Enrollment Management for a Skills-First World

Have you ever felt like you’re playing a game with new rules no one told you about?

That’s what it feels like to be an enrollment management professional right now. You have likely focused on macro-trends: demographic cliffs, sticker shock, and the FAFSA fiasco. But a quiet, structural revolution is underway in the job market, catalyzed by a single government decree, that poses an existential threat to the four-year degree as we know it.

The old script—Go to college, get a degree, land a stable professional job—is being shredded. The ground is shifting under our feet, and it’s not a market cycle; it’s a permanent tectonic plate shift. The old currency—the degree premium—is being devalued, and a new one is taking its place: verifiable, portable skills. And guess who’s leading the charge? The government.

This skills-first movement didn’t just appear out of thin air. It kicked off in June 2020 with a federal directive you might not have heard of: Executive Order 13932.

The premise is brutal, yet simple: a college degree is an inefficient, exclusionary filter that screens out millions of qualified candidates, particularly those “Skilled Through Alternative Routes” (STARs“)“. The federal government, under a mandate for merit-based employment, decided it needed to compete for the best talent by focusing on “what candidates know how to do, not where they learned it”

And this wasn’t just a political talking point. The Biden administration picked up the mantle, issuing further guidance to federal agencies to scale back their reliance on educational qualifications and prioritize competencies. This has become a durable, bipartisan policy, a testament to its effectiveness. This federal blueprint has since been followed by a wave of states looking to solve the same problem: a massive skills gap and a public sector workforce struggling to hire the talent it needs. Governors in states like Maryland, Pennsylvania, Colorado, and Virginia have signed executive orders and passed legislation to get rid of unnecessary degree requirements. They’ve realized that the most impactful way to fill these jobs is to focus on what people can do, not just where they studied.

And now we come to our front door. California, the world’s fifth-largest economy, has taken this movement to an entirely new level. Governor Newsom’s decision to officially remove degree requirements for nearly 30,000 public-sector jobs is the strongest signal yet that this is the future. This move, along with the ambitious Master Plan for Career Education, is a full-throated, legislative endorsement of skills and non-degree credentials as legitimate pathways to stable, well-paid work.

For us in enrollment management, this means our institutional viability now hinges on two non-negotiable strategic pivots. First, we need to talk about Modularity. Are we still forcing students into rigid, four-year blocks, or are we developing stackable microcredentials and short-form training that meet the needs of today’s cost-conscious, time-strapped adult learner? And second, we must address Validation. Are we making it a pain to get credit for prior learning, or are we enthusiastically embracing Credit for Prior Learning (CPL) and Direct Assessment to serve the massive population of “some college, no degree” (SCND) learners?

The state isn’t just talking about this; they’re building the infrastructure for it. The California Department of Human Resources (CalHR) is aligning its hiring practices with specific competencies. You can check out their framework for yourself here: CalHR Competencies. And the state legislature, through bills like SB 864, is pushing for a data-driven framework that directly links non-traditional assessments to state-approved workforce development.

The Enrollment Opportunity: Where Our Focus Needs to Be

Let’s be honest. Traditional undergraduate enrollment is declining. The rigid college structure is failing to meet the complex needs of the modern, working learner. But here’s the most important part: while the traditional student population is shrinking, California faces a projected shortage of up to 1.5 million workers by 2025 who have “some college education but less than a bachelor’s degree.”

This isn’t a problem; it’s our biggest opportunity. We’re sitting on a literal goldmine of over 6 million Californians who attended college but never finished. They already have foundational academic experience and just need a flexible, modular pathway to completion. This is where we come in. We can solve our enrollment crisis by efficiently attracting this massive, skilled adult learner population, and in doing so, we’ll help solve the state’s critical economic skills gap.

The future of higher education isn’t just about attracting new high school graduates. It’s about how we can reclaim our relevance by becoming the indispensable partner in the skills-first economy. The state is removing degree requirements and pushing for technology that documents skills for transfer, like eTranscript California. It’s time for us to ask ourselves: are we ready to shift our marketing to sell competencies, not just pedigree? Are our institutions ready to be a verifiable repository of skills, and not just a registrar of courses?

The conversation has already started. The question is, are we going to lead it or be left to catch up?