For years, employers treated degrees as a proxy for competence. Technology just called their bluff

A recent Washington Post investigation described something called “degree hacking” — students racing through accredited online bachelor’s and master’s programs in weeks rather than years. One woman earned both degrees in 2024 for a combined cost of just over $4,000. Another completed 16 college courses in 22 days. A cottage industry of You Tube coaches and $1,500 consulting packages has sprung up to help people game the system. Academic officials are alarmed. Accreditors are saying they may investigate. Reddit moderators at one university forum have had to create a separate subforum to contain the conflict between regular students and speed-runners. I am not alarmed. I’ve been warning about exactly this dynamic for years. If anything, I’m surprised it took this long. We’ve known this was coming since at least 2018 Back in 2018, I wrote a piece I called “Breaking Up the Degree Stranglehold.” The core argument was straightforward: the four-year college degree had become a blunt instrument — a filter employers used to manage hiring volume, not a reliable signal of whether a candidate could actually do the job. Drawing on research by Harvard’s Joseph Fuller, I pointed out that 67% of production supervisor job postings at that time required a college degree, while only 16% of employed production supervisors actually held one. More than six million jobs were already experiencing what Fuller called “degree inflation.” We weren’t hiring for competence. We were hiring for a credential — and then confusing the two. The costs were enormous and fell hardest on people who could least afford them. Requiring a bachelor’s degree for entry-level work knocked out nearly 83% of Latino candidates and 80% of potential African American candidates. It drove students into debt to obtain credentials that were, in many cases, economically irrational proxies for skills employers weren’t even that sure the