I graduated with an information systems degree about a decade ago, and no employer has ever given me any amount of money for that degree. I have never gotten a bonus or higher pay because of it. Now, I’m seeing so many videos on TikTok and reels lately of students who graduated with a computer science degree costing them upwards of 90K, And they are all packed any huge room with like 20 employers who are hiring for like 300 jobs but there’s like thousands of them…
So basically if you want a digital piece of paper that says you’re “educated”, you can pay $40000 > $350,000. But you’ll never get any amount of money for it from employers, it won’t help you find a job. It’s a myth
First off, videos on tiktok aren’t really worth taking seriously. There’s just too much fake garbage on there.
But anyway, the cost of education is absolutely a huge problem. It should be free or very low cost.
That being said, it’s simply demonstrably false to claim that a degree is useless or doesn’t help you get a job. There are many fields where a degree is an absolutely a requirement, like medicine, law, engineering, etc. The specific degree does matter a lot, though, and there are other important job hunting skills that you need to develop in order to actually get a job.
Speaking from personal experience, every job I’ve had thus far (as a software engineer) has listed a 4 year degree as either a hard requirement or strongly preferred. I do not believe recruiters would have given me the time of day were it not for my degree, because they are looking to match as many requirements as possible and are filtering people out. And when applying for jobs, ATS programs routinely filter out job applications with resumes that don’t list a degree.
Job seeking is an extremely gameified system and you have to learn the game in order to beat it. It sucks big time and I loathe doing it, but it’s what you have to do if you want to get high-paying jobs. That, or know someone at a company that can get you a job.
And one thing people don’t really push is that college is meant to build your professional network in the future. A lot of people approach college as a technical education only when it was designed to be a lot more.
Oof. Soon every job is going to ask “HoW mAnY fOlLoWeRs Do YoU hAvE?”
No, but referrals are still going to be a thing. You’ll also have to maintain a reputation in your industry, especially for senior roles.
You get bad results when you expect that people can self certify what they are capable of doing. Word of mouth is still an effective way to see if someone is a good as they say, and that starts in college.
You laugh, but I got my current job through linked in. I started going through old contacts to see if they were in an interesting place with openings, and found one - a guy who had been my VP a few jobs ago was building a new org
Early in my career I knew people without degreees who had managed to get in - once you’re in, you’re in. However their limitations became clear pretty quickly and I don’t believe you could break into the field today without a degree
Even beyond the fact that this is a highly specialized field where a degree is important, it’s a matter of scale. Every opening we have gets literally hundreds of applicants, all of whom have college degrees. We have to begin focusing on the most likely candidates somehow, so yes, no degree and you’re not even in the pile I see