Dropping degree requirements pays workers more, but few firms follow through

When prominent US employers strip the bachelor’s degree requirement from their job postings, the non-college workers who land those jobs earn substantially more than comparable workers hired into jobs that never required a degree in the first place. That is the central finding of a study published in Nature Human Behaviour, which matched job postings to 446,500 job starts recorded in US administrative data between 2011 and 2021.

Over that decade, employers reduced the share of their postings requiring a degree by more than 10 percent, a shift the researchers describe as decredentialing. The trend created a large body of postings for roles that employers had previously reserved for degree holders, opening a window onto what happens when the credential filter is removed.

The earnings premium for workers who moved into decredentialed jobs was sizable and durable. These workers earned 12 log points more than matched workers moving into never-credentialed jobs, a difference the authors report as a coefficient of 0.124 with a 95 percent confidence interval of 0.042 to 0.206. In practical terms, that amounts to roughly US$4,600 per year, and the premium persisted for at least five years after the job switch.

The comparison design matters for interpreting these numbers. By benchmarking non-college workers who took decredentialed jobs against matched workers with similar profiles who took jobs that had never demanded a degree, the analysis contrasts the two paths directly rather than relying on raw wage differences.

The study also documents who benefits from these openings. Workers hired after an employer dropped its degree requirement were more likely to be Black, Hispanic, or female than the workers they replaced, indicating that removing the credential filter shifts the composition of new hires toward these groups.

Employers, meanwhile, have their own incentive to relax the requirement. The authors find that dropping degree requirements reduces labour costs, giving firms a financial reason to edit postings even beyond any mobility motives.

Yet the headline caveat is stark. Most employers that removed degree requirements from their postings did not actually hire non-college workers into the affected jobs. Across firms that decredentialled, non-college hiring rose by only 1.2 percentage points, with a 95 percent confidence interval of 0.5 to 2.0 percentage points, meaning the average change was statistically distinguishable from zero but modest in size. In other words, editing a job posting is far easier than changing who actually gets the offer.

The authors conclude that decredentialing is a promising tool for social mobility, but only when employers follow through on the relaxed requirement with actual hiring. The findings temper optimism that simply deleting a line from a posting will open doors at scale. For the workers who do clear the new path, however, the payoff is measurable: a lasting earnings premium of several thousand dollars a year, concentrated among the non-college workforce that degree requirements have long excluded from better-paying jobs.

Subject of Research: Labour economics and social mobility

Article Title: Decredentialed jobs and upward mobility among non-college workers in the USA

Article References: Lyttelton, T., Nelson, D. K., & Wilmers, N. (2026). Decredentialed jobs and upward mobility among non-college workers in the USA. Nature Human Behaviour. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-02610-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41562-026-02610-5

Keywords: decredentialing, degree requirements, non-college workers, upward mobility, labour economics, hiring practices, Decredentialed, jobs, upward, mobility, non-college, workers