Why do secretaries need college degrees now?

Employers are running hog-wild with their job criteria. Here's why.

Thanks, Liberal Arts degree!
(Image credit: H. Armstrong Roberts/CORBIS)

When's the last time you saw a job listing that didn't require at least a bachelor's degree? For more and more Americans, the answer is "a long time ago," and quite possibly "never."

A report late last year found that, in one traditionally middle-class sector after another, one-half to two-thirds of job openings now demand a college degree. Yet those same jobs — like "production supervisors" and "executive secretaries" — didn't call for a degree in the recent past, and many of the people who hold those jobs now are not college-educated. Despite the fact that only one-third of Americans have them, college degrees have become the new high school diplomas, the baseline everyone in the workforce is assumed to meet.

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Jeff Spross

Jeff Spross was the economics and business correspondent at TheWeek.com. He was previously a reporter at ThinkProgress.