Why a College Degree Does Matter

Yes, that college degree comes with a ton of life experiences!

There is a murmur growing that a college education no longer matters in today’s economy. This sentiment is especially pronounced in small business, gig work, and entrepreneurial circles. It is a message we’ve all seen seeping into social media feeds such as this post from highly successful Linked In personality Shay Rowbottom: Educated People Are Narrow-Minded.

The drumbeat marching young people out of college classrooms is booming in business media as well. For example, the Forbes article, What’s A College Degree Worth? The Good News And The Bad, is presenting this as some kind of equivalency. Likewise, the Inc. Magazine article Employers Are Finally Rethinking Requiring Unnecessary College Degrees, suggests that employers are willing to ignore whether applicants have a degree at all.

It is even echoed in college newspapers such as the Harvard Business Review’s You Don’t Need a College Degree to Land a Great Job. I proclaim that all this is just hyperbole and click-bait designed to generate ad-revenue. Nothing could be further from the truth. Let me explain why.

A High School Education is Not Enough

There was a time that a high school diploma would be enough to train young people for a mid-level job. That time was the 1920s, more than 100 years ago. Even if we pretend that the start of the 20th century wasn’t headed into the worst economic downturn of the modern era, massive world wars, and the rise of socialism, it is hardly a model for where the labor force should be today.

There have been tremendous advancements in science, medicine, law, arts, mathematics and just about any other field since then. The information technology revolution alone should tell us we’ve advanced from the 1920s. So, not, a high school diploma is no longer enough.

Even if we ignore that “distant” history, our K-12 education has been defunded and depleted for the past 30 years by governments looking to redirect investment in education towards other priorities. The fact is that our K-12 education simply doesn’t compete with the rest of the industrialized world anymore, according to the article U.S. Education Rankings Are Falling Behind the Rest of the World.

Why K-12 Deficiencies Make a Difference

Now a common response that is often brought up is why should lower scores of US students matter in this country? Well, quite simply because the world has shrunk. Foreign students come here to study and go to college, over a million students to be exact.

When those foreign students arrive here after having completed high school, they are more knowledgeable, especially in the sciences and mathematics. This gives them a distinct advantage when they apply to college as well as after they start.

In addition to this advantage for college, those foreign students educated abroad, also typically come from school systems that track them into a specific career at an earlier age. This is often equivalent to having learned a trade by the age of 18. Therefore, if they elect not to attend college, they will be more qualified for jobs at that age, typically being offered jobs that US-born 18-year old workers are less qualified for.

Our College and Universities Can Make a Difference

What US-born students need after they complete their K-12 education is an opportunity to catch up. This is where American colleges and universities make a difference. Even if these students only attend a community college and do not transfer to a 4-year school, they will still complete their general education requirements. This helps the playing field for tomorrow’s workforce.

General education requirements are often dismissed as unnecessary, but they are the foundation for higher level classes, if students decide to continue their education. Likewise, they are also foundational if they chose to go into the workforce after completing them.

General education classes also provide more time for students to discover what they may want to pursue. Unlike many foreign school systems that track students earlier, as mentioned above, in American colleges that pressure is not as pronounced. As a result, students have more choices and opportunities to discover a preferred career on their own.

While it is true that American colleges offer a more broad education, it is also more complete. Students who receive a bachelor’s degree are better prepared for the workforce, even if that job is not specifically related to their chosen major. This is because with a broader education and less pressure to chose a specific career, students think more critically about the problems they need to solve.

Fear of Education

A broader education is often derided as unnecessary – often by people who themselves lack critical thinking skills. They may even be threatened by them. This may be why it is such a popular topic to deride college education in business magazines and journals. This is likely also why it is such a pervasive pastime on social media to belittle education.

This is truly unfortunate because college graduates with broad educations will become assets to companies that are willing to hire them. Critical thinking skills can make all the difference in highly competitive industries. Let me give an example.

