In 2015, 67 percent of U.S. job postings for production supervisors asked for a college degree. Only 16 percent of the people already doing that job had one. That 51-point gap, documented by Harvard Business School researchers in the report Dismissed by Degrees, is the cleanest picture available of what credential inflation actually is: not workers getting more educated, but employers demanding more paper for the same work.
The people holding those supervisor jobs were, by definition, capable of doing them. They were doing them. The degree requirement did not describe the work; it described the queue for the work. And a requirement that describes the queue rather than the job is not a qualification. It is a filter with a lock on it.
The mechanics of a debased currency
Credential inflation follows the same logic as monetary inflation: when the supply of a token rises faster than the value it represents, each token buys less. Fifty years ago a bachelor's degree was scarce enough to carry a signal. As it became the default, it stopped distinguishing candidates, so employers reached for the next tier (a master's where a bachelor's once sufficed, a bachelor's where a diploma once sufficed), and job seekers rationally chased the escalation. Everyone runs faster to stay in place.
The escalation is no longer limited to degrees. By late 2025, Credential Engine counted 1,850,034 distinct credentials on offer in the United States from more than 134,000 providers, with digital badges (over one million of them) now the largest category. When the response to a devalued credential is to mint 1.85 million new ones, the market is not correcting the problem. It is scaling it.
The Harvard team estimated that more than six million middle-skills jobs were at risk of degree inflation. And the report exposed the cost as self-inflicted: two-thirds of employers surveyed agreed that requiring a bachelor's degree for a middle-skills job makes the position harder to fill, yet three in five admitted rejecting qualified candidates with relevant experience in favor of recent graduates. Half reported paying those graduates more for the same job. Employers, in other words, describe the tax in detail and keep paying it.
What the inflated credential stops telling you
The original case for the degree requirement was informational: hiring is a bet on an unknown person, and a credential compresses years of unobservable effort into one observable fact. That case weakens at both ends as inflation proceeds.
At the top end, ubiquity destroys discrimination. If nearly every applicant for a role holds the credential, it cannot separate them; the real sorting moves to something else (school prestige, personal networks, unpaid internships), which quietly reintroduces class as the filter while wearing merit's uniform.
At the bottom end, the requirement excludes exactly the people whose competence is proven rather than promised. The production supervisor with twelve years of line experience and no degree is not a riskier hire than a fresh graduate; she is a less legible one. Degree screens do not reduce risk. They reduce reading effort, and they bill the savings to the excluded.
There is also a subtler casualty: the credential's meaning for the person who earns it. When a degree is pursued as an entry toll rather than as preparation, the incentive is to clear the bar, not to learn. Inflation does not only debase what employers receive. It debases what students seek.
Deflating on purpose
No individual employer can end the arms race, but any employer can exit it. The exit has a known shape: write requirements that describe the work (what must this person be able to do in month three?), accept demonstrated experience as equal tender to certified education, and test what actually predicts performance instead of what predicts paperwork. The Harvard researchers' core recommendation was exactly this: audit postings for requirements the job does not justify.
The harder shift is cultural. A company that drops degree filters must replace them with something, and the honest replacement is evidence: work samples, trials, references from people who watched the candidate work. That costs more per candidate than a checkbox. It is also the only version of hiring in which the currency being exchanged still means something.
Inflation ends when someone stops accepting the inflated notes. In hiring, that someone can only be the employer, because the employer is the one who printed them.
Sources
- Harvard Business School, Accenture & Grads of Life (2017). Dismissed by Degrees (Fuller & Raman). Analysis of 26 million postings: 67% of production-supervisor postings demanded a degree vs. 16% of incumbents holding one; 6M+ middle-skills jobs at risk of degree inflation. https://www.hbs.edu/managing-the-future-of-work/Documents/dismissed-by-degrees.pdf
- Credential Engine (2025). Counting U.S. Postsecondary and Secondary Credentials. 1,850,034 distinct credentials from 134,000+ providers, up from 1.08M in 2022; badges are the largest category. https://credentialengine.org/2025/12/09/new-report-finds-1-85-million-credentials-and-opportunities/