Over the past decade, California cities, counties, and the state government have been changing the job descriptions for thousands of employees — either by removing the requirement for a high school, college, or graduate-level degree or by detailing alternative ways that candidates can gain the same skills. More changes are on the horizon. Read on to learn how skills-based hiring is playing out in California

The nation's unemployment rate is low, but some big companies are laying off workers and requiring people to return to the office. Guy Berger, director of economic research at the Burning Glass Institute, joined CBS News to assess the state of the labor market.

‘“If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today,” the commission declared, “we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” At a time when Japanese cars were widely perceived as being superior to American models, the Germans were stealing away U.S. market share in machine tools and the Koreans were making inroads in steel, it was a warning that resonated.

Elevate academic standards in our K-12 schools, the commission implored, or we would soon be swamped by a “rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future.”

But by ushering in these academic reforms, the report’s greatest legacy may well have been this: It reinforced the idea that unless every student wound up going to college, we had failed them — and they had failed themselves….

…“There are some hints of progress. More than 15 states have eliminated the need for a four-year degree for most government agency jobs. Several prominent companies, including IBM and Accenture, have started to look for skills, instead of credentials, in their hiring. Such moves prompted the Burning Glass Institute, which conducts research into learning and work, to proclaim last year an “emerging degree reset.“

Despite growing public skepticism about the value of college, the cost of obtaining a degree from any of the University of North Carolina System’s 16 universities is worth it, according to a study evaluating the financial outcomes of graduates of the system.

Graduates who complete an undergraduate degree at one of the UNC System’s universities have a median lifetime return on investment of $500,000 compared to North Carolinians without undergraduate degrees. And completing a degree resulted in upward economic mobility for nearly 90 percent of low-income students.

These are some of the highlights of the results of a study the system released earlier this month that examined return on investment between 2015 and 2020 for the 724 undergraduate programs and 575 graduate programs across the UNC System. The study also found that students who complete graduate degrees had a median lifetime return on investment of $938,000 compared to those with just a bachelor’s degree.

The North Carolina General Assembly commissioned and funded the study. Over the past year-and-a-half, Deloitte, a private research firm, worked with consulting firms rpk Group and The Burning Glass Institute to analyze decades of wage data for graduates living in-state to calculate the return on investment for each degree, which was defined as lifetime earnings minus the costs of obtaining the degree.

The Seattle area has the highest proportion of advanced tech workers in the country relative to cities with similarly sized tech workforces, a new ranking from the Burning Glass Institute shows. Home to Amazon.com and Microsoft MSFT-1.40% .., , Seattle bested other West Coast hubs in attracting talent with cutting-edge skills, while cities weighed down by legacy tech jobs fell further behind.

What makes a cutting-edge city? Burning Glass ranked established and aspiring tech hubs across the U.S. by the share of their tech workforce that boasts a set of cutting-edge skills: those that are most in-demand and most well-paid.

The resulting ranking shows which cities across the country are fertile ground for companies looking to hire for roles requiring advanced skills or expand into new markets. At the opposite end of the spectrum are cities where finding highly skilled workers is becoming more difficult.

"This ranking has a lot of really important lessons here for cities and some warning signs," says Matt Sigelman, president of the Burning Glass Institute. "You can be a city with a relatively large tech workforce, but if that tech workforce doesn't have the same concentration of the most valuable talent, of the most valuable skills, then you can lose your edge very quickly."

Pittsburgh, whose prosperity once relied heavily on Andrew Carnegie’s steel mills, now draws much of its vibrancy from another legacy of the Scottish industrialist: Carnegie Mellon University.

CMU’s expertise in computer science and robotics is helping to draw high-tech jobs to the Pittsburgh metro area, as shown in a new study by the Burning Glass Institute ranking cities in terms of the “future readiness” of their labor forces.

Pittsburgh ranks fifth among large metro areas in the “momentum” category—or the growth in the number of technology workers and demand for advanced skills, according to the Burning Glass study. In that category, the Pittsburgh metro area trailed only those of Seattle; San Jose, Calif.; San Francisco; and Austin, Texas. The institute cited demand for software skills, including cybersecurity. Much of the demand for those skills comes from a growing array of tech companies and the presence of two major banks, Bank of New York Mellon and PNC Financial Services Group.

Despite the many clickbaity headlines and apocalyptic fearmongering around AI and job automation, the data are rather clear: As I highlight in my latest book, I, Human: AI, Automation, and the Quest to Reclaim What Makes Us Unique, you are less likely to lose your job to AI than to another human using AI, especially if you don’t use AI yourself. In that sense, there’s nothing new about the AI age; just like previous disruptive technologies, AI is eliminating some jobs but creating many more new jobs in turn, which desperately require humans.

