Superhuman Labor and the New Meaning of the Master's Degree

Less than one in seven hundred hires changed because a company took down the degree requirement from a job posting. The finding comes from an analysis of thousands of actual hires in the United States and is in stark contrast to what companies state. Eight out of ten employers say they have adopted a hiring policy based on skills rather than qualifications. In practice, almost nothing has changed where it matters most. This distance between rhetoric and real practice is not the hypocrisy of human resources departments. It is symptomatic of a deeper realignment of what businesses consider valuable in an employee now that AI has changed the cost of skill.