Member-only story
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 behind’?
In a world demanding for adaptability and speed, there are still businesses with rigid belief systems. With signals from the New York Times, WSJ and The Economist blaring through the print and digital megaphones, it is odd to see ‘college degree required’ on any job advertisement today.
Besides its value, even the form of the degree program has been changing over the past decade.
MOOCs, also known as Massive Open Online Course(s), have long existed, with the first versions existing in the 2000s. Universities hopped on the model, aiming for open learning and distance learning. A little over a decade later, MOOC platforms were established, creating an entirely separate industry under the education sector.
Today, MOOC platforms boast impressive numbers: they are forecasted to be a $20.8bn industry by 2024. Global MOOC enrolment continued to experience a meteoric rise, with more…
