The short answer
Because the change touched the job posting and little else. The Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School found that fewer than one hire in seven hundred went to someone who got in because a degree requirement was dropped.
The study looked at what happened after employers announced they were dropping degree requirements. About 45 percent of the companies changed their postings. Almost none changed how they hired.
Put yourself in the hiring manager's chair. You have hundreds of applications for one opening. Before, a degree line helped you cut the pile fast. It was a poor judge of skill, but it was quick. Now the line is gone, and nothing new has taken its place. You still have the same pile, the same hours in the day, and no better way to see what anyone can do.
So you do what anyone would. You fall back on what you can see: where someone worked, how many years, which school. Hiring managers aren't failing here. They're doing the sensible thing with the tools they've got. Nobody in the building has to want that outcome for it to happen.
Entry-level postings show the pull. In an analysis of 95,363 postings, 61 percent of jobs advertised as entry-level asked for three or more years of experience.
The way out is a replacement that does the degree's job better. It has to shrink the list to people who are qualified, and a hiring manager has to be able to check it in seconds. That's the second door: proof of skill, recorded, with a registry anyone can look up. Governments are moving in this direction. By early 2025, 27 states had taken steps to drop degree requirements for public jobs. The second step is what goes in the gap.
If you hire, don't just delete the line. Replace it with a step that shows skill: a short work sample on a real task, scored the same way for everyone by someone who does the job.
The study is from 2024, and practice may have moved since. It shows that a posting change alone moved little. It doesn't show that no replacement could work. The idea that the second door will work is a design argument, and the evidence for it is still to come.
Nobody has to tear the old gate down. Build a second way in beside it, based on proof of skill, and let people walk through.
A good interview answers "which of these ten?" Something still has to answer "which ten?", and that is the job the degree has been doing.
When employers can't see skill, they pay for paper, and capable people without the paper get passed over. The fix is proof anyone can check.