Could New U.S. Moves Give a Boost to the Skills-Over-Degrees Movement? – The Chronicle of Higher Education
I’m Goldie Blumenstyk, a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education, covering innovation in and around academe. As the Covid-19 crisis continues, here’s what I’m thinking about this week.
Two developments that could matter to higher ed? I took a few days off last week, so I’m still catching up on the implications of two recent news events. The farther-reaching one is an Executive Order that President Trump just issued that aims to change the “overreliance on college degrees” in federal hiring policies. The other is the Stop Hate for Profit campaign, urging companies and other organizations to halt their advertising on Facebook in July to protest what advocates argue are hate-speech, incitement, and misinformation policies that “come up short.”
The Executive Order on Modernizing and Reforming the Assessment and Hiring of Federal Job Candidates says that federal agencies can no longer prescribe a minimum educational requirement for jobs, except in cases where such a qualification is legally required by a state or locality. It also calls on federal agencies to use assessments of job candidates that do not rely solely on educational attainment.
While it might be facile to see this order as merely an anti-intellectual, Trumpian gesture, the skills-based hiring movement has support in many quarters, particularly among organizations that see it as an avenue for providing more economic opportunities to millions of Black and Hispanic people lacking a degree. (Indeed the Opportunity Marketplace I described last month is one example of a project designed to help level the field in hiring.)