additional pathways for worker advancement by prioritizing abilities and experience over formal postsecondary educational credentials.”
Brown is a Republican, but Democratic governors are moving in the same direction. Two weeks ago, California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom eliminated degree requirements for 30,000 government jobs, saying that “effort is part of the Newsom administration’s work to modernize state government and improve the hiring process by removing unnecessary barriers to public service jobs.” Newsom seeks to double the number of jobs not requiring a college degree, pending negotiations with unions, according to Center Square.
Hiring people with college degrees no longer pays for many employers. This might be because college degree holders no longer have higher IQs than the general public. “In recent decades, the intelligence quotient of university students and university graduates dropped to the average of the general population,” notes science writer Rolf Degen. “The results” of a recent study in Frontiers of Psychology “show that the average IQ of undergraduate students today is a mere 102 IQ points and declined by approximately 0.2 IQ points per year” since the mid-20th Century.
Many students learn little in college and can’t write coherently when they graduate. Nearly half of the nation’s undergraduates learned almost nothing in their first two years in college over a decade ago, according to a 2011 study by New York University’s Richard Arum and others. Thirty-six percent learned little even by graduation.
The Brookings Institution notes that Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Utah, and other states have stopped strictly requiring college degrees for up to 90% of state jobs, depending on the state.
In May 2023, Virginia got rid of bachelor’s degree requirements for 90 percent of state jobs. “Governor Glenn Youngkin announced today a landmark change in how state agencies will recruit and compete for talent by eliminating degree requirements, preferences or both for almost 90% of state classified positions,” according to a press release last week from the governor’s office. That change “will improve hiring processes, expand possibilities and career paths for job seekers and enhance our ability to deliver quality services,” Youngkin said.
