The Degree Still Matters But Also Asking Why

• Virtually any technical content taught in a classroom is now available through online courses, YouTube, documentation, and AI tutors. The upskilling economy has made credentials less central to demonstrating competence in many fields. But what college still offers, and what cannot be easily replicated online, is the development of communication and collaboration skills. These are often dismissed as “soft skills,” but the ability to present ideas under pressure and build trust with people is fundamental and colleges emphasize this.

• Also self-directed learning is harder than it looks. MOOCs succeeded at expanding access to education but struggled with completion of courses. Universities solve that through its strucuture of built-in accountability, cohorts who push you, and consequences that keep you moving.

On the student side…

• Community colleges: Although I did not go to one, going for the first two years saves significant cost. The first two years are generally for exploration (general education requirements, introductory courses, figuring out what you actually want to study) and you can do all of that at a community college. If we’re measuring success: a friend of mine went to a community college and ended up at J.P. Morgan.

• In-state public universities: Out-of-state tuition at private universities saddles students with six-figure debt for degrees that don’t justify the premium. In-state public schools offer comparable academic quality at a fraction of the cost.

• Pursue a three-year degree: There’s a growing body of evidence and advocacy for compressing degree timelines to three-years. Massachusetts also recently became the latest state to allow public institutions to offer 90-credit bachelor’s degrees, with Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey framing it as a way to lower costs and keep the state competitive.

  • The main argument is that institutions will cut corners under the guise of innovation. Some of that will unfortunately happen, but that assumes the current 120-credit requirement is essential, when much of it exists for historical or bureaucratic reasons. The better question is what gets cut. If much of the second and third years are elective padding, compressing them is good design. My advocacy for the three years also comes with a caveat; the framing as purely an affordability play is the wrong instinct. It should not be sold as getting students into the workforce faster but as giving the more intentional control over their time and money.

  • Personally, I did not finish in three years because I double majored and did multiple internships. But I am confident that it is very doable, and to the broader point on interdisciplinary thinking I make down below, universities should be supporting career development from the first year to get students to start thinking.

• Experience can trump credentials: In many fields, especially technology, entrepreneurship, and creative industries, a portfolio of demonstrable work outweighs the classes you took. Universities should emphasize experiential learning not just in the classes they offer, but in the flexibility they give students to pursue it.

  • What I have found is that people don’t really care about the classes I took or what college I went to. The most value I gained was through my experiences and the connections I built. There is an argument for where coursework matters more like if you are going into neuroscience or law, or already know you are heading straight through to graduate school. But for myself and most people, what you did outside the classroom will outlast what happened inside it.

  • I also won’t lie. When someone mentions they went to Harvard or MIT, it’s natural to assume they are sharp. But people don’t remember the specifics of your resume, they remember how you made them feel. The research of Professor Laura Huang shows that lasting success depends less on your resume and more on how you make people feel — whether you delight them, challenge them, add something to their experience of knowing you.. The degree gets you considered but not always remembered.

Two interesting perspectives. Both are probably right, just for different people. If you already have the network and the safety net, the credential is optional and if you don’t, the credential is often the first door that opens the next one.

Underappreciated phenomenon: Working at a high-growth, margin-focused startup is a real-life MBA where you get paid six figures plus equity to learn how to build a business instead of paying six figures and going into debt to learn how to build a theoretical one.

The loudest voices telling ambitious people to skip the credential, just build something, bet on yourself -- they already have the capital they're telling you not to chase. The Ivy degree. The connections. The social capital.

For everyone else, credentials are everything.

I went to UGA. It's a great school and I absolutely loved it, but it's not a target. In consulting recruiting, that matters a LOT. Getting an offer from Bain was hard. But once I had it, everything changed.

Every meaningful opportunity I've had since -- cold emails that actually got responses, pivoting to Hollywood, working at startups, the Schwarzman Scholarship -- traces back to that one line on my resume.

Not because the brand did the work for me. But because it got me in the room where I could...

Don't take advice about skipping steps from people who never had to take them.

On the universities side…

• Focus on interdisciplinary thinking: The future belongs to people who can find unexpected connections across domains that, on the surface, don’t seem to belong together. Look at AI: for years, students were told a computer science degree was the path to a high salary and stability and now that path is very uncertain. Help students start thinking about designing their own paths from the first year, not the fourth, and build that into every first-year curriculum.

  • CS Professor Yann LeCun said it well: “my recommendation was not to avoid CS as a major but to take the maximum number of courses on foundations (e.g. math, physics, or EE courses) rather than take courses on the trendy technology du jour”. Learn things with a long shelf life.

  • But foundations alone aren’t enough. The students who will thrive are the ones who can pair technical fluency with something seemingly unrelated like history. That combination is harder to automate and harder to replicate. As someone who studied CS, embracing a more expansive background across other disciplines like design and environment, has kept me flexible.

• Connect to the local community: Universities are deeply embedded in the towns and cities around them, and that relationship should go both ways. An institution that invests in its surroundings opens doors for students through more community partnerships, internships, and experiential learning opportunities. Many universities are consumed by chasing global rankings and that means less ability to focus on anchoring talent in their local economies and giving students a reason to stay after graduating.

• Know the focus: A university leader I work with put it plainly: “We are R1, but on the line and I am comfortable with that.” Many universities are too small to genuinely compete at the highest research level, and stretching toward that single goal risks losing focus on the students in front of them. Prestige is not the only measure of a good institution.

• Consolidate where necessary: The enrollment cliff driven by declining birth rates is real. Keeping underfunded, under-enrolled programs alive through financial engineering does not serve anyone. Mergers and closures are not failures but responsible stewardship.

  • For the community projects and meetups I run, my belief is that if it serves people in the moment, it has done its job. I am not looking for some 200-year vision and if it ends one day, the influence it had lives on. The same applies to universities. An institution that closes having genuinely served its students has done more than one that survives by losing sight of them.