What China Eliminating Degree Requirements Means For American Parents And Kids
The oat milk latte I ordered was already cold by the time my kid’s high school counselor leaned across the sticky table at our back-to-school coffee last month and pulled up a news article on her phone. “Did you see this?” she said. “China just eliminated mandatory bachelor’s degree requirements for most local government and public service jobs. Even some entry-level professional roles don’t need one anymore.” I blinked, still stuck on the email I’d gotten that morning from the College Board about my 11th grade son’s upcoming SAT registration, the $60 fee staring back at me like a reminder that every step of this process costs more than it did when I was 16. “What does that have to do with us here?” I asked.
I drove home thinking about my son, who’d turned our unused dining room into a small woodworking workshop over the summer. He’d built two raised garden beds for a neighbor, a dining table for my cousin, and fixed three leaky faucets around the house, all while earning $25 an hour cash for his work. For months he’d been saying he wasn’t sure he wanted to go to a four-year college, and every time he brought it up I’d felt a cold knot form in my stomach, the same narrative my parents drilled into me in the 90s playing on loop: No degree means no stable job, no security, no future.
When I walked in the door, he was hunched over a half-finished bookshelf for my sister, sanding the edges so they wouldn’t splinter. Sawdust covered his sweatshirt and the floor, and he had a smudge of dark stain on his left cheek. I showed him the article on my phone, and he wiped his hands on his jeans and read it, leaning against the workbench. “Duh,” he said, when he finished. “No one who hires me to build something asks if I have a degree. They just ask if I can show up on time and build it right.”
He wasn’t wrong. Over the last five years, I’ve watched more and more American employers and state governments drop degree requirements for hundreds of roles. Pennsylvania got rid of bachelor’s requirements for 92% of its state government jobs two years ago. Utah did the same. Big companies from Google to Target to Tesla no longer require four-year degrees for many entry-level corporate and trade roles. China’s move just isn’t a small policy shift in another country—it’s a big, public signal that the global standard of tying employability to a four-year degree is shifting, faster than many of us parents are ready for.
I still catch myself buying into the old story. Last week I went to a backyard dinner with a group of parents from school, and when I mentioned my son was considering a carpentry apprenticeship instead of applying to four-year schools right after graduation, one mom gave me that tight, sympathetic smile, the one that says you’re letting your kid throw his life away. I came home that night and overthought it for an hour, scrolling through student debt statistics and college graduation rates, wondering if I was being too lax, if I was setting him up for failure.
But then I thought about the time I helped hire an administrative assistant at my marketing job three years ago. We had two top applicants: one had a bachelor’s degree in communications from a good private school, $35k in student debt, and couldn’t sort a basic spreadsheet or format a meeting agenda without step-by-step instructions. The other had a 6-month office administration certificate from our local community college, no debt, and reorganized our entire messy shared filing system in three days, caught a $1200 accounting error no one had noticed in a year, and trained the rest of the team on a new scheduling tool we’d been struggling to learn. We hired the second candidate, and she still works there, making $10k more a year starting than the first candidate would have asked for. That’s when I realized the degree never was a guarantee of skill, and it’s becoming even less of one now.
The practical changes I’ve made as a parent have been small, but they’ve stuck with me. First, I changed the question I ask my son every night at dinner. Instead of leading with “Did you work on your college essay?” I ask “What’s the coolest thing you worked on today?” It sounds small, but it shifts the conversation away from checking boxes for a degree and toward what he actually cares about. Second, last month we sat down for an hour and pulled up actual job postings for the three paths he’s curious about—residential carpentry, cabinet design, and commercial construction. We didn’t go by what I thought the requirements were; we looked at what employers are actually asking for today. Almost all the apprenticeship programs only require a high school diploma, and they pay you while you train. Most full-time journeyman carpenter roles in our area pay between $65k and $95k a year, which is more than I make with my bachelor’s degree and 10 years of experience. Third, I let him drop the AP Physics class he was failing this semester to take a residential construction elective at the local technical college. If he ever decides he wants a four-year degree in construction management down the line, the class counts for credit anyway.
I don’t think this means all degrees are useless. If your kid wants to be a doctor, a lawyer, a biologist, or a public school teacher, they still need that degree. But for a lot of kids, it’s just an expensive, time-consuming step that doesn’t actually get them where they want to go. China’s decision to drop degree requirements for most public roles isn’t some distant news story that doesn’t affect us. It’s a reminder that the old rules we grew up with don’t apply anymore, and we don’t have to keep forcing our kids into a one-size-fits-all path that doesn’t fit them.
Last weekend, my son finished that bookshelf, delivered it to my sister, and came home with $800 cash. He put half in his savings for a used work truck, and spent the other half on a set of high-quality chisels he’d been wanting for months. I still have nights where I lie awake worrying I’m doing this wrong, that I’m not pushing him hard enough. But I look at him, covered in sawdust, excited to start his next project, and I remember what my counselor said that day at coffee: a degree is just a piece of paper. It never could tell you if someone can show up, solve a problem, and do the work that needs doing. That part is up to them, no matter where they live, or what piece of paper they do or don’t have. We’re all just figuring this out as we go.
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