Heidi Ahihi

“When a Degree No Longer Guarantees the Future, What Is Education Still Worth?”

This article started because my breakfast went cold.

I was eating when I came across a post my professor had shared on Facebook. It discussed a troubling idea: young people are becoming more educated, degrees are becoming more expensive, yet graduates are increasingly uncertain about their futures.

I stopped eating.

Not because I immediately agreed with it.

I started asking questions.

Is this actually true?

Based on what?

If it is true, which part is true?

And perhaps the question that bothered me most:

If the transition from education to employment really is becoming harder, should the next generation become less hopeful about education?

I am a returning student myself.

So I put down my chopsticks, opened my laptop, and started looking at the research.

Yes, Something Is Happening to Young Graduates

Let’s begin with the uncomfortable part.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the unemployment rate among recent U.S. college graduates was approximately 5.7% in the first quarter of 2026. Their underemployment rate was 41.5% – meaning a substantial share were working in jobs that typically do not require a college degree.

Those aren’t numbers I would dismiss.

They help explain why some young people can do everything they were told to do – study, graduate, apply for jobs – and still wonder why the promised transition into professional life feels so difficult.

Meanwhile, the jobs themselves are changing.

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, based on a survey of more than 1,000 employers, estimates that 39% of workers’ existing skill sets will be transformed or become outdated between 2025 and 2030. Employers continue to value analytical thinking, while technological skills are rising quickly alongside human abilities such as resilience, flexibility, agility and creative thinking.

There are also changes that a student choosing a major at eighteen could hardly have predicted.

A 2026 analysis by researchers writing for the New York Fed estimates that remote work may explain 64% of the recent increase in unemployment among young college graduates. Their explanation is surprisingly intuitive: inexperienced employees need training, feedback, mentoring and opportunities to learn from more experienced people. Those things can be harder to provide in distributed workplaces, making employers less willing to hire inexperienced workers in the first place.

Think about the position this puts a young person in.

You choose an education today.

You spend several years completing it.

But you graduate into a labor market shaped by technologies, workplace structures and employer demands that may have changed while you were studying.

That uncertainty is real.

We should not pretend otherwise.

But this is also where I think we need to be careful.

Research tells us what is happening. It does not automatically tell us what the findings mean for an entire generation – or what an individual should do with them.

Because the Other Half of the Research Tells a Very Different Story

If degrees are becoming worthless, we should expect the economic advantage associated with higher education to be disappearing.

It isn’t.

Across OECD countries, adults with bachelor’s degrees earn approximately 39% more on average than adults whose highest attainment is upper-secondary education. For people with master’s or doctoral degrees, the average advantage rises to 83%.

The same pattern is visible in the United States.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2024 a worker with a high-school diploma had median weekly earnings of $930 and an unemployment rate of 4.2%.

For someone with a bachelor’s degree, median weekly earnings were $1,543, with unemployment at 2.5%.

For master’s-degree holders, median weekly earnings reached $1,840, with unemployment at 2.2%.

Of course, these are averages.

They do not mean that every bachelor’s graduate will earn more than every high-school graduate. They do not account for every difference in occupation, ability, geography, field of study, family background or individual circumstance.

But they make one thing difficult to argue:

Education has not simply stopped having economic value.

So how can both stories be true?

How can young graduates struggle while education continues to carry substantial economic returns?

I think that contradiction is much more interesting than the headline that “degrees are becoming worthless.”

Perhaps We Are Confusing the Value of a Credential With the Value of an Education

Imagine that only ten applicants for a job have college degrees.

Having a degree tells an employer something distinctive about you.

Now imagine most applicants have one.

The degree has not suddenly become academically equivalent to a high-school diploma.

The knowledge you acquired did not disappear.

But the credential alone tells an employer less about why you, specifically, should be selected.

So another question follows.

What else can you do?

What experience do you have?

Can you write?

Can you analyze data?

Can you communicate?

Can you solve an unfamiliar problem?

Can you learn the software we use?

Can you work with other people?

Can you show me something you’ve actually built, researched, written or accomplished?

That distinction matters.

A credential is something we can put on a résumé.

An education should change what we are capable of doing.

And there is some fascinating evidence for that distinction.

Among tertiary-educated adults in OECD countries with available data, people with high numeracy proficiency earn about 40% more on average than tertiary-educated adults at a lower benchmark level of numeracy proficiency. In other words, even among people with higher-education credentials, actual skill differences remain economically meaningful.

OECD’s Education at a Glance 2025 makes an even more uncomfortable observation: despite rising levels of formal educational attainment, adult literacy and numeracy skills stagnated or declined in most OECD countries between 2012 and 2023.

That finding changed the question for me.

Maybe we shouldn’t only be asking:

Is a college degree still valuable?

Maybe we should also ask:

After all those years of education, what can I do now that I couldn’t do before?

What Did Education Actually Leave Inside You?

Can you read something complicated without immediately giving up?

