It was probably the most nerve-racking job interview of my life.
Across the table from me sat a person who had it all: years of professional experience, confidence and, perhaps most impressively from my vantage point, undergraduate and graduate degrees from two of the top journalism schools in the country. Here I was with a 10th-grade education and a G.E.D., hoping to impress a possible future colleague in an industry that expects impressive credentials.
It’s normal to be anxious in a job interview, so in a sense my desire for approval that day was not out of the ordinary. Except I wasn’t interviewing for the job. I was the interviewer. More specifically, I was a newly promoted digital editor at a major business magazine looking to hire my first staff writer.
I’ve never forgotten this dynamic: being in a managerial role in the New York City media industry — top of my game, as they say — and somehow still worrying that a job candidate might look up my educational background and wonder what right I had to be where I am.
That’s the real power of education.
When we talk about the education divide in this country, it’s often through the lens of political and cultural differences. College-educated Americans are assumed to be more progressive, vote Democratic, live in cities and work in professions that before the pandemic required being in an office. Their non-degreed counterparts, the story goes, tend to be more conservative, rural and employed in the kinds of blue-collar jobs that have been disappearing for the last 40 years.
Academic studies and polling data back up these stereotypes to some extent, but they are only one piece of a bigger picture about the giant rifts that have formed and continue to form between Americans who benefit from higher education and those who don’t.
The education divide is equally about who gives us a chance, who lets us in the room and which rooms we get to be in. It’s what made my encounter as a non-degreed editor interviewing a job candidate with a master’s from a top journalism school feel so poignant. Had our roles in the interview been reversed that day, it’s hard to imagine that my résumé would even have been considered.
Even after 17 years as a working journalist, I can’t take being in the room for granted. Job hunting in the white-collar world can be an especially demoralizing exercise when you have no formal education. I still recall a personal low point in the summer of 2016, when I was swept up in a large round of layoffs — not unlike the kind we’ve been hearing so much about recently. I was 45, newly married and suddenly severed from the online news publication where I’d worked as a reporter and editor. I felt good about my prospects, but despite having a decade of full-time newsroom experience under my belt, I couldn’t win the precious attention of hiring managers in media.
In fact, I couldn’t even get my résumé in front of them. Without a bachelor’s degree — long considered the de facto minimum qualification for a career in journalism — my online job applications were likely being swallowed up by algorithmic forces beyond my control, lost to the void of hiring software that was built to weed out the undesirable. Thanks to résumé screening, my years of experience no longer counted for me as much as my lack of schooling counted against me.
This was an era when software start-ups like Lever and Greenhouse were attracting big investors with the promise of building next-generation platforms for recruitment and hiring. In my 2016 search, finding a job seemed to be all about pointing and clicking, filling out fields, pressing send and hoping for the best. Technology had removed key frictions from the application process, necessitating a new kind of automated gate-keeping. Employers, like romance seekers on dating websites, assumed they knew exactly what they were looking for. Your chances of getting through the filters were wholly dependent on meeting a long list of predetermined attributes.
And for journalism, those attributes included a college-level education. I quickly learned during my discouraging job search that summer how easy it is to get ensnared by an applicant tracking system when your schooling stops at a G.E.D., or when you have gaps in your job history because of struggles with addiction, or when you’d spent your 20s working in retail. With nuance, I could perhaps explain my unusual back story to a human being, but how do you reason with a portal?
The good news is, future job searches may not always be as bleak as mine have been. Companies from Google to G.M. to Delta Air Lines are dropping college degree requirements for many roles, focusing instead on “skills-based hiring,” a philosophy that emphasizes people over pedigrees. Some high-profile chief executives, including Ryan Roslansky of LinkedIn, have been vocal about the benefits of a skills-based approach for companies looking to broaden their talent pipelines. And the Business Roundtable introduced its Multiple Pathways Initiative with the goal of improving diversity, equity and inclusion at all levels of corporate America by emphasizing “the value of skills” in recruitment, retention and advancement. This movement is not new, but the tight labor market, along with some of the inequities that were made more apparent by the pandemic, have brought it to the fore.
Having spent so many years in a profession where college is the default starting point, I suspect that it will take more than a few adjustments to H.R. software filters to produce meaningful change. Consider the ever-persistent education wage gap, which has been widening for decades and by some measures got even worse during the past few years. Recently updated data published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York indicated that the median annual wage for younger workers with a bachelor’s degree was $52,000 in 2022, compared to $34,320 for high school graduates in the same age group. Meanwhile, wage gaps along racial and gender lines persist at all education levels, as evidenced by a 2021 report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. Education can be a reasonably reliable predictor of lifetime earnings, the report found, but it’s only one part of a “complex equation.”
It’s probably also worth pointing out that most studies you’ll read about the education divide are written by people on one side of it. The same holds true for most news articles. Can we be so surprised that the media presents an incomplete picture about higher education when so few journalists navigate the working world without a four-year degree?
Assumptions around higher education just need to evolve. I still remember the boss at a weekly newspaper where I once worked who told me to toss résumés in the garbage if they didn’t have a college listed on them. Changing hearts and minds is hard, but changing habits is harder. One 2022 survey conducted by Morning Consult found that even though 72 percent of employers said they didn’t believe a college degree was a great indicator of a person’s skills, more than half still hired candidates from degree programs anyway because they saw doing so as a “less risky choice.”
Even I understand why they feel that way. When I was interviewing job candidates for that staff writer position, I can’t recall a single résumé that didn’t include a four-year degree. Most of the people I end up working with in journalism are college graduates, many of whom rightly saw college as their ticket to a better life. And most of them are talented, driven and more than qualified.
Higher education is always going to be a great way to secure professional opportunities and ensure the chance for upward mobility. Maybe it’s even the best way. But need it be the only way?
