At Durham University, in the UK, 18.4 per cent of graduates received a first-class degree in 2011. By 2024, that figure had reached 39.6 per cent. At Imperial College London, it went from 30.9 per cent to 52.5 per cent over the same period. The Office for Students, England’s higher education regulator, found that at some providers nearly twice as many top grades were being awarded as students’ prior attainment could account for. This is an example of degree inflation meeting the job market in plain sight. The entry ticket got more expensive. The information it carried got thinner.
When degree inflation meets the job market
A qualification works as a hiring filter for one reason only. It can be refused. A first-class degree once told an employer that the candidate had cleared a standard most of the cohort had not. When roughly one in six graduates held one, the classification did genuine sorting work. When more than one in three holds the same grade, the sorting breaks down. The employer is looking at a room full of candidates who all carry the same top mark. The mark no longer tells them who can do the work.
The incentives that produced this are specific and traceable. Universities in a marketised sector compete for fee-paying students. League tables weight graduate outcomes and student satisfaction. Satisfaction scores correlate with the grades students receive. Retention rates improve when fewer students fail. Each of these pressures pushed assessment practices in the same direction. The institution that held the line on grading standards risked losing applicants to the institution next door that did not. The one that let standards drift faced no immediate penalty. Tightening immigration rules added a further pressure. As visa regulations for international students grew more restrictive, universities that depended on overseas fee income faced an incentive to maintain high pass rates and attractive grade profiles to sustain recruitment from a shrinking pool. The penalty for holding the grading line sharpened from both sides. Domestic applicants compared league tables, and international applicants compared completion rates and classification outcomes across competing institutions
The pattern runs well beyond the UK. In the United States, average undergraduate GPAs at four-year institutions rose from 2.69 in 1990 to 3.14 by 2020. At high-school level, the split became even more telling. Average GPAs climbed from 3.17 in 2010 to 3.36 in 2021. Over the same period, ACT scores, which are externally administered and immune to the pressures operating on classroom grades, were flat or falling. Classroom grades went up. The independent measure of what those grades were supposed to certify did not follow.
Credential inflation in education and the employer response
The employment market has started adjusting. Recent survey data from ResumeTemplates found that one in four US employers planned to remove bachelor’s degree requirements from job listings by 2025, and a third had already dropped educational requirements from some roles. This is sometimes framed as progressive hiring practice, a move toward skills-based assessment. The underlying driver is simpler. The degree stopped being a cost-effective filter. When the classification no longer distinguishes, the employer who continues to require it is paying for a screening tool that no longer screens.
What fills the vacancy is more screening, not less. Employers who drop the degree add technical assessments, portfolio reviews, trial projects, psychometric tests. Each additional layer raises the cost of entry for the candidate. The graduate who spent three years and tens of thousands of pounds (or hundreds of thousands of dollars) acquiring a qualification, finds that the qualification now functions as a minimum threshold, a ticket to the first round, rather than a meaningful signal of readiness. To stand out, they need further certifications, further courses, further credentials, each acquired under the same inflationary conditions that devalued the previous one.
The cycle is self-feeding. The more people who hold a given qualification, the less it tells an employer. The less it tells an employer, the more additional qualifications they require. The more additional qualifications they require, the more the candidate spends. Each round of spending raises the personal cost without restoring the signal the original qualification was supposed to provide. The person inside this cycle is doing exactly what the system appears to ask of them. The system is charging them more for a currency whose purchasing power keeps falling.
Where the cost settles
The cost of this erosion falls unevenly, and it falls hardest on the people who followed the rules most faithfully. The graduate who chose the degree because it was supposed to open specific doors and who took on debt to fund it, discovers that the door now requires further proof of the competence the degree was designed to certify. Their qualification is genuine. The system that was supposed to make it valuable has stopped enforcing the standard that gave it weight.
This is visible in the data. Research from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and ONS Graduate Labour Market statistics shows a substantial and growing proportion of UK graduates working in roles that do not require a degree, earning returns that do not reflect the time and money the qualification cost. The degree is still required for entry. It has stopped being a meaningful measure of readiness once inside.
The professional who is five or ten years into a career built on qualifications faces a quieter version of the same exposure. The certifications that once opened doors now sit alongside identical certifications held by everyone else in the room. The annual CPD requirement, the industry badge, the accredited programme, the vendor-specific certification renewed every two years, each was acquired because the professional environment signalled that it mattered. The signal was accurate. What it described was the system’s requirements, not the qualification’s power to distinguish.
A credential is only useful when it can be withheld. A credential that everyone receives is a receipt, not a qualification.
The economy that sold qualifications as gateways has been quietly repricing them as entry fees. The door is still there. It just opens onto a longer queue.