Can you write an idea clearly enough that another person can understand it?

Can you look at a graph and question what it is really showing?

Can you recognize the difference between correlation and causation?

Can you notice when somebody presents one frightening statistic without giving you the denominator, comparison group or historical context?

Can you research something you know nothing about?

Can you encounter evidence that contradicts what you believed yesterday and change your mind?

Can you ask a better question?

That last one matters to me.

Because that is exactly how this article began.

I encountered a claim.

I could have agreed with it because it sounded convincing.

I could have rejected it because I didn’t like its conclusion.

Instead, my education has taught me to ask:

Based on what?

So I went looking.

And the evidence complicated the original question.

That, to me, is education doing its job.

The Market Can Reprice Your Degree. It Cannot Reprice Everything You Learned.

A degree has market value.

Market value changes.

A credential that is rare today may become common tomorrow.

A profession facing a labor shortage today may attract so many workers that the shortage eventually disappears.

A software package that employers desperately want today may be obsolete ten years from now.

A task that once required hours of human work may eventually take an AI system thirty seconds.

We cannot control all of that.

But education can leave us with something broader than the market price of a particular credential.

It can leave us with knowledge.

Ways of reasoning.

The ability to communicate.

Quantitative literacy.

Research skills.

Professional networks.

Exposure to disciplines and careers we did not know existed.

And, perhaps most importantly in a changing economy, the ability to learn again.

This is why I don’t want to tell a worried eighteen-year-old:

Don’t worry. Get a degree and everything will be fine.

That would be dishonest.

I don’t know what the labor market will look like when that person graduates.

But I also don’t want to tell them:

Degrees are losing value, so education isn’t worth it anymore.

That conclusion makes even less sense to me.

If the world is becoming less predictable, why would the ability to learn become less important?

Precisely because the world changes, the ability to learn becomes more valuable – not less.

Education Was Never Supposed to Be a Crystal Ball

I think we have placed an impossible expectation on education.

We ask an eighteen-year-old to choose a field.

Then we ask a university to prepare that student for decades of employment.

But the World Economic Forum’s employer survey expects almost two-fifths of workers’ existing skills to change or become outdated in only a five-year period.

How could a four-year degree possibly contain every skill somebody will need for the next forty years?

It can’t.

And perhaps it shouldn’t try.

There are things education can teach that age relatively slowly:

how to reason,

how to write,

how to work with numbers,

how to investigate,

how to communicate,

how to understand a discipline deeply,

how to recognize what you don’t know,

and how to learn what comes next.

Then there are skills that change quickly.

Software.

Tools.

Platforms.

Industry practices.

AI applications.

Those will require updating throughout our lives.

The solution is not to demand that universities perfectly predict the future.

The solution is to stop treating graduation as the end of learning.

But Lifelong Learning Does Not Mean Collecting Degrees Forever

There is another trap here.

If a bachelor’s degree feels insufficient, get a master’s.

If a master’s feels insufficient, get another certification.

Then another.

Then another.

Eventually, “lifelong learning” can become another version of the same anxious credential race.

But learning doesn’t belong exclusively to universities.

You can learn from a job.

An internship.

A mentor.

A book.

A research project.

A professional course.

A conversation with someone who understands something you don’t.

A new technology.

A mistake.

A career change.

Or you may return to university later because you finally know exactly what you need from it.

Sometimes another degree is the right answer.

Sometimes it isn’t.

The important question isn’t:

What credential should I collect next?

It is:

What do I need to learn next, and what is the best way to learn it?

Those are very different questions.

Don’t “Follow Your Passion.” Don’t Just “Follow the Money,” Either.

I also don’t think the solution is telling every young person to ignore the labor market and simply follow their passion.

That sounds lovely until rent is due.

Income matters.

Job opportunities matter.

Housing matters.

Financial security matters.

A young person is not shallow for thinking about those things.

But salary should not necessarily become the only variable in a decision that may shape decades of life.

Instead of asking only:

Which major makes the most money?

I would ask several questions.

What am I good at?

What could I become very good at?

What do I enjoy enough to keep learning even when it becomes difficult?

What problems does society actually need people to solve?

What skills are employers willing to pay for?

What kind of life do I want my work to support?

And:

If this field changes, what parts of what I learn can travel with me somewhere else?

There probably isn’t a perfect answer at the intersection of all those questions.

That’s okay.

Education isn’t supposed to eliminate every trade-off in life.

It can help us understand the trade-offs we are making.

And Education Is Bigger Than Employment Anyway

We have become very fond of discussing higher education as an investment calculation.

Tuition costs X.

Starting salary is Y.

Therefore, return on investment equals Z.

Those calculations matter enormously, particularly when education requires taking on substantial debt.

But something bothers me when they become the only way we talk about education.

If salary is the complete measure of learning, then a university is little more than an expensive job-training center.

I don’t believe that.

Learning economics, for example, doesn’t matter only if you become an economist.

