Ingram’s February 2023

Shared Pain in the C-Suite and on Campus As major employers downplay the need for a four-year degree, universities are being slammed with falling enrollments. What’s the solution?

by Dennis Boone

It’s possible that the nation has seen a greater disconnect between employ ee hiring patterns and college enroll ment—but hiring managers and uni versity enrollment executives alike might be hard-pressed to tell you when that might have been. Even with interest rates rising, with inflation barely cooling from the red-hot levels of 2022, and fears of a recession still unsettling stomachs in C-suites, employers are still hiring. And they’re still complaining about unprecedented challenges in finding, acquiring, and retaining talent. At the same time, the nation’s cam puses continue to empty out. Last year, the number of students enrolled in American universities was a staggering 4 million below where it was in 2012. Consider what that will mean over the next four years as employers are hop ing to refill the personnel pipeline with higher-educated students. The picture isn’t entirely dark, tho- ugh: Some key sectors of the U.S. economy—particularly hospitality ven ues like travel and restaurants—have seen employment come storming back from early pandemic-era lows. But with a difference this time: Many peo ple aren’t coming back to those venues without substantial pay increases. According to the global HR ser vices firm Gartner, the employee value proposition with regard to work is be ing transformed before our eyes. “The EVP for the post-pandemic workforce,” the company said amid the tumult of workplace disruption in the pandem ic, “must orient toward employees as people, not workers; provide an ex ceptional life, not work, experience;

and focus on the feelings, not just the features that match employee needs.” The pandemic, it declared, changed the relationship between people and their work. One of those trend lines is tightly entwined with the fates of colleges. In recent months, major U.S. employ ers have gone public with declarations that they would relax their require ments for college degrees to fill even high-level roles. Among them are tech giants Microsoft, and Google, finan

of higher education itself—and mov- ing swiftly to implement changes in programming, messaging, and market ing. Some of the biggest job growth in 2022, according to the Bureau of La bor Statistics, came in just four sectors that account for nearly two-fifths of the nation’s economy and more than half the jobs in the U.S.: health care, retail, manufacturing, and construction. This will give you a glimpse of what’s unfolding: Over the last half of

The Rebound and The Squeeze Four sectors that saw significant job growth throughout 2022—but continue to have difficulty finding qualified workers—account for more than half the nation’s GDP:

RETAIL Impact: $3.9 trillion Employment Share: 25.80 %

HEALTH CARE Impact: $4.3 trillion Employment Share: 14.00 %

MANUFACTURING Impact: $2.3 trillion Employment Share: 7.83 %

CONSTRUCTION Impact: $958 billion Employment Share: 6.00 %

cial-services monolith EY, and even the media conglomerate Penguin Random House. Intelligent.com, in a survey last year, reported that 53 percent of hiring managers said their company had done the same. Even public-sector employers are yielding to the pressure, as with an nouncements last year that Colorado and Maryland would relax degree re quirements for state workers. It’s hard to imagine a cultural shift that could be more alarming to universi ty administrators, coming after a decade of enrollment declines. They, too, are reassessing a value proposition—that

2022, health-care enterprises, leisure and hospitality, education, and other sectors hit hard by staff reductions in 2022 have seen employment rebound ed—but, almost across the spectrum, only because they’ve been compelled to adjust wage scales higher. Those sectors generated 1.2 million jobs over that stretch, up by nearly half over the previous 18 months, while at the same time, the tech sector has been shedding jobs by the tens of thousands. The dilemma for colleges and uni versities, then, is how to sell their prod uct to students who may be reluctant to invest tens of thousands of dollars into

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Ingrams.com

February 2023