Just How Important is the College Degree?

The Evolution of the College Degree and Extant Data Proving The Degree’s Importance

Andy Chan
12 min readOct 22, 2019

It gets ironic when a Harvard Business School professor predicted in an interview that half of the universities in the States will go bankrupt in the next decade — including Harvard itself.

While Clayton Christensen, the 5-time McKinsey Award recipient, maybe “excited to see [it] happen”, the recent spate of tech giants and multinational firms removing the college degree requirement in their job offerings seemed to indicate that his vision may eventually come true.

The most recent narrative is this: college degrees are slowly losing value.

They are typically described as illusions of security and false stamps of professional competency. It perpetuates the idea that knowledge is static — in that vein, companies who still hang on to their requirement for a college degree are, by default, old, clunky dinosaurs belonging to a bygone era.

Google’s meteoric rise in non-college-educated employees and PwC’s high school accountant programs seem to reinforce that idea. If giants like them, with global operations and billions in revenue, are making paradigm shifts in the way they acquire talents, what can then be said of those who are ‘lagging…

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Andy Chan
Andy Chan

Written by Andy Chan

Product design @ Delivery Hero. I write about pretty much anything I want to write.

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