Although university attendance has risen considerably in much of the developed world, there remain obvious advantages to providing viable alternatives that afford students a good career.  Unfortunately, research from Harvard highlights how unsatisfactory the careers of those educated via alternative routes often are.

The study reveals that those educated through alternative routes require around 30 years of work experience to earn as much as peers with a four-year degree do immediately after graduating.  The authors believe that this difference can largely be explained by an opportunity gap.

Lacking opportunity

In turn, this means that the kind of good jobs that offer a pathway to social mobility are often denied to people with perfectly adequate skills and experience, simply because they don’t have a college education.

The authors highlight how traditionally, this topic has framed college graduates as “skilled” and all others as “unskilled”, which is a description that suggests that college graduates have skills that justify their higher-income that non-college graduates lack.  Alternatively, a degree is viewed as providing a reliable signal as to the qualities and character of the individual that reliably indicate their future productivity.

These narratives revolve around the notion that the bulk of our skills are developed during the four years we spend at college, rather than the schooling up to that point or the decades we spend in employment after that point.  It enormously discounts the unique and transferable skills that are generated at work, whether through on-the-job training or via the experiences we gain at work.

Evidence of skills

Suffice to say, this is an extremely ignorant and outdated approach, as our work provides extremely good evidence of the skills we have and should be far more valuable in the labor market than a qualification obtained many years ago.  This is especially so as our professional experience is a much better indicator of future career choices than our degree, as we usually transition to occupations with similar skill requirements to previous roles.

The researchers find, however, that transitions that result in wage increases are far easier for degree holders than for those educated through alternative means.  People with a degree appear to have better access to higher-paying jobs, even if the skills required in the new job exceed their current skills.  This is important as it’s usually these kinds of transitions that see our incomes rise the most.

No such distinction appeared for transitions that resulted in lower incomes, such as through redundancies, with the value of skills similar for people with degrees or who were trained through other routes.

The researchers believe that their findings shed fresh light on possible reasons for the inequality that continues to riddle so many societies.  With the inequality not appearing to be due so much to the human capital obtained by college graduates as much as it is the friction placed on people without degrees as they strive to move into higher-wage jobs, it provides policymakers with a clear target to attack.