Traditional values have always told us education is paramount the key to success, the door to prosperity. Specifically, a college degree is what is sought, at any length, across country lines and across the seas parting with loved ones for a significant amount of years. As important as a degree may be, in our day and age, and in the U.S specifically, the amount of skills can be learned outside of traditional schooling and the high cost of tuition may make one re-evaluate the worth of a college degree altogether.
In the previous generations, there were fewer graduates, so it had a higher value. The demand was greater, and graduates were highly sought after. But that has now changed. “It just has not been the blanket guarantee of following the same path to prosperity that the earlier generations followed,” says economist Will Emmons of the St Louis Federal Reserve.
The value of education is measured against the cost to pursue that education and a degree offering you a sizable salary to justify its time and cost. In schools like Georgia State University (GSU) and the University of Georgia (UGA), we’ve seen tuition double over the past decade, leaving students in greater debts with compounding interest. According to Brookings Institute, in 2021 students are $30,000 to $50,000 in debt. And with all of that debt, it’s almost imperative to find that ideal job in your field of study to pay off that debt. Well, that doesn’t always happen.
“The average American family now pays seven times as much as the average European family to send their kids to college,” says Peter Cappelli, professor at Penn’s Wharton’s Business School. “You have about a quarter of colleges in the U.S., the degrees from that college earned a negative rate of return. That is, you’re never going to make back the money that you spent going to college in the first place.”
New York Fed Data shows four out of ten graduates work in jobs that don’t require a college degree. And for those who graduate who don’t work in a lucrative field with student debts weighing over them, it’s difficult for them to crawl out of debt, as some carry that debt close into retirement age. So life-altering decisions that 18-year-olds are making may have lifelong effects well into mid-life.
Now the issue of a degree’s worth may not be as debatable in let’s say law (if you pass the bar) for instance, since studying law on YouTube may not cut it. But it becomes a lot more questionable in no other arena than the tech world. It generally doesn’t require a college degree to be a coder, for example. And learning computer languages for free (or relatively free) like Java or Python is quite doable for 18-year-olds just out of high school who don’t have to spend time commuting to college or money for a degree that may never be used. And if they’re lucky enough to still be in their parent’s basement while doing it, that’s even more money saved.
In today’s world, there’s just a plethora of skills to be learned online through platforms like Udemy, LinkedIn Learning, Codecademy, and many more. Codecademy, for example, offers classes in 12 programming and markup languages, where you can learn Python, Ruby, Java, jQuery, as well as HTML and CSS. You can also sign up for a Codecademy Pro account for a nominal monthly fee.
Many employers now value candidates with raw skills versus graduates who may have learned theories without the real-world experience to apply it. Highly-sought skills like Tableau for data analytics or SQL for DBAs or Java for developers can get you through the door for an interview, without necessarily having a degree. And many companies are now offering certifications that can be acquired fairly quickly, such as AWS and Cisco. Although some of those certs are company-specific, it is highly valued and will almost guarantee you an interview, at least. As DBA Manager Raymond Fulton at Travel Port simply put it, “Ideally, college equips you for continuous learning. But that’s not always the case. If you know how to use the tools we need, then you’re an asset to the organization. That’s what I look for in a candidate.”
