Why your college degree doesn’t matter today

The idea that college degree doesn’t make sense is an idea that has been tossed around from I guess the time when college started hundred of years ago. But it makes a lot of sense in the present generation and the reasons are quite clear.

The Internet  

The education system today still focus on memorization and rote-learning of facts. We all have memorized the height of Mt. Everest is 8848m and that Nepal is 147181 sq. km in area. And this memorization of facts made sense even 10 years ago but today when these facts are just two clicks away. Do we really need to memorize them? The world is changing, 90% of all the data in the world today was created in the last two years. The speed in which research paper and data are published is so fast that in no-way can a human brain memorize them. What we need is to train the students to interpret these facts and to use them to solve the world's problems, not memorize them. And the interpretation of facts is a topic untouched by the so called “modern education institutions”.  

Unsustainable Education

See we live in a world where the technology and subject matter are changing rapidly. What is modern and correct today may be outdated or wrong in the few years. And so the people who got a degree in Information Technology 20 years ago never even imagined about the smartphones we so frequently use today. Then just think are those people still working in the Silicon Valley today. There is high chance that the aren’t or they had to attain college again making their old degree useless or they self-taught them-self again making their degree useless. So if you really want to be successful I don’t think college is the right thing to go to.

Longer degrees lesser value

There was a time when a person with an SLC, the now SEE degree would be the most educated person in the family, sometimes in the entire village. But now a SEE degree!, forget about it today I personally know people with Bachelor’s and Master’s degree who are unemployed and are struggling to get their Ph.D’s. And so the value of a degree is decreasing and formal education is taking-up more and more chunk of people’s life wasting the energetic and youthful 20 to 25 years of a person’s life and for what? To be overtaken by a robot or a kid who didn’t go to college and learned the same thing on the internet in fewer years while saving million of rupees in tuition fee. Doesn’t sound right? Does it.

Jobs without degree and importance  to work experience

Imagine that you somehow got through this ruthless education system without going insane and then when you finally went to you dream office or organization to ask for the job and they ask you for work-experience. What would happen to you? And at the same time, there is a guy, half your age with the same marks as you have got in the written test and with more work experience than what you could ever get in the next decade of your life. This is a serious problem faced by the people working in the field of computer science and I.T. but now as more and more people self-teach themselves a wide variety of subject this trend will be seen in different subjects and work fields. Again the question comes back “Is the degree worth it?”

Producing Mediocratic workforce over Leading Entrepreneur

Finally, if you get a job that's not good for the economy. Unemployment is about 3.25% but among the 96.75% employed people, only a very few are above poverty line. That means the 96.75% of the population employed around 30% are below the poverty line so, what we need are not Manager for a food chain there are already a lot of people applying for the job. What we need are leaders who have both the skill and the knowledge regarding the field they are working in and these kinds of leaders are not produced by the again so called “modern education system” what it is actually producing is mindless mediocrity workforce who can only engage in monotonous over-production of goods and services. Useless for the growing demand for social entrepreneurs.

Now, by this, I don’t suggest you be absent in college from tomorrow onwards. No, but be aware that the degree you are working so hard to get isn’t perfect and wouldn’t be enough to be rich, successful and immortal in your history books. And I’m not lashing out on any particular country or organization this is not a problem of a single country or organization this is a problem of the whole world but a problem that can and has been fixed by countries like Finland. I don’t even want to frighten you about the failing education system but what I want to do is aware you about the problems we all will face in this ever competitive economy and that our college degree won’t be enough to get an edge in this race for employment.