Companies Dropped the Degree Requirement. Most Hired Graduates Anyway.
Coursera and Udemy have merged on the promise of a skills-first job market. Hiring records show employers changed their job ads far more than their hires, and the missing piece is trusted proof of skill.
On May 11, 2026, Coursera completed its combination with Udemy. The two US-listed online learning companies had announced the all-stock merger, valued at about $2.5 billion, on December 17, 2025[1][2]. Udemy's shares are being delisted from Nasdaq, and the combined company reports 290 million learners, 18,000 enterprise customers and more than $1.5 billion in 2025 revenue[1].
Chief executive Greg Hart described the goal as moving beyond a content catalog toward a system that ties skills development to real-world outcomes, and the announcement promised verified mastery of skills[1]. That pitch assumes employers now hire on demonstrated skills rather than degrees. Many have said so. The hiring records say most have not.
What the hiring records show
The key evidence is a February 2024 report from the Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School. Matt Sigelman, Joseph Fuller and Alex Martin tracked about 11,300 roles at large US firms that had removed a degree requirement, then checked who was hired, using the career histories of 65 million workers[3].
Dropping the requirement raised the share of hires without a bachelor's degree by about 3.5 percentage points. Because only 3.6 percent of roles dropped the requirement at all, the net change across the labor market was 0.14 percentage points: roughly 97,000 workers a year out of 77 million hires, or fewer than 1 in 700[3].
The firms split three ways[3]:
- 37 percent were leaders that hired about 18 percent more workers without degrees into those roles, among them Walmart, Apple and General Motors[3].
- 45 percent changed the posting and little else. The report lists Bank of America, Amazon and Oracle here[3].
- 18 percent made early gains, then slid back[3].
Since then, degree requirements have crept back
Posting data has since turned. Indeed Hiring Lab reported in January 2026 that 19.3 percent of US job postings on its site required a bachelor's degree or more in November 2025, up from 16.6 percent two years earlier, though still slightly below pre-pandemic levels. Holding the mix of job titles constant, the share hit a five-year low of 18.5 percent in March 2024 and has since edged up to 18.6 percent. About 51 percent of postings still name no formal education requirement[4].
Employers' own plans show the degree holding on. In the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025, a survey of more than 1,000 employers, 43 percent expect to keep using a university degree to assess candidates through 2030, behind work experience at 81 percent and pre-employment tests at 48 percent. Just 14 percent plan to weigh short courses and online certificates, slightly fewer than in the 2023 edition, and only 19 percent see removing degree requirements as a promising way to widen their talent pool[5].
Governments look similar. By late 2024, 25 US states, beginning with Maryland in March 2022, had committed to remove unnecessary degree requirements from public jobs. An NBER working paper by Justin Heck, Peter Q. Blair and colleagues estimates that degree requirements in those states' postings fell 2.5 percentage points for each year of the policy[6]. Postings are not hires. The Hechinger Report found in December 2025 that officials in Maryland and Pennsylvania track the education of applicants but not of new hires. In Colorado, people without degrees were 25 percent of hires in the affected job classifications in 2024, about the same share as in 2023[7].
Amanda Winters, who advises states on skills-based hiring at the National Governors Association, told the outlet: "I think it’s a sort of do-or-die moment"[7].
Why the degree survives
Sigelman, Fuller and Martin argue that a posting is only the first step. Hiring managers compare candidates with one another, under pressure to fill a costly vacancy, and a degree remains the easy shorthand even when it is no longer required[3]. Replacing it takes a signal that is as quick to read and as trusted.
A June 2025 report from the American Enterprise Institute and Burning Glass noted more than 1.1 million credentials on offer and examined 23,444 of them against career histories. Only about 12 percent delivered significant wage gains that earners would not otherwise have had, while the top tenth yielded annual wage gains of nearly $5,000. The authors' explanation is that most credentials rest on little more than the provider's own word that the holder mastered the material, or only finished the course[8].
A March 2026 analysis of more than 1,000 major US employers by Burning Glass and OneTen found that companies that remove degree requirements see only a 2-percentage-point rise in the share of hires holding non-degree credentials[9].
Coursera's own survey of about 3,500 employers, students and university leaders reports that 94 percent of employers are willing to pay graduates with micro-credentials a higher starting salary[10]. That is a company survey of stated intentions, not hiring records. Its chief content officer, Marni Baker Stein, told Times Higher Education that the degree has long been the primary currency, especially for entry-level jobs[10].
“There’s not a great taxonomy of trust”
Where credentials do work
The evidence is not all negative. In a randomized experiment covering more than 800,000 online certificate earners without college degrees in developing countries, described in a working paper, researchers Susan Athey and Emil Palikot encouraged learners to display their certificates on LinkedIn. Among the 40,000 whose employment was tracked, new employment rose 6 percent, or 1.0 percentage point, and 12 percent for those with the weakest prospects. Learners with the strongest profiles gained almost nothing[11].
Employers that follow through also gain. In the Burning Glass and Harvard data, workers without degrees hired into formerly degree-only roles had a two-year retention rate of 58 percent, against 48 percent for their graduate coworkers, and saw salaries rise about 25 percent on average[3].
