‘Paper Ceiling’ Campaign Gives Much Needed Attention to Workers Without College Degrees

Penn State’s spring break is over and the students are back in Happy Valley. 

Penn State’s wrestling season is over – with another national team title, two individual titles and eight All-Americans. (All hail Cael!) 

Penn State’s basketball season is over – with their first NCAA tournament victory since 2001.

Penn State’s men’s hockey team is in the NCAA tournament – with their first round game against Michigan Tech this Friday afternoon in Allentown.

And my handy-dandy weather app said that sunrise last Friday was at 7:20 a.m. and sunset was at 7:20 p.m., meaning for the next six months or so our days are longer than our nights. 

All of which says, spring is here!  (OK, that 19-degree aberration on Sunday notwithstanding.) 

And spring in Happy Valley leads directly to the annual ceremony that marks a life-changing transition for college students here and across the country: graduation. Penn State will award more than 20,000 degrees this year, although not all at spring commencement. And there are plenty of other colleges across the country conferring degrees. According to the Education Data Initiative, if 2023 is like 2020, around 4 million people will get college degrees in the U.S. this year – associate’s, bachelor’s, master’s, doctorates or professional degrees. And around 3 million of those will be the four-year-or-higher kind of degrees. That’s a lot of new college graduates.

New college graduates that, according to the most recent findings from the U.S. Census Bureau, become part of the almost 38% of the people age 25 and older in this country who have at least a bachelor’s degree. More than a third of, let’s call it the working-age population of the U.S.,  has a four-year degree or more. That’s a lot of college graduates.

What seems to get lost in the translation of those numbers is this: almost 62% of the working-age people in the United States do NOT have a four-year degree. There are one-and-a-half times more working-age people without four-year degrees than with four-year degrees. Now, THAT’s a lot of people. 

The reason I point this out is that as I was watching all the sporting events on TV this past weekend, I saw a commercial for a campaign titled Tear the Paper Ceiling, which focuses on workers without bachelor’s degrees. The commercial was intriguing so I looked into it. 

The campaign defines “paper ceiling” as the invisible barrier that comes at every turn for workers without a bachelor’s degree. They suggest that because these workers have no alumni network, and are subject to biased algorithms, degree screens, stereotypes and misconceptions, they hit a “paper ceiling” in their working lives. They point out research that shows “more than 60% of employers rejected otherwise qualified candidates simply because they did not have a bachelor’s degree.”

In August of 2019 I wrote on these pages about the topic of free college tuition for all, and also suggested that pre-employment screening could be discriminatory if employers said job applicants needed a four-year degree but couldn’t demonstrate the job actually required that level of education. 

Obviously then, this ad showing up on my television screen championing workers without degrees was interesting to me. Considering that we live in a community where the business of conferring college degrees is by far the largest industry, and around 70% of those living here have a four-year degree, a national campaign that advocated for those without bachelor’s degrees seemed pretty contrarian. So, I dug deeper.

The campaign was created by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization called Opportunity@Work. They’ve given a name to those workers who don’t have at least a bachelor’s degree: STARs,  an acronym for Skilled Through Alternative Routes. Their argument is that upward mobility for STARs is hampered by the falsehood that a bachelor’s degree is the only gateway to job-relevant skills. They point out that four-year degree requirements for jobs automatically screen out 76% of African Americans, 83% of LatinX and 81% of the rural population. 

They’ve got a number of national companies and organizations who have agreed to partner with them on this campaign, at least several of them who might seem odd as groups that would support a mission to fight for those without degrees. Accenture, Google, LinkedIn, McKinsey, IBM and the College Board to name a few. Even the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Although, given that Bill Gates left college before earning a degree, maybe that one isn’t so odd. 

Which is a nice time to segue into an always intriguing list – well-known people who don’t have four-year college degrees: Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Tiger Woods, Ellen DeGeneres, Ashton Kutcher, Brad Pitt, Ralph Lauren, President William McKinley, President Harry Truman, Paul Allen, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ryan Seacrest, Paul Newman, Michael Dell, R. Buckminster Fuller and Ted Turner. And some people whose names might not be familiar, but the companies they created are: Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify; Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter and Square; and Travis Kalanick, the co-founder of Uber.

Granted, with its demographics I don’t expect Happy Valley to be interested in, or welcoming of, a campaign that hypes opportunities for those without four-year degrees. Penn State, as it should to fulfill its mission, proudly publicizes the benefits of Penn State as a top spot for corporate recruiters to find talent, and espouses the impact generations of Penn Staters have made (the alumni network).

In addition, given the amount of data thrown into the public’s eye about the individual economic benefit of a bachelor’s degree – such as the Social Security Administration’s research that shows men with bachelor’s degrees earn approximately $900,000 more in median lifetime earnings than high school graduates, and women earn $630,000 more – it’s hard to argue against getting a four-year degree. Something our daughter has already received, and our son will receive in less than two months and then go right into an MBA program.

But still, all that aside, for the millions of workers in this country with in-demand skills and experience, yet without a four-year degree – who, again, we should all be reminded, comprise a vast majority of the working-age population – it is good to see them get a little attention every now and then.