The Value of College, an Honest Assessment

“College will never be the same as it was before the pandemic”

As a junior at Xavier university I told my mom that I wanted to major in Liberal Arts, but the news was not well received. She told me college was too expensive to waste on a degree without career ties and that only taking the classes I was interested in was not how life worked. Despite my objections, I had no choice because she was paying the tuition and begrudgingly chose a major upon transferring to my third college in four years. It took 20 credits a semester and an extra half year, but ultimately I earned my B.A. in healthcare administration and policy.

While I would go on to have a five year career working in various healthcare IT and consulting positions, I always wondered if this was due to my degree or because of an internship I landed in health insurance my senior year that led to other roles in the industry. It was at about this time I was starting to feel burnt out and unmotivated to work in healthcare anymore. I wanted a new career but could only get interviews for jobs similar to those I already had. I really didn’t want to return to school and was unsure if it even was the most efficient way to jumpstart my career pivot. Before enrolling in grad school I thought back to my undergrad experience and pondered the following as I considered a return to school:

• What was the value of all those college classes I took?
• Did I get my first internship because of a degree or because of my neighbor who recommended me to the company?
• Did the philosophy, sports management, and criminal justice classes even matter?
• What were the skills that actually made me successful in my role and how did they tie to my college experience?
• Is going back to school and paying the thousands of dollars in tuition worth it?

I did ultimately return to school and now no longer work in healthcare; this made me wonder if I have outlived the value of my degree before the age of 30. It is with this in mind that I have the following three conclusions about higher education and early stage career development:

First, employment is more tied to what you can do than what you know. While a recruiter may screen your resume, getting and thriving in a job, or as a leader, is more about the ability to execute than the theory of execution. As a healthcare administration major, I read the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and wrote many papers dissecting the impact it would have on payers and providers. While the general knowledge was nice to have, my actual day to day work required very little knowledge of ACA. In fact, the most important class I took for my first five years of work was my Information Systems 200 class which taught me how to make pivot tables and dissect data in excel. While I worked for companies that worked on the initiatives shaped by ACA my actual job relied on the technical skills I had learned in classes completely unrelated to my degree. By the age of 26 I was earning a lucrative salary in healthcare sales and can say with complete confidence this was more due to the communication and people skills I learned as a waiter and athlete, than any of the classes you might see on a transcript. It is the skills or things you can do that matter most to career success.

Upon returning to college in 2020 I was set to get value out of every class I took and transition from a career in sales to a role in product management and user experience research. It was during this return to school that I had my second realization, college curriculums are not liable to career outcomes. At the end of every college semester I would rank my classes on a scale of 1–3. Classes receiving 3 taught hard skills that I could foresee directly using in my career, while 1’s were mostly considered a waste of time. My MA/MBA program had an average class score of 1.7. As most of what I learned seemed redundant or outdated. My program failed to focus on the most important job skills students were after and instead leaned on historical curriculums. As a CEO it has been important for me to understand basic financing and accounting principles, but ultimately I will be offloading these tasks to professionals and furthermore much of what I learned in school will likely be automated in the coming years as it was more focused on computation than application.

My third and final realization has come now that I am successfully employed in a job I love in addition to running a start-up I am passionate about; it is inevitable that colleges will change their offering or lose their market share in the coming decade. My colleagues in tech have a wide variety of backgrounds. From self taught coders to english majors turned UX bootcampers, no path is quite the same. With companies like Google and Amazon entering the education marketplace we are seeing a rise in credentials that offer on-demand, low cost, online solutions that target actual job skills without the fluff of traditional degrees. Solomon Alao, the VP of Outcomes at Morgan State University, is transforming his school by offering micro-degrees, digital verified credentials, and other forward thinking solutions to stay ahead with the new competition. In my call with him he noted, “Change is inevitable if we are looking at the future of education and work, teachers may not like it, but it is inevitable. College will never be the same as it was before the pandemic”. With 42% of Americans now touting a college degree we must look forward and get more granular with how we do education viewing the complete learning record of an individual and focusing on the skills that matter.

So often classes are lecture based, focusing on memorization of data instead of performance of tasks, leading to students who have no idea how to actually execute relevant job skills. In a 2021 survey 1 in 3 Americans now admit to lying on their resume, with 40% of those lies relating to false knowledge of or the ability to perform skills. We need to hold professors and students accountable for what is taught in classes, and focus on defining which skills are career relevant. There is an abundance of information on the internet, we don’t need teachers to reiterate the information we need them to show us how to use it.

So, what’s the conclusion to all this? Well for one that my mother was wrong, and that I should have just taken the classes I wanted, but beyond that we need a new solution to higher education. Expensive classes with low returns on investment will not cut it, as the future student has more options than ever to learn in the ways that work best for them. EDUcoin works to solve this problem by creating a blockchain based database that tracks the transfer of skill from teachers to students. By documenting the skills learned in classes and tracking them to career outcomes we offer the first solution which gives students and administrators real time data into the outcomes of individual classes, tying them to the demands of jobs and the workforce placement of students. This solution works to solve the problem of those classes which weigh down the value of degrees and do not adequately prepare students or reward teachers for focusing on the skills that matter most. To learn more about how we are changing education visit Educoinapp.com.