Several career success stories today are mostly coming from people who didn’t even pursue a college degree. Is this becoming a common trend for Millenials?
College degree is not a measure of career success
Based on university statistics, only 60% of college freshmen pursue their bachelor’s degree and graduate. In a competitive fast-paced industry, a college degree is not the only way to success.
Inflation in college fees. Education is very costly nowadays, even if you are lucky enough to grab a scholarship, other school expenses will still hurt your pockets. Student loans can help in surviving college financially, but, there is this urgency to find a high paying job to pay back the loan. Problem is, most high paying jobs require extensive work experience to qualify.
This is the reason why a lot of high school graduates prefer to start working early, the same 4-5 years they spent in college can already give them the skills and experience at work.
Obsolete graduate degrees. A lot of college degrees are becoming obsolete in today’s industry. The advancement in technology introduces new professions that are not exactly inclined with traditional college degrees. Some of the skills needed for career success in today’s high paying industry are self-taught and with guides readily available online. High-profit industries today include SEO specialists, crypto traders, software developers, and other e-commerce related businesses.
Innovators with no diploma inspire others. Social media is a very helpful tool. Did you know that Facebook the most popular social media platform was created by a college drop-out? Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard University during his sophomore year to work on his “Facebook” project which makes him earn around $6 million daily as of today.
Another career success story was from Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma, who finished a degree in B.A English but took a totally different career path in e-commerce business. Alibaba earned around $11.26 billion for one year based on its March 2019 financial report.
Online learning. With the aid of the internet, several learning materials and tutorials are readily available even at home. One of the most career successful fields is in programming.
Certificates of programming seminars used to be the barometer for hiring a good programmer. But today, experience and actual programming skills are more important than certificates and programming degrees.
Going into college gives divided attention for students taking up minor subjects not related to their degree, while online learning only focuses on the things you need to learn, giving you more time to practice and apply your learnings.
But still, this is a case to case basis. A number of countries globally still put more value in college degrees when it comes to hiring applicants. There is still this stigma that degree comes ahead of skills.