It can teach you to ask about incentives, opportunity costs, externalities, trade-offs and counterfactuals.

Statistics isn’t valuable only if someone eventually pays you to calculate statistics.

Understanding statistics also makes you harder to fool with statistics.

History doesn’t matter only if you become a historian.

Psychology doesn’t matter only if you become a psychologist.

Learning another language isn’t valuable only when “bilingual preferred” appears in a job advertisement.

Education gives us more ways to understand the world we are living in.

Sometimes it teaches us that something we confidently believed for years was wrong.

Sometimes it introduces us to something we didn’t know existed.

Sometimes it gives us the language for an idea we had felt but could never explain.

Sometimes it gives us a better question.

Those things are difficult to put into an ROI spreadsheet.

That doesn’t make them worthless.

So What Would I Tell a Young Student Now?

I would not promise you certainty.

I would not tell you that one degree will protect you for the rest of your life.

I would not tell you to choose whichever occupation happens to appear safest in today’s headlines.

And I definitely would not tell you that because the labor market is changing, learning no longer matters.

I would tell you to build layers.

Learn something deeply.

Learn to read and write well.

Become comfortable with numbers.

Learn how to research.

Learn how to communicate with people who don’t think like you.

Understand technology well enough that you can recognize how it is changing your field.

Get real experience whenever you can.

Build things.

Write things.

Research things.

Work with people.

Let knowledge leave the classroom and collide with reality.

And learn how to learn again.

Not because your first education failed.

But because your life will probably last much longer than many of the skills you currently use at work.

This Isn’t Only the Student’s Responsibility

There is one message I don’t want this article to accidentally send:

The labor market is becoming harder, so young people simply need to adapt harder.

No.

If the problem is structural, responsibility cannot belong entirely to individuals.

Universities need stronger connections between theory and actual work.

Employers need to remember what “entry level” means.

A new graduate is not supposed to arrive with ten years of professional judgment.

Somebody has to create the first opportunity.

Somebody has to mentor.

Somebody has to train.

And if economies increasingly require workers to reskill throughout their lives, governments, employers and educational institutions need to make continuing education realistically accessible—not merely tell workers to keep learning while leaving them with neither the time nor resources to do it.

Adaptability matters.

But we should not use “be adaptable” as a polite way of transferring every cost of economic change onto the individual worker.

Maybe We Should Stop Promising Young People That Education Will Make Their Future Safe

Perhaps we should promise something different.

Don’t tell a child:

Study hard, and your future will be secure.

Tell them:

Study because your future will contain things you don’t know yet.

Study so that not knowing something doesn’t frighten you.

Study so that you know how to find out.

Study so that when somebody makes a frightening claim, you know how to ask:

Based on what?

Study so that when technology changes, learning another technology doesn’t feel impossible.

Study so that if one career ends, you don’t believe your usefulness ended with it.

Study so that you have more choices.

Study to understand the world.

And study to understand yourself within it.

Education does not guarantee security. It expands what we are capable of doing when security changes.

Your degree may not be as rare as the degree held by a previous generation.

Your first job may not use everything you learned.

At thirty-five, you may need to learn something entirely new.

At fifty, you may work in a profession that barely existed when you were eighteen.

Know that.

Prepare for it.

But don’t be afraid of education because of it.

If anything, uncertainty gives us an even stronger reason to learn.

Because perhaps the greatest value of education was never that it could hand us a ticket for one train and guarantee that the train would carry us safely through the rest of our lives.

Perhaps its greatest value is that when the destination changes—or when we realize we want a different destination—we can step off, look around, read the map again, ask better questions, learn what we need to learn—

and find another way forward.

Don’t study only to become qualified.

Study so that what you don’t know today never has to define what you are capable of becoming tomorrow.

A Note About the Featured Photo

Yes, that is my breakfast.

This entire article began over that little pot of homemade meatball and mung bean vermicelli soup on an ordinary Wednesday morning.

I was happily eating when I encountered the post that made me wonder whether the increasingly pessimistic story we tell about education was actually supported by the evidence.

So I stopped eating and started researching.

By the time I returned to my breakfast, the noodles were cold.

I ate them anyway.

And now I’m going to live my Wednesday.

Maybe that little pot belongs at the top of an article about education after all.

Because sometimes education isn’t somebody standing in front of a classroom giving us an answer.

Sometimes it is simply having enough curiosity to interrupt a perfectly wonderful breakfast and ask:

Wait. Is that actually true?

References

Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2025). Education Pays, 2024. U.S. Department of Labor.

Federal Reserve Bank of New York. (2026). The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates.

Emanuel, N., Harrington, E., & Pallais, A. (2026). Remote Work Leaves Younger Workers Sidelined. Liberty Street Economics, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2025). Education at a Glance 2025: OECD Indicators. OECD Publishing.

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2025). What Are the Earnings Advantages to Education? In Education at a Glance 2025.

World Economic Forum. (2025). The Future of Jobs Report 2025.