Skilled Workers Are Finally Gaining Ground. AI Will Decide Whether They Keep It.
A new Opportunity@Work report shows deliberate hiring changes are reopening good jobs to the 70+ million U.S. workers without a four-year degree – just as AI begins rewriting the rules of who gets seen.
WASHINGTON, June 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- A new report from Opportunity@Work argues that the country's future competitiveness depends on a question being decided right now, largely out of public view: whether the artificial intelligence (AI) reshaping how Americans get hired will open doors for skilled workers or quietly wall them off.
2026's State of the Paper Ceiling report makes the case that at its core, the labor market is infrastructure. A built environment of signals and pathways, signals are the gatekeepers that decide who gets seen and let through. For example, the job requirements employers write and the screening tools they use. Meanwhile, pathways are the routes workers travel to advance – through education, training, and a sequence of jobs that build skills and lead to better wages.
Like roads and bridges, that infrastructure reflects the priorities of whoever designed it. And for more than 70 million STARs – workers Skilled Through Alternative Routes rather than a bachelor's degree – years of degree screens and a lack of skills-based hiring practices have resulted in designs that route them away from opportunity.
"The labor market will not become inclusive by accident," said Papia Debroy, Chief Impact Officer of Opportunity@Work. "It is changing now because employers, policymakers and workforce leaders are changing the design. The data is now unambiguous: when employers send better signals and create pathways based on skills, workers who gain skills through alternative routes succeed at rates that challenge long-held assumptions about talent."
The report's central finding is that the design can be changed, and that the evidence it works is now measurable. After STARs lost access to 7.4 million good jobs between 2000 and 2020, that decline has reversed and resulted in modest gains. Key findings include:
- STARs have regained 783,000 jobs, and the turnaround is concentrated exactly where employers deliberately redesigned their hiring.
- Within Opportunity@Work's networks, employers increased jobs open to STARs by nearly 20% year-over-year – totalling roughly 600,000 jobs.
- Fifty-two percent of STARs starting new jobs in our network achieved mobility in the most recent year alone; adding up to 90,000 STARs moving up since 2022.
- Today, 33 states and counting have committed to removing degree requirements from public jobs and 75% of employers say they are more likely to hire STARs than they were two to three years ago.
The report frames AI as the defining variable in what comes next – "amplified intention." As CEO Byron Auguste and Debroy wrote in Brookings, AI is "a technology designed to observe, replicate, and accelerate." Auguste and Debroy argue that if we direct it at the patterns of the past, it will replicate the "paper ceiling" and accelerate its exclusionary effects. But if we direct it toward workers' skills, it can accelerate the tearing of the paper ceiling – expanding opportunity for STARs and helping employers find the talent they need.
The stakes are concrete. Recent analysis with Brookings and Opportunity@Work highlights up to 11 million "gateway jobs" – entry-level and mid-skill roles STARs have historically used to climb into better-paying work– that are exposed to AI jobs losses, dismantling the mobility architecture workers and employers both rely on. At the same time, AI-driven hiring tools are increasingly deciding who gets seen at all, often invisibly and trained on data carrying the full weight of historical exclusion.
"The rules, signals, and systems built during technological transitions tend to last long after the technology itself evolves," said Debroy. "The defaults being set today will shape who can access opportunity, advance, and thrive for generations. This is the moment to get them right."
The report identifies the actors with their hands on the design – employers, HR technology companies, the public sector, educational institutions, and funders – and argues the redesign is a collective endeavor that no single actor can complete alone. It points to early proof: among employers aware of the paper ceiling, 62% of postings in historically degree-required roles were open to STARs in 2025, versus 57% overall.
Opportunity@Work positions itself as the infrastructure connecting these efforts, building the research, networks, tools, and standards that embed skills-first practices into the systems where hiring decisions actually happen. "A program that helps one employer hire better is valuable," the report notes. "Infrastructure that changes how thousands of employers hire is transformative."
The full report is available at www.opportunityatwork.org/impact/sopc2026
About Opportunity@Work
Opportunity@Work is a 501(c)3 nonprofit social enterprise on a mission to rewire the labor market so all Americans can work, learn, and earn to their full potential. Our work advances economic opportunities for the 70+ million U.S. workers who are Skilled Through Alternative Routes (STARs) instead of through a bachelor's degree. Opportunity@Work engages with corporate, public sector, talent technology, and philanthropic partners through landmark research and labor market data analysis, public awareness and narrative change, STARs-centric software tools, and multi-sector networks. Our goal is to enable upward mobility for 1 million STARs by opening up 10 million jobs, and boost their earnings by 100 billion dollars by 2035. Learn more at opportunityatwork.org
Contact:
Rena Ramirez
rena@opportunityatwork.org
SOURCE Opportunity@Work
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