As illustrated in our recent ManpowerGroup report, 58% of employers see AI as a net creator of new jobs. The problem is that people who are displaced by job automation (for example, brick-and-mortar store managers) don’t automatically have access to all the new jobs that are created by technology (for example, cybersecurity analyst, digital marketer, or AI ethicist). According to the World Economic Forum, half of employees will need reskilling by 2025 to keep up with new technologies, and this figure predates the current generative AI boom…

This will also increase diversity and inclusion. As Harvard’s Joseph Fuller and Christina Langer and Burning Glass Institute’s Matt Sigelman point out: “The shift to skills-based hiring will open opportunities to a large population of potential employees who in recent years have often been excluded from consideration because of degree inflation.” If organizations complain about their inability to find diverse and creative talent, they should stop looking for talent in the same old places and ways….

“Economic growth has weakened considerably, but it’s still relatively easy for people to find jobs. That’s puzzling economists, who are used to seeing job offers disappear when growth slows. In other words, it’s a happy day for labor.

Things could get stranger. Judging from recent trends, there’s a chance that the economy slows down even more — or even shrinks — and yet the unemployment rate stays low…

I asked Gad Levanon, the chief economist of the Burning Glass Institute, if he could imagine a recession with low unemployment. “It never happened before,” he said. “But theoretically it is possible, and I think now it is as close as we ever got to it.

This chart shows an index of labor market tightness that Levanon created. It’s a composite of nine indicators, normalized so that the average value of each is zero. The data sources are the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Conference Board and the National Federation of Independent Business.”

Joining the bottom of the consulting-firm food chain typically means working 12-hour days, juggling work during vacations and fixing PowerPoint fonts late at night. These days, many rookie consultants are just hoping to be on a project—any project.

For the first time in years, recent hires have too little to do—and that’s stressing them out more than the round-the-clock work they anticipated. Some young consultants “on the bench” or “on the beach”—lingo for being between clients—say they spend downtime exercising, watching Netflix or napping, while still getting paid. Such a scenario might sound too good to be true for many in corporate America. For this cohort of high achievers, who thought they’d pull themselves up the ladder through their work on thorny business challenges, it’s far from ideal. 

Too much time on the bench makes it harder for consultants to develop the strategic-thinking and communication skills that catapult them into their next jobs, said Matt Sigelman, a former McKinsey consultant who is president of the Burning Glass Institute, a think tank focused on the future of work. 

In years past, having a college degree was required for almost every salaried job—and many hourly jobs, as well. Candidates who didn't have a degree often would lose out on opportunities and struggle to advance their careers.

Recently, widespread talent shortages and a number of other cultural shifts have prompted more employers to revisit that requirement.

About two-thirds of working-age adults (64 percent) do not hold a bachelor's degree, and undergraduate college enrollment fell by 8 percent from 2019 to 2022. The share of jobs that require a college degree fell to 44 percent last year, down from 51 percent in 2017, according to research from the Burning Glass Institute.

As a result, major employers such as Dell, IBM and Bank of America have eliminated the college degree requirement for most jobs, and many other businesses are following suit.

A four-year college education is a big and long-term investment, as the 40 million plus Americans who carry $1.6 trillion in federal student debt know all too well. Nevertheless, it can be worth it, because of the college wage premium– the extra salary graduates with four year college degrees earn over those who have only high school diplomas. In fact, one of the metrics Forbes used to rank the Top 500 Colleges for 2023, is how many months or years of excess wages it takes for alumni of a college to pay off the net cost (after scholarships and discounts) of their degrees.

With payments and interest on federal student debt about to resume after a Covid pandemic moratorium that began in March 2020, the payoff from college is front of mind these days. Which is why an analysis released this week by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco is particularly timely. It shows a flattening of the college wage premium, which grew substantially between 2000 and the 2010s.

In addition to the Census data, there’s anecdotal evidence that good workers without college degrees are in higher demand these days. Some large companies, including Google, IBM, and Accenture, now offer college degree-free ways into their operations. In 2021, IBM announced it had removed bachelor’s degree requirements for more than half of its job openings in the U.S. In 2021, just 26% of job postings for software QA engineers at Accenture required a degree, according to a report from the Burning Glass Institute. Meanwhile, Oracle required degrees for 100% of postings for the same position and Apple required degrees in 90% of them.

IBM is hiring people without degrees to help it recruit a more diverse workforce. "There are brilliant people everywhere, but opportunity is not the same for everyone," says Jenny Taylor MBE, who leads the company's early professional programmes.

As well as having entry-level programmes, IBM has removed degree requirements from many other job listings, so people aren't disadvantaged later in their careers.

Research by The Burning Glass Institute found that only 29% of IBM's listings for a Software Quality Assurance (QA) Engineer in the US required a degree. By comparison, it was between 90% and 100% at four other big-name tech companies.

College costs have notably increased from a decade or so ago — after adjusting for inflation the cost of an average year of undergraduate study has risen by more than $5,000 since 2007. And as higher education expenses have gone up, student loan debt has followed suit — the average Federal student loan balance has doubled over that same period.

