From around 2020, large American employers made the same announcement one after another: a college degree would no longer be required for many roles. The press called it the end of the paper ceiling. Non-profits launched campaigns and state governments rewrote civil service hiring rules.
In February 2024 the Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School published a study measuring how much those announcements had changed in practice. They analysed some 11,300 roles at large firms between 2014 and 20231,2.
Job ads changed, hires did not
The first half of the story matched the headlines. The number of roles dropping a bachelor's degree requirement grew nearly fourfold over the period2.
The second half did not. After requirements were dropped, the share of hires without a bachelor's degree rose by only about 3.5 percentage points. In absolute terms, only about 97,000 of the 77 million annual hires benefited, fewer than 1 in 700 hires in 20232.
The study sorted companies into three groups. 37 percent were genuine leaders: they dropped the requirement and changed how they hired, and their share of non-degree hires rose by nearly 20 percent. 45 percent changed in name only: the job ad no longer mentioned a degree, but the people chosen were still almost all graduates. The remaining 18 percent went backwards, losing the gains they had made2.
Why deleting a line is not enough
When a degree requirement disappears from a job ad, everything else in the process stays put. Screening software still scores by university. Hiring managers still trust a degree as a safe signal. Interviews still ask questions graduates answer more smoothly, whether or not they relate to the job.
To hire on skills for real, a company needs a way to measure skills in place of the degree: work samples, structured interviews built on job situations, practical assessments. Without an alternative tool, recruiters fall back on the familiar one.
Where Vietnam stands
In May 2026 VOV reported a policy direction in Vietnam shifting emphasis from academic qualifications to occupational skills, practical capability, adaptability and work performance, alongside lifelong learning so workers retrain regularly. A related priority is moving labour from low-productivity work into higher-productivity work3.
For domestic employers, it is a signal to review the hiring criteria in use. Many job descriptions still make a qualification a hard requirement for roles where practical capability is what decides results: maintenance technicians, sales staff, customer service specialists. That requirement narrows the candidate pool unnecessarily.
But the lesson from the Burning Glass and Harvard study is not to stop at editing job descriptions. Without changing how candidates are assessed, a company lands in the 45 percent that changed in name only.
One requirement, rewritten
Take a maintenance technician role in a factory. The familiar job description says: technical college diploma or above, preferably in electrical or mechanical engineering, at least two years' experience.
Rewritten around skills, the requirements might read: reads single-phase and three-phase wiring diagrams; diagnoses and replaces common motors, sensors and contactors; follows lockout-tagout safety procedures; keeps a maintenance log. The diploma becomes one way of showing those skills, no longer the only way.
The assessment to match: a thirty-minute practical on a mock control panel with a planted fault, plus a few safety scenarios. A graduate can pass it, so can someone who learned on the job, and the recruiter sees the same thing in both: can they fix the machine?
This approach has a side benefit. It forces the line manager to sit down and say what the job really requires, something a line reading "college diploma or above" lets everyone skip.
