Ernst & Young no longer requires degrees for entry level jobs.
There’s an idea that jobs and income are an automatic and deserved reward for moving on the conveyor belt and jumping through all the right hoops. Many hope and believe that a degree will automatically entitle the holder to a good paying job.
A degree has never made someone more valuable. What you can do determines the value you can create and demand. The degree is only a signal that, with more or less accuracy, tells employers that you are likely to be better on average than someone without the degree. That signal is no longer working for EY because the reality isn’t backing up the assumed correlation.
EY does potential employees a favor to announce and implement this policy. The degree is not signalling enough value to distinguish those with it from those without. Degrees are very expensive. Everyone who buys one assuming it will bring them a good EY job is buying under false pretenses. They need to create value to get hired.
EY is saving potential employees money and time by telling them what’s always been true: it’s about the value you can create, not the paper you have. The paper was used because it often correlated and it was a quick and dirty way to eliminate some weak applicants. Now the applicants with degrees are not sufficiently better than those without.
This presents an opportunity for young workers. You are not required to spend four years and six figures poured in cinder block walls with fluorescent lights to take tests on things you mostly have no interest in. You are free to learn to create value any way you can.
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