College graduates tend to earn more money. The income gap between those with a college degree and those with only a high school education is growing and increases with age. Whatever you spend on college, you’re likely to end up making that back and more, says Sandy Baum, a nonresident senior fellow at the Urban Institute’s Center on Education Data and Policy.

Without factoring in scholarships or other financial aid, the return of a college degree tends to outweigh the investment. On average, college graduates earn 1.2 million dollars more over their lifetime and are less likely to be unemployed. Even at the most expensive school in the country, and assuming you have to pay every dollar, you got no scholarship, you’d be getting an amazing return, says Matt Sigelman, president of The Burning Glass Institute, a nonprofit research center.

The National Skills Coalition, a research and advocacy organization focused on workforce training, has issued a new report detailing best practices for states to assess the quality of nondegree credentials. The organization worked with almost a dozen states to help them develop assessment models for nondegree credential programs.

The report, released today, notes that there are thousands of nondegree credential options offered by hundreds of providers in and outside higher ed nationwide, ranging from certificates to badges to occupational licenses and apprenticeships. But determining the quality of programs has been a long-standing challenge for state education and workforce development agencies and public and private employers.

Ensuring these credentials provide economic and educational value is a high-stakes matter for students and workers who enroll in the programs.

While economics is often called the dismal science, there is cheerful news coming from an area of study called the economics of skill development. This field analyzes the relationship between hard and soft skills—our cognitive and noncognitive domains—and how these domains affect wages and labor-market success. The good news is that, beyond simply mapping these relations, this discipline also identifies skills across industries and careers that boost upward mobility and promote pathways to opportunity. And its findings on the importance of soft skills such as communication and cooperation for wage progression have implications for school and life.

Unfortunately, most American K-12 schools have not yet caught on to the importance of skill development and do not teach foundational skills to their students. But these new insights can help K-12 educators understand what foundational skills young people should learn before they graduate from high school, whether they go into the workforce or college. These insights also should guide the development of an opportunity program for young people—one based on the complementary relationship between hard and soft skills, between the cognitive and technical domains and the social relationships needed for success.

aby Boomers are getting older. Born between 1946 and 1964, the youngest members of this generation are turning 59 this year. The generational shift is being felt throughout the economy—and the workforce.

According to Moody's, an estimated 70 percent of the drop in labor force participation since the end of 2019 was due to the retirement of aging workers. Baby Boomers are exiting the labor force at a higher rate than any other population; the labor force participation rate for Americans over age 55 has fallen 1.5 percentage points since before the pandemic.

In addition, research from Gad Levanon, chief economist at The Burning Glass Institute in New York City, shows that working-age population growth is slowing to a halt for the first time in U.S. history, a trend that will continue through the rest of the decade.

Which colleges best set up its graduates for careers in finance? Or data science? Or law? It turns out that different schools really help students pursue careers in different fields. And other schools, not so much. Our guest, Matt Sigelman, from the Burning Glass Institute, helps breakdown the latest research that they published with the Wall Street Journal on the topic and helps you know what it all means—plus other insights on the connections between education and careers.

For those who have been in the worlds of education and workforce, you probably know Matt and the great analytical work he has led to help build the field of labor market analytics. This conversation is the first in a semi-regular set that Matt and I plan on having each year to help share insights from the latest in research that the Burning Glass Institute does and help share why it matters.

June 7, 2023

By Liam Knox

The Ohio State House of Representatives passed a higher education bill last week to ensure that colleges are transparent in their communications about the cost of their degree programs and the returns their graduates can expect on that investment.

Ohio House Bill 27, which passed by a vote of 88 to 1 Thursday, would require public colleges and universities in the state to send admitted students who qualify for financial aid a one-page “financial cost and aid disclosure form” in their aid packets. The form would offer a full breakdown of the net cost of a degree, including the expected duration of the student’s financial aid package, a clear definition of grants versus loans, and the minimum monthly loan payments required of the student after graduating. It would also mandate that institutions share with admitted students postgraduation data on outcomes…

Matt Sigelman, president of the Burning Glass Institute, a nonprofit focused on workforce research, said he recognized lawmakers could have hostile motivations for introducing transparency bills in an age of increasing state disinvestment and right-wing hostility to higher education funding.

But the data, he said, are on higher ed’s side. On average, graduates with bachelor’s degrees earn 84 percent more over their lifetimes than people with only high school diplomas, according to a study from the Georgetown CEW. And if institutions or programs do underperform for students, making consumers aware of that is a worthy public service when the data are presented in good faith.

“Yes, this is being driven by hostile legislatures. But I think everything that we’ve seen in the data for the most part shows that college degrees are worth it,” Sigelman said. “If lawmakers want to bring accountability measures to prove that, I say game on.”