The degree premium is a rounding error on proof

Every large employer now has a statement about valuing skills over credentials. Most of their funnels still do the opposite, because when a thousand CVs arrive and nothing in them is verifiable, a university name is the one field that feels safe to sort by. The degree is not evidence of the work. It is evidence that verification is too expensive, so a proxy will have to do.

Proxies are not free. Filtering on credentials prices out career changers, people who could not afford the credential, and everyone whose capability arrived through doing rather than enrolment. It also overprices confident credential holders who have never shipped anything. Both errors are invisible inside the company, which is why the press release and the funnel can disagree for years.

Verification got cheap

Here is what changed: showing work is no longer hard. A repository, a shipped automation, a write-up with the outcome attached, all of it publishable in an afternoon, all of it checkable by anyone. When verification is cheap, the economic case for the proxy collapses. What remains is habit.

Breaking the habit

We removed the sort key. There is no university field in a Disruptajob search, and education sits quietly at the bottom of a profile as background, never as a capability. A capability here can only come from tagged, published work. If a company wants to filter on credentials they are welcome to a market that already does: all of them. This one sorts by proof.