One of the most common complaints is about the foreign language requirement at most colleges. While a large multinational or import/export company might need a few people that speak another language, they tend to prefer hiring foreign workers for that purpose (probably because they are more skilled?).

However, why would colleges also allow students to fulfill that requirement by studying a rare language like German? Even more unnecessary would be a “dead” language like Latin? What is the purpose of that? The answer is simple: critical thinking skills.

This is because learning another language teaches the mind that, let’s say a chair, can also be called ein Stuhl or et sellam. By being fluent in another language the mind immediately accepts that there are more ways to look at a chair. Likewise, there are more ways to solve a complex problem. This is why language learning is closely linked to mathematical ability – students who learn a foreign language tend to also be good in mathematics.

This can be a very important skill to have in business as well. Obviously, business can be very math intensive. However, businesses can also have complex problems that need to be solved or otherwise missed opportunities that someone with critical thinking skills will be less likely to miss.

The same argument can be made for other oft derided subjects like philosophy, art, and music. OK, I’ll digress: philosophy is foundational for legal matters, art will come in handy when you need to select the right color for your company logo, and an understanding of music will be invaluable in your social media campaigns.

And what about Street Smarts?

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard from entrepreneurs, small business owners and even C-suite executives how much they value street smarts over a college education. As matter of fact, it is a running theme in many business books from Kiyosaki’s best-seller Rich Dad Poor Dad, to Liebman’s Harvard Can't Teach What You Learn from the Streets, to Ellsberg’s Education of Millionaires, as well as Ferriss’ eponymous 4-Hour Work Week and countless others. They all profess that street smarts is the key to success and the rest is unnecessary fluff, including a college degree.

What all these books have in common is that they promise a shortcut to success. Sure, you can read enough of these books (like I have) and get a cliff’s notes version of what a college education might be like. But it will not provide the equivalent of a four-year college education.

This is because in addition to critical thinking skills, a college education also teaches street smarts. This is because college professors read these books too. They know that they need to teach both book smarts and street smarts and that is what they do.

Even if college classes didn’t do such a good job teaching street smarts, the very fact that students will spend a few more years in school will give them time to learn those skills. They will have another four years to develop them over someone who entered the workforce at 18. More importantly, they will learn to use both critical thinking skills and street smarts together.

The street smarts argument revolves around an unrealistic view of what a college education is. The assumption is that students spend their entire days in classes and doing homework. It assumes there is no college life, that there are no roommates, no relationships, no extracurricular activities, no sporting events to attend, and no excursions off campus.

College is not a convent in the Middle Ages. Common sense tells us that is simply not the case – it is called a college experience for a reason. Most campuses require freshmen to spend at least their first year living in dormitories. After that, most students move into apartments off campus. Many students will find a part-time job during this time as well.

By the time students graduate, they will have developed those key street smarts, if not in the classrooms, then in the life that is inextricably part of the college experience. And yes, that life will include enough adversity and challenges to ready them for the real world.

Most importantly, there is no cliff-notes version of that experience, no business book that will reveal  just the essentials, and no guru who can show them a path to that knowledge without that experience. There is no way around a college education, even if you have a book that is specifically called Skip College (and yes, I read that one too and it doesn’t work).

The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character; that is the goal of true education. - Martin Luther King, Jr.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that a college education is a comprehensive and broad entry into early adult life, and by extension the workforce. This is why a college education matters. The idea that it doesn’t or that this is no longer a requirement for the modern workforce is simply false.

That idea is built on a misunderstanding of what a modern college education brings. If not, then it is an idea built on fear, the fear that these college graduates will outshine the current generation of business owners and leaders.

More insidiously, it is based in the idea that the next generation should not be made up of thinkers but of doers. It should be made up of compliant worker bees in cubicles  who are not educated enough to challenge their working conditions. If, so, I think that the great resignation is a clear indication that the cat is out of the bag…