A college degree used to be a reliable passport to a better-paying career. To employers it signaled a level of knowledge and intellectual skills not shared by someone without a degree. That's why students and parents have been willing to pay increasingly higher tuition, taking out student loans and second mortgages before the graduates earn a dime.

But what if employers lose trust in a college degree?

A recent study finds that employers now believe colleges are not providing value. According to the Freedom Economy Index, a joint project of job-recruiting service RedBalloon and PublicSquare, an overwhelming 91 percent of the 70,000 small businesses they surveyed said colleges are not “graduating students with relevant skills that today's business community needs.” Two-thirds strongly disagreed with the notion that colleges are teaching relevant skills.

Indeed, many employers now see a college degree as a negative rather than a positive.

When the survey asked employers if they were “more or less likely to consider a job-seeker with a 4-year degree from a major university or college,” employers were four times more likely to answer in the negative (41 percent) than in the affirmative (10 percent), while an additional 42 percent said it made no difference. Amazingly, almost 20 times as many employers were said they were “strongly” less likely to hire the applicant with a college degree than "strongly” more likely.

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Why? One respondent complained that college graduates “typically have an incompatible ideology with my business culture.” College students indoctrinated in “intersectionality” and “critical gender studies” who are trained to spot “microaggressions” in every mundane interaction do not, it seems, make for sought-after employees.

The “woke” ideological orthodoxy on campus isn't doing students any favors. Colleges were once regarded as places where students critically assessed a wide variety of viewpoints, but employers no longer see them that way. When asked whether colleges are “fostering free speech and debate, thereby graduating students capable of debating ideas and using critical thinking,” a whopping 97 percent disagreed.

Employers aren't just complaining about the lack of value in a college degree. They're eliminating it as a requirement for many entry-level jobs. Companies such as Accenture, Bank of America, Google, IBM, and Walmart no longer require college degrees for hundreds of different positions. A report by the Burning Glass Institute last year predicted that “an additional 1.4 million jobs could open to workers without college degrees over the next five years.”

Meanwhile, 12 states no longer require a bachelor's degree for most government jobs.

Other employers are moving rapidly to eliminate degree requirements. According to a recent Intelligent survey, “ninety-five percent of respondents say their companies currently require bachelor's degrees for at least some roles.” In 2024, however, “45% of these companies plan to eliminate the bachelor's degree requirements for some positions."

If these employers were mistaken, and college degrees did actually signal workplace value, then we would see the first movers reversing course and reinstituting degree requirements. Instead, the opposite is happening: businesses that have already shed some degree requirements are shedding more. Among the more than half of employers who dropped some degree requirements in 2023, 73 percent said they plan to eliminate more degree requirements in 2024.

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Employers see value in institutions that foster a diversity of thought, inculcate critical thinking, and impart useful skills—but not in campuses that leave students with a rigid and extreme ideology.

If a college degree is no longer an automatic passport to better employment, then colleges will have a very hard time persuading students and their parents to pay increasingly exorbitant tuition.

When college students are more likely to come home with new pronouns than new marketable skills, how long will it be before parents refuse to shell out five or six figures on a traditional college degree? And why would students take on significant debt to make themselves less employable, especially when they can access the same jobs without delaying their earnings for four to six years?

These are questions college presidents and administrators should be asking themselves.