A few weeks ago, someone with a degree in computer science from the University of Texas asked me if their degree still mattered.
Last week, a self-taught developer told me they couldn't get past resume screens.
Different paths. Same frustration.
The Burning Glass Institute projects that 1.4 million jobs could open to workers without college degrees over the next five years. Yet 52 percent of recent college graduates are underemployed a year after graduation, working in jobs that don't require their degrees. The problem doesn’t improve with time; graduates still face a 45 percent underemployment rate 10 years after finishing school.
This is a market failure. But why is it happening?
It’s because we're conflating two entirely different functions that degrees serve.
Is College Still Worth It?
Yes and no. Degrees still signal persistence and skills, but results vary. 52 percent of college graduates are underemployed after one year, and 45 percent remain so even after 10 years.
Still, most employers say degrees remain valuable. In particular, the network a graduate builds remains important for career durability. Bootcamps, certificate programs and apprenticeships offer alternatives to a four-year degree, though adaptability matters most.
Degrees Still Open Doors, Even When Skills Don’t Match
I’ll admit that, as someone who invested in my own master’s degree while simultaneously building a tech company that helps job seekers navigate career transitions, I have complicated feelings about these hiring trends.
Here’s what I learned in that master’s program. I took a fabulous class called “How the Future of Work is Shaping the Future of Education” taught by Dr. Peter Blair, a labor economist. Dr. Blair argued that degrees serve two distinct functions. The first is skills development, meaning the things a student learns how to do. When it comes to this function, colleges have long come under scrutiny for the perceived mismatch between tertiary education and job-ready competencies.
The second function is signaling — and this one still carries massive weight. Nobel Prize-winning research even attests to labor market signaling as a proxy for trust. Graduating from college, whether MIT or UMass, signals persistence, work ethic and the baseline competencies employers associate with obtaining a degree: writing, analysis and collaboration. It may not be fair since you can master those competencies in other ways. But it’s reality.
There is no clear-cut ROI to a degree, which means there’s no rational reason to spend hundreds of thousands once you factor in tuition, living costs and foregone earnings. Still, the signaling value persists.
The Skills-Based Hiring Gap
Companies love talking about skills-based hiring. The numbers tell a different story.
According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, nearly two-thirds of employers (64.8 percent) use skills-based hiring practices for new entry-level hires, yet only 30 percent have actually removed degree requirements. Harvard Business School and Burning Glass Institute research reveals the stark reality: for every 100 jobs that drop degree requirements, companies make fewer than four additional non-degree hires.
That’s not a typo. Four.
That slow progress makes sense when you look at employer attitudes: 87 percent of employers still say a college degree is worth the investment, with the “definitely worth it” camp even growing over the past five years.
There are success stories worth noting. Opportunity@Work identifies more than 70 million STARs — workers Skilled Through Alternative Routes — representing about half the U.S. workforce. Their research shows 30 million STARs could earn 70 percent more if skills-first practices became the norm.
But I would say “if” is doing heavy lifting in that sentence.
When Specialization Backfires: The Resilience Factor
A decade ago, coding bootcamps seemed brilliant. They were a fraction of the cost of a college degree, averaging $14,000, with direct pathways to high-paying roles. Then reality hit. Launch Academy paused enrollment, citing a lack of opportunities. AI can now code faster than any grad.
I would say the real challenge isn't learning specific skills. It is building adaptability: the meta-skill needed to recognize what to learn next, how to learn it and how to signal that effectively. IBM research shows skills have a half-life of about five years, with technical skills lasting just 30 months. The World Economic Forum predicts that 44 percent of workers’ skills will be disrupted between 2023 and 2028.
Alternative pathways are evolving. Aon and IBM are expanding apprenticeships into cybersecurity and data analytics. Google Career Certificates now partners with universities for credit transfer. I don’t see the differentiator as the pathway; instead, I’d ask if you can build adaptability alongside specific skills.
What Universities Do That Bootcamps Can’t
Universities don't need to reinvent themselves, and they probably shouldn’t. Instead, they need to preserve what they do well that’s unique.
Just last week, Demis Hassabis, the Nobel laureate who runs Google DeepMind, declared that “learning how to learn” is the most critical skill for the next generation. At an event in Athens, he said, “One thing we'll know for sure is you're going to have to continually learn throughout your career.”
