Former Merck CEO urges companies to drop arbitrary college requirement for 1 million skilled Black job seekers, winning Franklin Institute award

In the weeks following the murder of George Floyd, some U.S. business leaders issued vague statements about narrowing the opportunity gap for Black Americans. Others made donations to various causes in the name of diversity.

Ken Frazier, then the chief executive officer of pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co., was underwhelmed. Why couldn’t his fellow CEOs simply hire more Black people?

So later that year, in December 2020, the Philadelphia native cofounded the OneTen project: a coalition of business leaders who pledged to hire or promote one million Black employees in the following 10 years — with two key stipulations. The jobs must pay family-sustaining wages, and they must be filled with applicants who have the skills needed for the job but lack a four-year college degree — a credential Frazier believes is often unnecessary.

More than 73,000 people have since benefited from the program, and Frazier, 68, was honored Thursday with the Franklin Institute’s annual award for business leadership. Eight others were recognized at the black-tie ceremony for their contributions in the sciences, in fields from cancer research to climate change.

It’s not that Frazier doesn’t see the value of college. He graduated from Northeast High School at age 16, having skipped kindergarten and eighth grade, then earned an undergraduate degree at Penn State and a law degree from Harvard. Before coming to Merck in 1992, he taught law school in South Africa during the apartheid era, while on sabbatical from the Philly law firm then known as Drinker Biddle & Reath.

But too often, he said, businesses use college-degree requirements as an arbitrary way to winnow down their pools of job applicants. That excludes plenty of people who have the aptitude, yet don’t have a four-year degree due to a lack of resources.

Black Americans are disproportionately hindered by this barrier and are 30% less likely than white people to hold jobs that pay family-sustaining wages, according to a report from the Bain & Co. consulting group, written in conjunction with the OneTen project. Most jobs meeting that definition — with salaries of $40,000 to more than $90,000, depending on location — require a four-year degree, a credential that three-fourths of Black Americans do not have.

“It’s preventing people from even getting a toehold in having the kind of life that one needs to have to join the middle class,” Frazier said in an interview.

» READ MORE: Here are the 9 award-winners that the Franklin Institute is honoring in a black-tie ceremony Thursday

Increasingly, other policymakers agree. In January, Gov. Josh Shapiro’s first act in office was to remove the college-degree requirement from 65,000 state government jobs, representing 92% of the total. Before that, at tech giant IBM, then-CEO Ginni Rometty called for creating more “new collar” jobs — IT positions that could be filled by skilled people with vocational training. (She’s now one of five members on the executive committee at OneTen, along with Frazier.)

Frazier describes his father, Otis, as someone who could have benefited from such a program. A janitor with a third-grade education, he had a keen intellect and read two newspapers a day. He and his wife, Clara, a piano teacher and church organist, were staunch supporters of education, discouraging Ken and his two siblings from watching TV at the family’s modest home near North 18th and York Streets.

At Merck, headquartered in Rahway, N.J., Ken Frazier had started to rethink the college-degree requirement several years before the OneTen project. The company identified jobs in information technology, sales, operations, and customer service for which a diploma was unnecessary, he said.

The effort picked up speed with the formal start of the OneTen program. Merck has “recredentialed” more than 1,400 positions and has hired or placed more than 350 Black workers into those spots, the company says.

Nationwide, more than 65 corporations in the OneTen coalition had hired or promoted more than 73,000 Black workers by the end of 2022, project officials say.

At Merck, one employee who has benefited is Robert Roberson, 52, who manages a team of 10 data-entry workers at a WeWork site in Center City.

Roberson’s father died when he was a teenager, so he had to get a job to help support his younger siblings, he said in an interview. College was not an option. Before coming to Merck, he had a job taking care of lab animals at Temple University, but found that his path to advancement was blocked.

“It definitely hurts your confidence to some degree,” said Roberson, who started at Merck in August. “It can stop you from dreaming.”

Another Merck hiree through the OneTen project is Cameron Johnson, 29, who works in the drugmaker’s IT department from his home in West Kensington. He had been working as a chef in Philadelphia, but because he could not afford to finish culinary school, he was unable to advance to executive chef.

After being furloughed during the COVID-19 pandemic, he began to look into other career options.

Because he’d always had a knack for computers, Johnson then took online IT classes and enrolled in Year Up, a job-training program for people without four-year degrees.

“Just because they don’t have that piece of paper,” he said, “it doesn’t mean they don’t want to.”

The job at Merck came soon after. And although Johnson didn’t need a college degree to get the post, he is working toward one at night, taking online classes in information science at Penn State.

Frazier, who stepped down as Merck’s executive chairman on Dec. 1, said talent-development programs such as Year Up are a key part of the process, enabling corporations in the OneTen project to boost their hiring efforts. He calls it a “skills-first” approach to hiring that helps create a more diverse workforce.

“When you reduce the barriers that maybe disproportionately affect one group, you reduce them for everyone,” he said.

Frazier said the concept can even help people with plenty of credentials, as it did for him. He was hired at Merck for his attorney skills, but after one year in the legal department, then-CEO Roy Vagelos wanted him to learn the rest of the business.

» READ MORE: Why the OneTen coalition is asking corporate America to fill jobs on a 'skills-first' basis

Frazier had a stint in the public affairs division, then served as general counsel before moving into positions of increasing responsibility on the corporation’s commercial side. He was named CEO in 2011, overseeing the company when it launched the cancer drug Keytruda.

Now he works in the New York office of venture capital firm General Catalyst, where he specializes in investments that are aimed at increasing health equity.

Having spent so much of his career in the health sciences, Frazier said he’s proud to be recognized by the Franklin Institute, calling it a guidepost of accuracy in an era of increasing misinformation.

“With the proliferation of so much bad data, so much misinformation, it’s helping the public to understand how the scientific method works,” he said. “It’s based on research and knowledge, not rumor and speculation.”