It’s time to drop stigmatizing people without a college degree
When I tell people I didn’t finish my college degree, they have one of two reactions.
Sometimes it’s “Good for you for doing your own thing,” but oftentimes I get a look of concern — or pity — and a question: “But you’ll go back, right?”
Over the past century, graduation rates have soared. Surely that’s a good thing.
I’d like the doctor who prescribes my medication or the engineer who builds the bridge I drive over to have college credentials.
But a college degree has also become a status symbol and a de-facto requirement in polite society.
Non-graduates are being left behind. In fact, nearly four in five say they they’ve experienced some form of stigma for not having a degree.
But it’s not just raised eyebrows. Many companies have erected degree requirements as a barrier to apply for jobs — boxing out a huge swath of Americans.
Those policies are simply unsustainable, however, especially as more and more kids like me go our own way.
A 2022 survey of high school students found that, although 85% feel pressured to pursue a four-year degree, 62% want to “forge their own educational path.”
And they are: At the start of this school year, there were 4 million fewer college students than a decade earlier.
For me, the decision not to finish college was a realization that a very expensive piece of paper doesn’t define my value.
I was a 4.0 GPA student at NYU when the pandemic started, and I decided to take a leave of absence when the school demanded full tuition for Zoom classes.
And so I began pursuing my dream of being a journalist. I learned on the job — not in the classroom.
Many Gen Z’ers like me have realized we’re being sold a bill of goods by colleges and universities who managed to appoint themselves gatekeepers to success … but are they really?
My generation has taken notice of a deeply broken system. We’ve watched the nearly $2 trillion in outstanding student loan debt cripple generations of Americans who were told their degrees would pay off.
Instead, there are actually several college majors with higher unemployment rates than high school grads.
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 7.6 percent of 22- to 27-year-olds who didn’t graduate from college are unemployed.
Meanwhile, kids the same age who have degrees in philosophy, sociology, media, graphic design and foreign language are more likely to be out of a job.
And fine arts majors take the cake, with a 12.1% unemployment rate.
When colleges are offering courses like Queer Ecologies, Decolonizing the Gaze, and Storytelling for Social Justice — classes that aren’t exactly setting kids up for viable career paths — in exchange for record-breaking tuition, should it come as any surprise that more and more enterprising young people are saying “no thank you”?
As promising non-graduates enter the job market, it’s time for employers to catch up and dump their exclusionary and elitist degree requirements.
Major corporations like Google, Tesla, and IBM are leading the way and doing just that, and smaller companies are starting to follow suit.
In fact, a staggering 53% of companies eliminated degree requirements for at least some roles in the past year.
It’s time for more to do the same.
Gen Z has realized the academic cabal was holding their success hostage. We’re bucking the status quo — and now it’s incumbent on society to support us.
C’s make degrees. Life experience makes a good employee.