When done right, universities excel at imparting exactly this skill. They do so through three mechanisms.
Social Capital
Referral hiring advantages are well-documented across industries. The challenge is building the network to get those referrals in the first place. Universities create sustained peer interaction, alumni relationships and faculty connections that provide a network job seekers can draw on later. Alternative pathways struggle to replicate this network at scale.
Structured Practice
Work-integrated learning is any program that integrates real-world practice into academic studies so that students learn by doing. A classic example? Northeastern University’s co-op program, through which undergraduates work for at least one semester instead of taking classes. The program shows strong outcomes, with program graduates seeing significantly higher starting salaries than traditional degree holders.
While many universities are still developing these programs, companies like Podium and Riipen have had success embedding experiential learning into existing structures. For example, they may source employer-sponsored projects that count as credit. The benefit goes beyond the experience or a resume bullet point. Ideally, these programs include scaffolded reflection and skill transfer, teaching students to extract patterns from specific experiences and apply them to novel situations. This is another way students learn how to learn that Hassabis emphasized: the ability to transfer knowledge from one context to another.
Metacognitive Abilities
This is the aspect I talk about most frequently. When technical skills have a half-life of just 2.5 years, your ability to recognize what you need to learn, how to learn it efficiently and when to unlearn outdated approaches becomes the only durable skill. You don’t develop this meta-skill by memorizing Python syntax. You develop it through years of wrestling with complex, ambiguous problems across disciplines. Incidentally, this is exactly what liberal arts education was designed to do before we decided it wasn’t practical enough.)
But here’s the reality check: Even the best university education won't carry you through a 40-year career — and that might actually be more like *cough* 60 years.
The traditional model was simple: Get a degree, get a job, work until retirement. That’s dead. Job security has been replaced by something more complex and demanding: career security. And that requires a completely different playbook.
From Job Security to Career Security
After watching hundreds of professionals scramble during layoffs, I developed the ADAPT framework for career security:
Agility
Regularly benchmark yourself against the market, not just when you need a new job. This might mean scanning job postings once a quarter to check for the specific skills and tools companies are looking for in your industry or taking a recruiter call even if you’re not actively looking. The goal? Spot shifts early and adjust before you’re forced to.
Documentation
Record wins in real time. Your brain won’t remember that 2023 project. Log metrics and project details, save performance review notes, anything to help make a case for yourself in the hiring process or promotion cycle. Think of it like portfolio building.
AI Fluency
Beyond ChatGPT, can you use AI to meaningfully augment your work?
Personal Branding
Learning in public beats learning in silence. We’re all learning these new tools, and showing how you’re building your own expertise is creating value for yourself and others. You don’t need to be a LinkedIn influencer. You can keep a blog of what you’re experimenting with and share resources in a Slack group.
Ties
Your network is your net worth. Yes, that’s cliché, but more true than ever.
Universities provide strong foundations for ties, documentation (transcripts and portfolios) and metacognitive skills that enable agility. But everyone needs to actively develop AI fluency and personal branding, regardless of their pathway.
The truth? None of us can afford to coast anymore, with or without a degree. This point brings us back to the question everyone’s dancing around: How do we build a system that actually prepares people for this reality?
Building a Bridge That Works
If the bridge between education and employment is broken, why are students still asked to pay hundreds of thousands to cross it?
The path forward requires action at three levels:
Structurally
Preserve the signaling value of credentials while making them accessible based on merit rather than wealth. Models worth exploring and potentially scaling include employer-funded education or income-share agreements, where students pay a small tuition amount up front and then a percentage of their income later. This ties access to outcomes.
Institutionally
Universities play a role, but so do high schools, specifically with respect to guidance. Students need clarity about the different pathways they can choose, what outcomes they could expect and the tools to make those informed decisions.
Individually
Young people and professionals alike should build their own career security through frameworks like ADAPT.
The real differentiator isn’t the credential. It’s whether your learning experience develops both immediate employability and long-term adaptability. Degrees retain signaling power, but their lasting value lies in fostering the meta-skills that enable career resilience.
The question isn’t whether college is worth it. It’s how to access learning that delivers both employability and adaptability without making that access contingent on family wealth.
