The Class Ceiling
August 19, 2024
While employers and HR professionals have made great progress in the area of diversity, equity, and inclusion in recent years, there’s an area in which DEI efforts have been lacking: social class. By not addressing the inequities of class discrimination, organizations are both putting themselves at a disadvantage and denying opportunity to capable people struggling to find suitable work.
Ignoring the potential of people such as single mothers, ex-offenders, recent immigrants, retirees who need and want to work, non–college graduates, etc.—people who’ve been relegated to low-wage, hourly work with little or no potential for advancement—is simply missed opportunity for employers with openings for, say, entry-level white collar jobs or blue-collar, skill-building training programs.
Of particular interest to employers should be people without college degrees. Many jobs that are mostly held by people without degrees now require them of new hires. A college degree required to be hired or promoted, but not actually necessary to do the work, has been termed “the paper ceiling.” When you think about it, the requirement of a college degree to fulfill many of the healthcare, government, or retail job openings currently unfilled is simply a form of class discrimination, not practicality. And one study found that over half of U.S. employers rejected otherwise qualified job applicants simply because they lacked a college degree. In response to this form of discrimination, the governors of Pennsylvania, Utah, Maryland, and Alaska have all dropped the four-year college degree requirement for most government jobs in their states.
The fact that more and more jobs require a college degree (“degree inflation”) also results in unnecessary discrimination against Black, Latino, and Indigenous people, as they are less likely to have a degree, and so less likely to be hired or allowed to advance in their careers. Thus, one form of discrimination leads to another. Degree inflation is also proving to be a disadvantage for young white men, who increasingly are either disinclined toward or can’t afford college and have been graduating at lower rates.
Discrimination on the basis of social class may be intentional or unintentional. It is sometimes caused by unconscious bias, prejudices we have that we’re not even aware of. We might jump to conclusions about someone’s ability or character because they appear to be economically disadvantaged, they have an accent or speak in a way that sounds “low class,” they seem too young or too old, or have at one time been incarcerated.
By acknowledging and addressing class discrimination for the prejudice it is, organizations and HR professionals can not only increase equity and inclusion in the workplace, but also greatly increase the pool of talent available to them, and offer opportunity to many hardworking people for whom it may have been denied.