Most leaders can not answer that. The ones who can usually cite the same handful of headline programs everyone else does, JPMorgan, SAP, the ones that show up in every
LinkedIn post about neurodiversity. Here is what those posts leave out. In 2018, Jesse Collins applied for a quality assurance testing role at JPMorgan Chase. Collins, diagnosed with autism, worried he didn’t have the same qualifications as other applicants. JPMorgan ran him through its Autism at Work pilot program, which involved
a week of hands-on skill-building and direct conversation with hiring managers, evaluating his potential. He was hired, and JPMorgan’s original 2015 pilot cohort, the same program Collins later joined, had been measured as 48% more productive than employees who’d already been in the same role for three to ten years.
The Employment Reality Behind the Credential
Eighty-five percent of autistic adults with a college degree are unemployed, while 4.5% is the rate of unemployment in the general population. For an autistic candidate, a diploma doesn’t guarantee employment, even when, as Collins’s story shows, that same talent can measurably boost productivity once given the chance.
So if hiring programs work that well, why have you not heard the number reflected?
Collins’s story is real. JPMorgan set out to reach 300 neurodivergent hires by 2020, inside a workforce of hundreds of thousands. The program works. It has also stayed small, years after proving the model, against an autism unemployment rate near 85%. That is not a failure of intent, but it is not evidence the model does not work, either. It is evidence of what the model was actually built to do: support a hand-picked cohort well, not change how the company hires everyone else.
Most employers treat a diploma or degree as a proxy for whether someone can do the job. For professions built on licensure, like law or medicine, a credential is important. For the non-credential-gated part of hiring, the proxy is applied out of habit rather than evidence, and the industry rarely stops to ask which situation it’s actually in before screening a resume out.
Here is the part almost nobody says out loud: accommodations are not the expensive part.
Nearly 60% of workplace accommodations cost employers nothing at all. Most of the rest run under $500. Accommodation costs for a hundred employees could be covered by what one company spends on a single executive retreat, and it still would not come close to explaining why these programs stay this small. What does not stay cheap is the customized infrastructure wrapped around each hire: job coaches, dedicated mentors, disclosure-based onboarding, redelivered for every new person who walks through the door. That structure works beautifully for a few hundred people. It was never designed to work for the millions still locked out.
When a Measure Becomes the Target
Since the Every Student Succeeds Act passed in 2015, most states added “college and career readiness” indicators to school accountability systems, but fewer than one in five states actually weight career-readiness at 20% or more of a school’s overall rating. The metric becomes crossing the graduation stage, and companies blindly inherit this as well. Economist Charles Goodhart named the mechanism decades ago, writing about monetary policy: “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Once an institution knows exactly what is being counted, it optimizes for the count: employers and schools alike fall for this trap.
Want proof? In Florida the discrepancy between graduation and proficiency is clear, about 90% of students graduate high school within four years, but only 44% reach proficiency in algebra and geometry. This adoption of a one-dimensional metric is detrimental, as evidenced by the fact that half of educators report spending 20% or less of curriculum time on workforce-relevant skills, and by the fact that only 54% of employers believe colleges and universities are graduating students with the skills their businesses actually need, and 56% say it is difficult to find candidates with the right skills at all.
Seventy percent of employers say new hires need “moderate or significant” additional training just to function in the role. Only 24% of recent graduates say they arrived with everything the job required. Even the confidence attached to the credential is unreliable in the same direction: NACE data shows 84% of students feel prepared for work and 65% of school administrators agree with them, but only 37% of recruiters believe today’s graduates are actually prepared.
How Credentials Penalize Different Thinking Styles
A college degree measures the ability to sit for standardized timed testing and navigate classroom-based expectations for four consecutive years. Notice what is missing from that list. It disproportionately penalizes executive-functioning and social-processing differences, the kind that disproportionately affect neurodivergent students without access to scaffolding resources. The credential is not failing to capture neurodivergent talent by accident: it conflates conformity with competence.
Many neurodivergent students who do cross the graduation stage do so under an IEP or a 504 plan, accommodation frameworks built explicitly to help them graduate. They don’t build the workplace-transferable executive-functioning or self-advocacy skills a job actually requires.
Autistic graduates are twice as likely as their neurotypical peers to be unemployed 15 months after graduation. Adults with ADHD are 30% more likely to experience chronic employment issues than neurotypical peers. When autistic graduates do find work, they earn roughly 30% less than neurotypical peers in comparable roles.
