Despite a growing emphasis on nondegree pathways, microcredentials alone won’t make workers nearly as competitive as a bachelor’s degree when it comes to the well-paying jobs of the future.
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Advancements in technology and a contracting labor force are expected to spur the growth of more than 15 million decent-paying jobs by 2031. But the vast majority of new jobs will require some higher education credential, and 66 percent will require at least a bachelor’s degree.
While greater emphasis on workforce readiness and growing public skepticism about the value of a traditional college degree have led to a microcredential boom, these courses alone will be on par with a high school diploma’s ability to help applicants land a good job, according to a new report from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce published Tuesday.
“Our numbers are very clear: Bachelor’s and graduate degrees are going to dominate,” said Artem Gulish, senior federal policy adviser at CEW and co-author of the report. “They’ll require much more of those quantitative and analytical skills. The organizational and business complexities are going to grow with greater technological capabilities.”
The report, “The Future of Good Jobs: Projections Through 2031,” which was supported by JP MorganChase, defines a “good job” as one that pays a national minimum salary of $43,000 to workers aged 25 to 44 and $55,000 to workers aged 45 to 64. Though it will still be possible for workers without a bachelor’s degree to get one of these jobs in the future, researchers found that it will only get harder.
The researchers used data from CEW’s 2023 report “After Everything: Projections of Jobs, Education, and Training Requirements, 2021–2031,” which analyzed macroeconomic factors, changes in occupational structure and trends in educational distributions within occupations to forecast educational demand through 2031.
The resulting data outlined in Tuesday’s report shows that as technology continues to become more complex, so will the training of the workers who need to interact with it on the job.
More Specialized Jobs
In 2021, 22 percent of good jobs were on the middle-skills pathways, which includes workers who don’t have a four-year degree but do have a credential such as a certificate, license or associate degree; by 2031, researchers project 19 percent of good jobs will require middle skills. For workers with just a high school diploma, the availability of good jobs is expected to drop from 19 percent in 2021 to 15 percent by 2031.
“More jobs are becoming more specialized and require some type of training,” Gulish said, noting that good-paying blue-collar jobs, such as those in welding, plumbing and construction, often require some formal training beyond high school. That means that by the 2030s, “there will still be lots of basic construction jobs, but they’re not necessarily going to be good.”
Managerial and professional occupations are projected to add 6.2 million new good jobs through 2031, the largest of any sector. Eighty-four percent of those office jobs, however, will require at least a bachelor’s degree. Nine out of 10 jobs in STEM fields will meet the report’s threshold for a good job, while health care, education, law and business are among 10 occupation fields requiring bachelor’s degrees that researchers identified as “promising” avenues toward earning wages that could comfortably support a family.
“We are going through a time of major economic change that carries both promise and uncertainty,” Jeff Strohl, director of the CEW and lead author of the report, said in a news release, citing the looming retirement of baby boomers and “potential disruptions” from generative AI as drivers of that change. A piece of “good news” in that uncertainty, he said, is the expected “stronger growth” among skilled jobs that pay higher wages.
Compared to those with a bachelor’s degree or higher, workers with some higher education credential but no degree will have access to half as many promising occupations. Many of those opportunities will be more physically demanding, including jobs in construction and extraction; health care; technical protective services; installation, maintenance and repair; and production.
“While the value of college faces growing skepticism, our report affirms that the bachelor’s degree pathway will be the dominant route to a good job in 2031, with a majority of good jobs forecasted to lie on the bachelor’s degree pathway,” Catherine Morris, co-author of the report, said. “While the middle-skills pathway offers new opportunities, we still see the bachelor’s degree and middle-skills pathways as complements, not substitutes.”
And workers with just a high school education will have even fewer opportunities than those with middle skills; only one of those fields—installation, maintenance and repair—is likely to lead to a good job by the early 2030s.
The report’s conclusion that a bachelor’s degree will only become more valuable as the 21st century marches on contradicts recent efforts from governments and employers to increase the uptake of nondegree pathways, said Shalin Jyotishi, founder and managing director of the Future of Work and Innovation Economy Initiative at New America, a left-leaning public policy think tank.
Numerous states, including Colorado, Florida and Maryland, have dropped four-year degree requirements for government jobs in recent years. In 2023, more than half of companies also dropped bachelor’s degree requirements for entry-level and midlevel jobs, according to a report from Intelligent.com.
“When it comes to many of these short-term training programs, time and time again we’ve seen that it leads to unemployment, underemployment or employment in poverty-wage jobs if they’re the primary mechanism for career preparation,” Jyotishi said. “They’re an excellent tool for upskilling and reskilling but insufficient to launch careers for the long haul.”