work experience is another way to get the treatment but there’s a catch-22. To get the kind of experience you’d need to make yourself competitive for a decredentialled job, you need… a decredentialled job

On the college-as-treatment piece: totally. Groups pushing decredentialling as a policy intervention are very big on “micro-credentialling” — basically do online courses for the specific skills you need but there’s lots of obvious problems with that

non-college workers leave more quickly than BA workers in these positions, but they keep the earnings boost in their next job so it doesn’t seem like they’re completely failing out.

Yeah all of these mechanisms are totally plausible (though hard to get at with our data) but we’re pretty sure firms are decredentialling because they’re struggling to hire BA workers, so you’d expect firms to work to overcome them. We sorta have evidence for the integration piece —

I’m glad you like it! One thing that’s head scratching about this: there’s this huge increase in firms dropping degree requirements over the last 10 years... and they still don’t hire noncollege workers

Thank you!

Employee contacts are more effective at getting job seekers hired when they are embedded in closed informal networks -- their friends are also friends of friends. Job seekers connected to these kinds of networks are not only more likely to be hired, but they stay longer at the employer once hired.