Some of the most capable neurodivergent minds never cross the finish line schools are graded on because the traditional classroom, the standardized test, or the four-year timeline was never built around how they think.
The Real Cost of Degree Inflation
Over 70% of new U.S. job postings between 2008 and 2017 required a college degree, and a 2022 study found 62% of employers still require one even for entry-level roles. Most applicant tracking systems are built to auto-reject any resume that does not check the degree box, regardless of the skills, portfolio, or experience listed underneath it, meaning a brilliant, self-taught, or credential-less neurodivergent candidate can be filtered out by software before a human ever reads their name. This is the same pattern we see when hiring processes screen out high performers long before anyone evaluates actual capability.
Researchers have a name for the population this locks out: STARs, workers Skilled Through Alternative Routes rather than a bachelor’s degree. There are an estimated 70 million of them in the U.S. economy, and roughly 30 million could earn up to 70% more if they had access to the jobs a degree requirement currently blocks them from. This isn’t only a cost to workers. It’s a cost employers are paying without tracking it. Harvard Business School researchers, working with Accenture, analyzed 26 million job postings and found that requiring a degree for a role that does not functionally need one raises that role’s salary cost by up to 30% and adds an average of 12 days to time-to-fill, on top of roughly 6 million American jobs needlessly gated by “degree inflation” in the first place. When a worker without a degree does land one of those jobs anyway, their salary rises by an average of 25%, proving the degree requirement is not protecting quality.
What Works When You Stop Relying on the Proxy
Now for the company that actually solved this by refusing to run one at all.
Some employers have not conflated employability with graduation. IBM launched an apprenticeship program in 2017 that started with three career tracks and has since grown to more than twenty, spanning software engineering, data science, cybersecurity, and design, growing twice as fast as the company projected in its first year. By the end of 2022, IBM had surpassed 1,000 apprenticeship hires, and more than 90% of past program graduates converted into full-time employees. IBM backed the model with real money, committing $250 million to apprenticeship and “new collar” programs by 2025, and stripped bachelor’s degree requirements from more than half of its U.S. job openings: the same kind of filter JPMorgan set aside to hire Collins at a different company facing the same problem.
The difference in scale is not an accident of company size. It is a difference in what got rebuilt.
JPMorgan built a customized program layered on top of an unchanged hiring process, which is exactly why it could support a few hundred people well and not many more. IBM changed the underlying structure itself, dropping the degree requirement broadly rather than running a boutique accommodation track for a hand-picked group, and the hiring numbers moved by an order of magnitude as a result. That is the difference between accommodation and infrastructure: one requires a coach for every new person; the other is built into how the company hires by default.
Applied specifically to neuroinclusion, that same shift, building flexible communication, skills-based assessment, and structured onboarding into the baseline rather than adding a disclosure-based program on top of the existing one, is what would let companies hire meaningfully larger numbers of neurodivergent talent while spending less per additional hire, not more. It is also the version of this work that compounds the innovation and problem-solving gains research already ties to neuroinclusive teams, instead of confining those gains to a small, separately managed cohort.
Across registered apprenticeship programs broadly, employers report a 90% apprentice retention rate and fill roles 30% faster than through standard hiring, with a return of roughly $1.47 to $1.48 for every dollar invested. They are describing what happens when an organization stops assuming a diploma already proved what it was hired to prove, and starts testing for the thing it actually needs through practical training on inclusive hiring and skills evaluation.
How many neurodivergent people does your company actually employ?
Employers have been relying on a proxy that was never verified to track the outcome they actually care about, and the cost of that reliance is landing on exactly the population that can least afford it. It turns out that talent that, once actually evaluated on what they can do rather than what paperwork they hold, has shown up measurably more productive in roles built around their strengths. If your honest answer to the question above is “a handful, through a program we are proud of,” you are not behind. You are exactly where JPMorgan is: running a model that works and will never get past a few hundred people, because nobody rebuilt the system underneath it. The companies that build that evaluation into their infrastructure, instead of running it as a side program, are the ones positioned to hire far more of it.
If you are ready to audit where your own hiring filters, degree requirements, ATS screening rules, interview formats, are quietly screening out capable neurodivergent talent before a human ever sees it, grab a free 30-minute Neurodiversity Strategy Consultation with Burch Price & Associates. We help C-suite and HR leaders stop mistaking a credential for a guarantee, and start building the process that finds the talent the credential was never built to reveal.
