Whoa! Deloitte: "No college degree; no problem."
The message from Deloitte and many employers today is that—if you have the skills—they can train you faster than it takes to get that college degree.
Millennial incomes have consistently been 20% less than Boomers at the same age (wage adjusted)—and they paid 2300% more for college.1 So many younger Millennials, and now Gen Zs, are foregoing college altogether, an experiment for which the results are uncertain and unknown. For parents, the choice of not going to college is understandable when you know college isn’t right for your son or daughter—but it’s so against everything that we believed that the decision can be terrifying.
Enter this striking headline from Forbes: “Deloitte Is Hiring Job Seekers Who Don’t Have A College Degree,” the newest frontier in skills-based hiring. OTJ training is expected in many blue collar jobs—but from Deloitte, one of the "Big Four" multinational accounting and consulting firms? Not so much.
So if you’ve had heart palpitations about someone you love choosing not to go to college, it’s likely employers are catching up on that decision. Remember, younger generations are not only are taking courses in high school that older gens took in college, but they have access to online courses like MOOCS Boomers and even Gen X never imagined. Often free MOOCS are designed to be accessible to thousands of participants in every country in the world; by 2021, MOOCS had already reached 220 million learners. And these aren’t the University of Phoenix: MOOCS are offered by Stanford, MIT, Harvard, UC Berkeley, the University of London and a host of others.
In an increasingly tight job market and with fewer kids going to college, Deloitte is forging into the what may now seem obvious, with four pathways in their no-degree program:
ENCORE For those re-entering the workforce after having stepped away for extended time from working. Perfect for moms who took a baby/toddler sabbatical, care-givers, or for Boomers who retired (or were forced out) too early.
Skills-first professionals: Designed for those with work experience looking for a new role, or for those starting out fresh without college.
Neurodiversity: Designed for neurodivergent talent, this pathway provides training and apprenticeship offerings that could lead to full-time employment. (Kudos to Deloitte and other employers that see this advantage.2)
Heroes: Designed to help service members, military spouses and veterans identify career paths and secure job opportunities.
Here’s Deloitte’s site to explore and search for positions.
In case you were wondering what all the uproar has been about college debt, that’s it. Like many readers, I made it through college in the last century with a couple part-time jobs, a grant or two, and workd credit debt I could pay off in a few years. Not so for Millennials and now Gen Z. The cost of college—and resulting debt—is higher in the United States than in almost all other wealthy countries, where higher education is often free or heavily subsidized. Meanwhile, U.S. states pulled back funding for public universities and colleges in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. And that’s without talking about contemporary predatory practices of college lenders. Read more here.
As a side story and example, I once knew very well—and worked, and delivered a baby, for—the man who later in life led Corinthian Colleges, a higher-education scam that defrauded tens of thousands of low-income students out of as much as $100 million in federally backed loans. The CEO and CFO who led the scam had multi-million dollar salaries, with over 100 campuses of various names in the US and Canada. For leading over 70,000 kids to limited colleege credits or no degree, few of the marketed job opportunities, and into massive debt that still hasn’t been forgiven, the CEO and CFO got wrist-slaps from the first Trump administration: fines of only $80,000 and $20,000.
Love him or hate him, Elon Musk certainly wasn’t held back financially by his autism—at least not while on his previously private backstage. The abilities shared by many neurodiverse include heightened attention to detail, creativity, strong problem-solving skills, and the ability to hyperfocus on specific areas of interest.