What’s in the Data? (2/19)
Extracting Degree Requirements from Job Postings
Marissa Hashizume, NLx Research Hub Economist
February 19, 2026
Welcome to the blog series, What’s in the Data? These posts will provide updates on available features and interesting discoveries in the NLx Research Hub data. Whether you’re an analyst or researcher, or just curious about what job posting data looks like, this series will keep you informed. We encourage those interested in using the NLx Research Hub data to check out our data request page for more information.
Please note that job postings are not equivalent to job openings. These posts describe the NLx Research Hub job postings only.
Why do we need to parse out degree requirements? Required or preferred degree information typically lives within chunks of text in the job description. In other words, if we want to use that information for analytic purposes, we need a way to find and extract it from the surrounding description text and do so at scale for the millions of records the NLx Research Hub gets every month. Fortunately, we live in a time of Large Language Models.
The NLx Research Hub partnered with Amazon Web Services utilizing their Nova Lite model to parse out degree requirements and other information from our job posting data. Our initial testing produced between 92% and 98% accuracy of Nova Lite’s required and preferred degree extraction compared to manual coding. Here we describe what the degree requirement data looks like for the 31.5 million NLx Research Hub job postings from 2024 and 2025.
Overall, 59% of job postings from 2024 and 2025 mentioned degrees, with 38% requiring a specific degree and 33% mentioning but not requiring one (either in the context of a preferred degree or an instance where experience and education are substitutable with one another). The most mentioned degrees were bachelor’s and high school credentials, required in 17% and 16% of job postings and mentioned but not required in 17% and 7% of job postings, respectively.
Bachelor's Degrees and High School Credentials Were the Most Frequently Mentioned
Degrees were most often required in job postings for Community and Social Service (63%), Architecture and Engineering (62%), and Life/Physical/Social Science (60%) occupations.
Community and Social Service was the only occupation group where a master’s degree was the most frequently required (in 23% of their job postings). In every other occupation group, the most required degree was either a bachelor’s or high school credential.
Life/Physical/Social Sciences, Educational Instruction and Library, and Legal occupations were the most likely to require a doctoral or professional degree (15%, 10%, and 8% of their job postings, respectively). In the Sciences and Education/Library occupations, those postings were still overshadowed by postings requiring bachelor’s degrees (27% and 16% of their postings, respectively). Job postings for Legal occupations required bachelor’s degrees at practically the same rate as doctoral/professional degrees (8% of their postings).
Required vocational and associate degrees only showed up as non-negligible in Healthcare Practitioner and Technical occupations (9% of their job postings). All other occupation groups required those degrees in less than 3% of job postings.
Explore the chart below for more required degrees by occupation group.
Required Degrees by Occupation Group
Have we piqued your interest in degree mentions in job postings? We are looking for pilot users of our 2024-2025 parsed data! You can either 1) help us validate the accuracy of parsed information, 2) help us explore the microdata and make sure the information is in a useful format, 3) help us explore aggregate data and see how you might be able to use it in your work, or 4) all of the above. Please reach out to us at nlxresearchhub@naswa.org to get involved.
