Today the traditional 4 year degree is just the most common measure and screening tool for entry level positions.

However, this may change. Before companies became proficient at articulating corporate goals and translating those down into departmental and individual objectives, the most convenient way to evaluate performance was through checking what time people got to their desk in the morning and when they left at night.

Less important was what work got done while they were at their desk because in the absence of individual objectives this was hard to measure.

Today my employees are scattered around the country and I have no idea when they are actually working nor do I particularly care. They are measured against their objectives.

Perhaps when we figure out better ways to measure knowledge we can abandon the rather poor binary metric of the 4 year degree.