WATCH: Companies ditch four-year degree requirement

Campus Reform Higher Education Fellow Nicholas Giordano appeared on Wilkow! to discuss how major U.S. companies are dropping their requirement to have four-year degrees. 

Degrees used to be a ‘golden ticket’ into corporate America, “but then the businesses and the companies realized that the students are not coming in prepared for our workforce,” Giordano said.

Colleges have not given students the tools they need to succeed, he argued. “What’s the point of a college degree when you can give students technical skills to do certain jobs?”  

Companies used to have apprenticeships, where people started at low-level positions and worked their way up, Andrew Wilkow, host of the program, mentioned. “Something is happening in colleges that are making the graduates no longer desirable.” 

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Giordano responded, “It’s because education has lowered standards for the last 30 years. Students have simply been cycled through the system where they haven’t learned how to write effectively, they don’t learn how to communicate with other people.” 

He further explained that companies are taking it upon themselves to train workers, because the universities are unreliable, as they incentivize laziness.

“Companies are saying, ‘We need workers that are actually going to work.’” Gordano concluded. “How are these students going to be able to manage in the real life if they can’t sit there and take a class that’s hard?”

Watch the full video above.