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.
In plain words
One posting can pull in hundreds of applicants. A real technical interview takes an hour of a senior person's time. Three hundred applicants at an hour each is seven and a half weeks of interviews for one opening. Nobody can afford that, so nobody interviews the whole pile. The degree is a poor judge of skill, but it's fast. Whatever replaces it has to shrink the list to the people who are qualified, in a way a hiring manager can check in seconds.
Evidence and sources
- Employers admit their screening software rejects qualified people. Harvard Business School and Accenture, Hidden Workers (2021).
- Removing degree requirements without a replacement changed almost no hiring. Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School, Skills-Based Hiring (2024).
Questions this answers
- Why do companies still screen by degree?
- How can a company screen hundreds of applicants fairly?
- Why aren't technical interviews enough?
- What should replace degree requirements?
Where this falls short
The 300-applicant figure is an illustration, not a statistic.
In the book
In Four Weeks, Not Four Years: Chapter 9.
Related ideas
Cite this idea. Trenton Rich, "Which ten?," in
Four Weeks, Not Four Years (2026), maxwellrich.com/idea-which-ten.html. Free to quote, copy and reuse with credit under
CC BY 4.0. The book itself is under normal copyright.