Build The Skills You Need In The New Economy
By: Chad Grills
Tags: Higher Education, Careers, Entrepreneurship, Economy, College

Finding our mission is incredibly difficult if we have debt and can’t work at the job we want. In order to always be growing, many individuals will undoubtedly want to level up their skills. This is a great thing, but in order to do this safely, we must avoid the pitfalls of thinking that college will solve all our problems. College is a great choice for those seeking to get a credential that they can only obtain through college. But for both the college bound, as well as those who want to bypass bureaucracy, this article could help save you tens of thousands of dollars in debt and years pursuing a degree that may not pay off.

It’s a bit crazy that the average college student in America takes 5.6 years to complete a four-year bachelor’s degree. On average, these students are left with around $30,000 of debt, and the ones who find jobs typically work outside their majors, in jobs they didn’t need their degrees for in the first place. Collectively, there is $1.3 trillion of student debt! College costs (when adjusted for inflation) have risen 400% since the 1980s. Many college degrees do not lead to opportunities or job offers and carry with them a debt that can’t be expunged via bankruptcy. To make matters worse, we often don’t realize how long we’ve been pre-sold the idea of college throughout our K-12 education. In order to avoid these pitfalls, and overcome past conditioning, we must choose carefully when we’re pursuing training that will help us level up our skills.

This isn’t to say that college degrees can’t be extremely valuable; of course they can. But before we purchase a college degree or course load, we are allowed to double-check and objectively prove to ourselves the value of what we’re buying.

Trust, But Verify

A few months before my last deployment in the military, I was thinking about going to graduate school. I wanted some sort of credential that could guarantee me a great salary and future opportunity. Looking back on where I was then feels a bit pathetic now. I was looking for confirmation from a university about the type of value I could provide to employers. I was looking for a “quick fix” of getting a graduate degree, prestige, and a salary boost instead of doing the hard upfront work of making sure the degree I was going to purchase was valuable. At first, I thought I’d go to law school and get a JD. But I found a number of attorneys who had graduated in debt and were clerking at $40,000 a year. Others were at big law firms, but they definitely did not seem mission-driven.

Then, I thought, since I already had a bachelor’s degree in economics… I’d get a PhD in economics! That would be it! That credential would set me up for success! As I began to study and take the prerequisites needed for a PhD in economics, such as Calculus III, I started to ask myself better questions. Who had their PhD in economics that I wanted to emulate? Who found meaning in this choice? I decided I should start meeting people who had earned their PhD in economics and ask for myself. I had my sights set on a specific economics department at a specific college, so I dug around to find dissertations and resumes of those who had recently earned their PhDs. I cold emailed all of them. A few responded, and we struck up some interesting conversations. I expected to hear that they were making great money, they had learned a lot, or that they were generally content with the investment they’d made in their PhD. None of this was true.

To say they were not satisfied was an understatement. Each person I reached out to seemed confused, unsure of the value of their degree. To be blunt, some of them seemed to be harboring deep, passive aggressive anger towards spending five years on a pursuit that didn’t lead to where they were told it would. Many were working at the same jobs they had before the PhD program. In a few cases, they were still looking for jobs.

This was an icy wake up call about higher education. Looking to learn and take an interest in improving ourselves is great, but we should determine the actual potential value of the college degree we’re buying before we purchase it.

I talked to one of my former professors from undergraduate school for a final piece of advice before I decided whether or not to go to graduate school. He listened intently to my story of reaching out to recent graduates from the program. He responded with a few crystal clear points:

Be thankful you didn’t waste five years of your life doing that

Think about how much you could learn on your own, or accomplish in the business world, in five years

You can find used editions of every book they read in class on Amazon, and read them on your own

His points hit home, and I got the wake up call I wish I had received before I devoted four years of time and money towards a bachelor’s degree. Making the choice to go to college or earn a credential doesn’t have to be difficult. It only takes a small amount of extra work for us to “trust, but verify” the value of what we’re buying. If we want to produce a certain outcome, earn a certain salary, or unlock certain opportunities, there has never been a more important time to reach out and discover if the path we’re thinking about is viable.