Is a College Degree Even Needed Anymore?
Level 2 - Admissions 101
Welcome back! If you have been paying attention to the news recently, you may have noticed that there is a trend among companies moving away from college degree requirements with open roles.
That has created a lot of discussion around the devaluation of college degrees, and many are using this as an opportunity to strongly push the narrative that students should avoid college and the debt that comes from it.
There are two parts of this conversation:
What is the immediate practical impact of jobs no longer requiring college degrees?
Is this a long-term trend or a short-term bump?
Today’s article will focus on the first question.
Let’s start with the facts.
What are employers doing with college degrees?
First, a little bit of history.
College degrees have always been a matter of employer preference. There has never been a mandate to require college degrees.
A college degree has historically served as:
A means to identify intelligence for a role
A way to identify individuals who have a basic understanding of a given field (i.e., a major in a given field)
A qualification that sets skilled and unskilled labor apart
Historically, a college degree helped employers easily sort out which applicants were strong and which were not.
That has changed though for a variety of reasons:
Employers are hiring with little to no regard for undergraduate major - you are seeing political science majors working in investment banking
The labor-market is tight in certain areas - waiting for someone with the right credential is not practical for employers that need someone now
College education is expensive - higher debt for college education requires higher wages - if the wagers aren’t there, the debt cannot sustain itself
Lack of practical skill-set - the market is constantly shifting in what is needed, and colleges cannot adapt fast enough to meet that need
Technology has changed the costs of training what is needed - companies that used to shift the cost of training to colleges now have the ability to train themselves, either in “bootcamps” or apprenticeship models
All of that adds up to a different outcome - employers are removing college requirements and replacing them with work experience or a willingness to train individuals themselves.
Immediate Impact
Simply put, the reaction here is a bit overblown. Many are using this in a long-standing crusade to question the value of a college degree.
Many believe that the college debt crisis is a sign that the college degree is not valuable and the best way to solve it is to eliminate people going into college debt for “mediocre degrees.”
The shift in employer hiring not requiring a college degree appears to bolster this view - why take on debt for a college degree that may get the same job that no longer requires a college degree?
But there are a few things being avoided in this view. Only 1/3rd of Americans are college educated. And not every college degree is economically valuable in the same way. In other words, an art degree does not have the same economic options as an engineering degree.
For those who have degrees that are valuable (ex. MD), no one is suggesting the qualifications of those jobs are going away. Nor can these qualifications be easily substituted with a non-degree equivalent.
But there are roles where either a) there is not a clear degree equivalent or b) employers are in a position to not need a degree to train them for what they need.
There has already been pushback on liberal arts degrees - useless degrees with no tie to any monetizable career are already being questioned.
Then there are is a push against smaller, less reputable programs - are you going to waste money attending a program that cannot send any students to good jobs?
Again, none of that is changing.
All this is doing is highlighting a trend - choose a major with a high probability of career success while attending a reputable college.
That is why we say this is overblown - no one is saying a college degree is worthless. It is only highlighting the value (or lack thereof) of a given degree.
Here’s the other part of this - we’re only looking at this in a time when things are relatively good from an economic standpoint.
If there is an economic downturn, all statistics show that those with a college degree weather the downturn far better than their non-college degree counterparts. In other words, our view is that this is a trend so long as we are typically in a good economy. If employers have an abundance of choices to make, they will typically choose applicants with college degrees over those without one.
What to do with this information
In our view, you will want to look at the type of jobs that you are interested in and look to see if those roles require college degrees.
For example, coding is something that likely does not require a college degree. Coding academies exist, and it is likely that many employers will likely train individuals to work.
If you see that is the direction you want to go, it means you may need to evaluate whether college is correct for you.
Candidly, we would look to create two parallel processes:
Go through the college application process
Go through a job application process
If you do both, you now have the ability to make a decision to defer college and pursue a job or pursue college if the right job is not there.