Maybe you've heard you don't need a college degree in today's job market. Don't believe it.

If you’re on the market for a new job, it’s still much better to have a college degree than not. Getty Images; Alyssa Powell/BI

Employers are increasingly saying you don’t need a college degree to get hired, but secretly, you still kind of do.

A new report from Indeed said 52% of job listings on its platform didn’t mention any educational requirements, compared with 48% in 2019. During the same period, the share of job postings asking for a college degree or higher fell to 17.8% from 20.4%.

This is part of a move toward “skills-based hiring,” a push for companies to look at what candidates can do, not where they studied. Having hiring managers focused on a candidate’s qualities instead of their diplomas is generally good news for the two-thirds of Americans who aren’t college graduates — and companies love to tout their progress in this area.

In recent years many businesses have hopped on initiatives to tear down the “paper ceiling,” or open up more opportunities for workers without higher education. In 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, several big-name companies signed onto an effort to place 1 million Black Americans without college degrees in “family-sustaining jobs.” In 2023, The New York Times’ editorial board applauded various efforts in the public and private sectors to ax degree requirements for jobs.

“There are many jobs that can be done without a college degree, but ask for one anyway,” Abbey Carlton, the vice president of social impact at Indeed, said in a statement accompanying the Indeed report. “This is keeping thousands and thousands of otherwise qualified job seekers from applying for these roles, especially those who may not have had equal access to college. Having inflated degree requirements perpetuates the cycle of inequities in the workforce.”

But just because companies say they’re not looking at education doesn’t mean it’s not a factor. Companies’ claim that they’re not looking at education as much is neat, but a recent study from Harvard Business School and the Burning Glass Institute, a nonprofit research center, found that fewer of them were actually walking the talk.

It found that while some businesses, such as Apple, Walmart, and ExxonMobil, made tangible changes to who they brought on board, most companies that made a big deal out of dropping degree requirements for workers didn’t really change their hiring practices. Nearly half of the firms the study looked at just said they would shift toward more skills-based hiring, and a fifth started to make the change but didn’t stick to it. The result: Skills-based hiring made a difference in fewer than one in 700 hires last year. The researchers said they looked at a sample of 11,300 roles at large companies for which they could observe a “meaningful volume of hiring” for at least a year before and after the change and tapped into Burning Glass’ database of 65 million American workers’ career histories. They found that nearly all the change in hiring was driven by the segment of companies it dubbed “skills-based hiring leaders,” which actually did alter their hiring practices. The rest were a little like the guy who says looks don’t matter and then mainly dates models.

Hiring policies happen from the top, but hiring happens across thousands of hiring managers inside a company.

It’s not necessarily that businesses are intentionally being sketchy — it’s more that instituting companywide cultural change is hard. CEOs can really mean it when they say they’re focusing on skills and not education, but it doesn’t make a difference if not everyone gets the memo. Old habits die hard, and if a hiring manager is down to two people with five years of experience, one with a bachelor’s degree and one without, the default is the degree.

“It is really hard to embrace an idea that tells you what not to do but doesn’t tell you what to do,” said Matt Sigelman, the president of the Burning Glass Institute. “Hiring policies happen from the top, but hiring happens across thousands of hiring managers inside a company. And unless you are creating the systematization of a policy, unless you’re embedding that policy into a set of processes, it doesn’t stick.”

A move toward skills-based hiring is a good thing socially, economically, and practically. As the population ages, the shrinking pool of available workers could force employers to be more flexible about hiring.

“Based on the demographic changes we’re seeing in the country, long-term labor-market tightness is going to be more of a long-term issue, I think, than a lot of employers are thinking right now,” Cory Stahle, an economist at Indeed, told me. “And so using skills-focused hiring is a way to really get around that.”

That explains why some businesses are dropping education from job listings and at least attempting to follow through. It can help companies discover quality candidates they might have previously passed over, including those who would’ve seen the requirements listed and not even bothered to apply. It can also help diversify workforces.

Skills-based hiring is now easier to do, too. Employers have more software tools to assess candidates’ qualifications and skills, meaning they don’t just have to guess whether your degree means you know how to do the job they need.

Paying attention to skills instead of education is a good deal for everyone. Burning Glass has found that at companies with solid skills-based hiring practices, workers without degrees have higher retention rates than workers with degrees. What’s more, the study found that workers without degrees hired into roles that required degrees in the past saw a 25% salary increase on average.

The larger-stakes conundrum here is that there’s often a gulf between what companies say and what they actually do, even on something as simple as caring about whether you’ve graduated from high school.

Looking for a job is a frustrating and opaque experience. Whether or not you have a degree, you may as well apply for that job — you ultimately just don’t know what exactly your potential employer is looking for.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.