Megan Parker, right, a law firm receptionist, and Laura Burnett, a paralegal, are college graduates, as are all their
co-workers.
By CATHERINE RAMPELL
ATLANTA —The college degree is becoming the new high school diploma: the new minimum requirement, albeit an expensive one, for getting even the lowest-level job.
Consider the 45-person law firm of Busch, Slipakoff & Schuh here in
Atlanta, a place that has seen tremendous growth in the college-educated
population. Like other employers across the country, the firm hires
only people with a bachelor’s degree, even for jobs that do not require
college-level skills.
This prerequisite applies to everyone, including the receptionist,
paralegals, administrative assistants and file clerks. Even the office
“runner” — the in-house courier who, for $10 an hour, ferries documents
back and forth between the courthouse and the office — went to a
four-year school.
“College graduates are just more career-oriented,” said Adam Slipakoff,
the firm’s managing partner. “Going to college means they are making a
real commitment to their futures. They’re not just looking for a
paycheck.”
Economists have referred to this phenomenon as “degree inflation,” and
it has been steadily infiltrating America’s job market. Across
industries and geographic areas, many other jobs that didn’t used to
require a diploma — positions like dental hygienists, cargo agents,
clerks and claims adjusters — are increasingly requiring one, according to Burning Glass,
a company that analyzes job ads from more than 20,000 online sources,
including major job boards and small- to midsize-employer sites.
This up-credentialing is pushing the less educated even further down the
food chain, and it helps explain why the unemployment rate for workers
with no more than a high school diploma is more than twice that for
workers with a bachelor’s degree: 8.1 percent versus 3.7 percent.
Some jobs, like those in supply chain management and logistics, have
become more technical, and so require more advanced skills today than
they did in the past. But more broadly, because so many people are going
to college now, those who do not graduate are often assumed to be
unambitious or less capable.
Plus, it’s a buyer’s market for employers.
“When you get 800 résumés for every job ad, you need to weed them out
somehow,” said Suzanne Manzagol, executive recruiter at Cardinal
Recruiting Group, which does headhunting for administrative positions at
Busch, Slipakoff & Schuh and other firms in the Atlanta area.
Of all the metropolitan areas in the United States, Atlanta has had one
of the largest inflows of college graduates in the last five years,
according to an analysis of census data by William Frey, a demographer
at the Brookings Institution. In 2012, 39 percent of job postings for
secretaries and administrative assistants in the Atlanta metro area
requested a bachelor’s degree, up from 28 percent in 2007, according to
Burning Glass.
“When I started recruiting in ’06, you didn’t need a college degree, but
there weren’t that many candidates,” Ms. Manzagol said.
Even if they are not exactly applying the knowledge they gained in their
political science, finance and fashion marketing classes, the young
graduates employed by Busch, Slipakoff & Schuh say they are grateful
for even the rotest of rote office work they have been given.
“It sure beats washing cars,” said Landon Crider, 24, the firm’s soft-spoken runner.
He would know: he spent several years, while at Georgia State and in the
months after graduation, scrubbing sedans at Enterprise Rent-a-Car.
Before joining the law firm, he was turned down for a promotion to
rental agent at Enterprise — a position that also required a bachelor’s
degree — because the company said he didn’t have enough sales
experience.
His college-educated colleagues had similarly limited opportunities,
working at Ruby Tuesday or behind a retail counter while waiting for a
better job to open up.
“I am over $100,000 in student loan
debt right now,” said Megan Parker, who earns $37,000 as the firm’s
receptionist. She graduated from the Art Institute of Atlanta in 2011
with a degree in fashion and retail management, and spent months waiting
on “bridezillas” at a couture boutique, among other stores, while
churning out office-job applications.
“I will probably never see the end of that bill, but I’m not really
thinking about it right now,” she said. “You know, this is a really
great place to work.”
The risk with hiring college graduates for jobs they are supremely
overqualified for is, of course, that they will leave as soon as they
find something better, particularly as the economy improves.
Ashley Atkinson, an assistant office manager at the firm, graduated from Georgia Southern University.
Rich Addicks for The New York Times
Ashley Atkinson, an assistant office manager at the
firm, graduated from Georgia Southern University.
Mr. Slipakoff said his firm had little turnover, though, largely because
of its rapid expansion. The company has grown to more than 30 lawyers
from five in 2008, plus a support staff of about 15, and promotions have
abounded.
“They expect you to grow, and they want you to grow,” said Ashley
Atkinson, who graduated from Georgia Southern University in 2009 with a
general studies degree. “You’re not stuck here under some glass
ceiling.”
Within a year of being hired as a file clerk, around Halloween
2011, Ms. Atkinson was promoted twice to positions in marketing and
office management. Mr. Crider, the runner, was given additional work
last month, helping with copying and billing claims. He said he was
taking the opportunity to learn more about the legal industry, since he
plans to apply to law school next year.
The firm’s greatest success story is Laura Burnett, who in less than a
year went from being a file clerk to being the firm’s paralegal for the
litigation group. The partners were so impressed with her filing
wizardry that they figured she could handle it.
“They gave me a raise, too,” said Ms. Burnett, a 2011 graduate of the University of West Georgia.
The typical paralegal position, which has traditionally offered a path
to a well-paying job for less educated workers, requires no more than an
associate degree, according to the Labor Department’s occupational handbook,
but the job is still a step up from filing. Of the three daughters in
her family, Ms. Burnett reckons that she has the best job. One sister, a
fellow West Georgia graduate, is processing insurance claims; another,
who dropped out of college, is one of the many degree-less young people
who still cannot find work.
Besides the promotional pipelines it creates, setting a floor of college
attainment also creates more office camaraderie, said Mr. Slipakoff,
who handles most of the firm’s hiring and is especially partial to his
fellow University of Florida graduates. There is a lot of trash-talking
of each other’s college football teams, for example. And this year the
office’s Christmas tree ornaments were a colorful menagerie of college
mascots — Gators, Blue Devils, Yellow Jackets, Wolves, Eagles, Tigers, Panthers — in which just about every staffer’s school was represented.
“You know, if we had someone here with just a G.E.D. or something, I can
see how they might feel slighted by the social atmosphere here,” he
says. “There really is something sort of cohesive or binding about the
fact that all of us went to college.”