What this means in practice
Demand for skills is not in doubt. WEF respondents expect 39 percent of workers' existing skills to be transformed or outdated by 2030, say 59 of every 100 workers will need training, and rank skill gaps as the main barrier to business transformation, cited by 63 percent[5].
Money is following. Workday agreed in September 2025 to buy Sana, an AI company whose products include the Sana Learn platform, for about $1.1 billion[12]. Pearson and Microsoft's January 2025 partnership includes new AI credentials and certifications[13]. Singapore gave every citizen aged 40 and above a S$4,000 training credit from May 2024[14], and India's SWAYAM Plus platform, launched in February 2024, offers industry-built courses with credit recognition[15].
None of this changes who gets hired unless a manager can trust what a credential certifies. Platforms need to publish outcomes credential by credential, because a provider's brand is no guarantee of payoff[8]. Employers that want wider talent pools have to change how they screen and interview, not only the posting[3].
The WAC view
The gap between what employers announce and whom they hire is, at root, a measurement problem. A degree is a blunt signal, but it is familiar and widely trusted, while many short credentials rest on the provider's own word. Until skills are assessed in ways a hiring manager can check quickly and trust without knowing the provider, deleting a line from a job posting will change little. The next phase of skills-based hiring will be decided by the quality of assessment, not the volume of content.
What to do with this
For universities
Embed micro-credentials inside degrees only where each one carries its own rigorous, independently checkable assessment, and publish graduate outcomes by credential. Do not plan on employers abandoning the degree: the data shows it is still their default filter.
For educators
Design assessments that make students demonstrate a skill under realistic conditions and leave evidence an employer can inspect. Teach students to present that evidence, since visible credentials help most for candidates with thin résumés.
For edtech leaders
Compete on verified outcomes, not catalog size: track wage, promotion and job-entry results for each credential and drop the ones that show none. Build proof of skill that a hiring manager can trust in seconds without knowing your brand.
The events behind this article, in WAC News
Sources
- Coursera Completes Combination with Udemy to Build the World’s Most Comprehensive Skills Platform. Coursera (Business Wire release, via FinancialContent), May 11, 2026.
- Coursera and Udemy enter a merger agreement valued at around $2.5B. TechCrunch, December 17, 2025.
- Skills-Based Hiring: The Long Road from Pronouncements to Practice (Sigelman, Fuller, Martin). Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School Project on Managing the Future of Work, February 2024.
- Where Do College Degrees Still Matter in a “Skills-First” Job Market?. Indeed Hiring Lab, January 28, 2026.
- Future of Jobs Report 2025. World Economic Forum, 2025.
- Tearing the Paper Ceiling: The Impact of State Commitments to Remove Degree Requirements on Public Awareness and Job Opportunities for STARs (Working Paper 33220). National Bureau of Economic Research, 2024.
- As the job market tightens, workers without degrees could hit a ‘paper ceiling’. The Hechinger Report, December 2, 2025.
- Holding New Credentials Accountable for Outcomes: We Need Evidence-Based Funding Models. American Enterprise Institute and Burning Glass Institute, June 16, 2025.
- Credential Fluency: The Hiring Advantage in the Race for Skills. Burning Glass Institute and OneTen, March 3, 2026.
- Skills qualifications ‘suffering from lack of public trust’. Times Higher Education, June 4, 2026.
- The Value of Non-Traditional Credentials in the Labor Market (Athey and Palikot, arXiv:2405.00247). arXiv, November 5, 2025.
- Workday Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Sana. Workday, September 16, 2025.
- Pearson and Microsoft announce multiyear partnership to transform the future of learning and work with AI. Microsoft, January 14, 2025.
- New SkillsFuture Level-Up Programme to Boost Mid-Career Upskilling and Reskilling. Ministry of Education, Singapore, March 4, 2024.
- Education Minister Launches 'SWAYAM Plus' Platform For Enhanced Digital Learning. IIT Madras, February 28, 2024.
Written by the WAC editorial team. Facts are drawn from the numbered sources above and were checked against them before publication; opinions appear only under “The WAC view”. The organisations and people named are not affiliated with the World Assessment Council unless stated. Send a correction
More from Spotlight
The First Rung Is Narrowing: What the Data Say About AI and Graduate Jobs
US graduate unemployment did not spike in summer 2026, yet payroll records show a widening gap for young workers in AI-exposed jobs. Both findings can be true, and universities should act on where they overlap.
The $2 Billion Bet Against the College Major
Carnegie Mellon will spend $2 billion of a record $3 billion gift on a Miami campus organized around societal challenges, not majors. Research backs the teaching method far more firmly than the structure.
Harvard Capped the A. History Says the Hard Part Comes Next
After six in ten grades became A's, Harvard's faculty voted 458 to 201 to ration the top mark from fall 2027. Princeton and Wellesley tried to hold grades down before, and both gave up.
Work with the WAC centres
Universities, educators and education companies can register their interest in joining the World Assessment Council network.