By Rebecca L. Watts, Ph.D.
In his first executive order since taking office, Governor Josh Shapiro removed a requirement of a four-year college degree for 92% of all state government jobs. The decision affects 65,000 commonwealth government jobs, including about 550 currently open on the state’s job website. The new governor’s move is aligned with national hiring trends in the private and government sectors.
Shapiro has garnered praise from national media outlets and sparked a conversation that is long overdue about the return on investment of higher education. For starters, student debt still looms as a national crisis. More than 43 million Americans owe a combined $1.75 trillion in federal and private student costs. Two generations of employees, millennial and Gen Z, worry that they will never be able to afford a home or retire due to crushing student debt levels.
The executive order also tackles a workforce bottleneck. Even before the pandemic, back in 2019, the Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry Economic Survey showed that PA employers listed a lack of qualified applicants as the most pressing issue they face.
The governor’s action brings hope, removing a barrier for skilled people who were shut out of thriving wage jobs because they did not have a particular degree. According to the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey covering the five-year period ending in 2021, a majority of Pennsylvanians (67%) age 25 and older have no college degree or only an associate degree. They can now benefit from a change in focus to skills-specific requirements.
There’s no doubt that in the long-term a college degree will continue to be a worthwhile pursuit. The 2019 median income for a Pennsylvanian with a bachelor’s degree was approximately $54,000 compared to a median income of $32,000 for high school graduates without a college degree. Additionally, the national average unemployment rate for holders of a bachelor’s degree was 2.2% in 2019, compared to an unemployment rate of 2.7% for those with an associate degree and 3.7% for high school graduates.
These income and opportunity gaps compound annually and span generations.
One thing is clear: to remain relevant, the higher education sector must adapt to new realities. To this end, nonprofit, accredited Western Governors University (WGU) leads the Open Skills Network (OSN), a coalition of employers, education providers, policy makers, military, non-profits, and other stakeholders dedicated to advancing skills-based education and hiring.
The mission includes workforce development efforts like skills mapping – an industry-by-industry, sector-by-sector, job-by-job description of needed skills and their value in the workplace – to ensure our graduates have the skills employers need.
The OSN system works closely with employers, to ensure that our curricula align closely with what hiring managers actually need. And it uses tools to accurately assess students’ mastery of the core competencies they will need in the workforce.
OSN partners are working together to create a national system of competency-based education, which measures skills and subject knowledge rather than time spent in a classroom. Each student individually progresses through courses as soon as they can prove they have mastered the material.
The flexibility of this approach means that students are able to work full-time while also acquiring skills for a future job at a pace that is best for them. This approach benefits both workers and employers by saving time and money and developing a more diverse workforce that meets the needs of our modern economy. Census data shows that Black and Latino job applicants are less likely to have a college degree when compared to their white counterparts, and a more flexible and inclusive higher education system based on competencies would help to rapidly bridge this gap.
We stand at a crossroads in terms of how we develop talent for our workforce. Pennsylvania is facing a skills gap leading to shortfalls in qualified employees in a wide range of critical fields, including cybersecurity, education, and manufacturing, among others.
I am heartened to see Gov. Shapiro change hiring practices for the Commonwealth to remain competitive in an increasingly global economy. His executive order allows a large population of skilled workers without college degrees to earn a living wage. And this, in turn, gives them the means to expand their career opportunities through a competency-based education.
Rebecca L. Watts, Ph.D., serves as a regional vice president for Western Governors University (WGU).