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For much of the past century, America believed that college was essential to upward mobility. A four-year degree has long been a symbol of the American dream, seen as a way to ensure that millions of students could be better off than their parents and grandparents. Today, however, that faith is plummeting. A Gallup poll earlier this year found that Americans’ confidence in higher education has fallen to a new low of 36 percent, down from 57 percent in 2015. Although a record share of Americans had a bachelor’s degree as of 2021, degree skepticism and pandemic-related disruptions led undergraduate enrollment to drop 8 percent from 2019 to 2022.
This pessimism is understandable. The earnings advantage afforded by a bachelor’s degree, although still sizable, has leveled off in the past 15 years while tuition has continued to rise. And according to the National Student Clearinghouse, 40 million Americans have enrolled in college but haven’t ultimately graduated—an all-time high. As a result, college has left many students in debt, without a degree to help them get out of it. In response, many Americans have adopted an either/or approach to higher education, one that pits abstract academics against career preparation. Some prospective students are giving up on traditional degrees altogether, favoring instead cheaper, shorter, career-focused credentials. This fall, for example, a Clearinghouse analysis found that enrollment in nondegree-certificate programs rose nearly 10 percent compared with last year.
But the push to replace a liberal education with practical training is deeply misguided. The two approaches are complements, not substitutes; the best careers require both. Perhaps that’s why practical education already pervades the college system. And when the push extends to economically disadvantaged students, who are disproportionately steered toward nondegree programs that don’t have strong records of fostering economic and career advancement, it’s particularly dangerous. Despite the claims that “the degree is dead,” the job market itself is sending an unambiguous signal: College is still worth it.
Places like Colorado Mountain College demonstrate why. CMC is one of about 400 “dual-mission” institutions in the U.S. that offer a mix of undergraduate programs and specialized certificates. Students have a wide range of choices, such as an associate degree in English literature, a bachelor’s degree designed for forest managers, or a certification in avalanche science. “We want learners who come out of CMC to know how to think,” Carrie Besnette Hauser, the school’s president, told me. “We do liberal arts and career-focused skills training—and smash them together.”
The graduates who are most valuable to employers have both targeted, profession-specific skills and the kind of transferable skills—such as writing, critical thinking, and communication—that are honed by a liberal education. Consider the local tourism industry that employs many CMC graduates. An outdoor guide should be able to work with spreadsheets, communicate with clients, and market the enterprise. A fly-fishing instructor who wants to start a business will likely need to understand not only sales and accounting but also environmental science.
In addition to dual-mission schools like CMC, America has more than 100 land-grant institutions, which were established to provide professional skills in the context of a liberal education. Undergraduates at these schools can specialize in areas such as forensics, hotel management, and agricultural science while also being exposed to a broad range of academic subjects.
The job market rewards this combination. Using a database of hundreds of millions of online job postings, résumés, and social profiles, the labor-market-analytics company Burning Glass Technologies has documented the rise of “hybrid jobs,” which demand a blend of technical skills and creative thinking. The company (now rebranded as Lightcast) showed that hybrid jobs pay more than those that require a narrower set of skills. They are “the jobs that are growing the fastest, that are of highest value,” Matt Sigelman, Lightcast’s chair and one of the authors of the report, told me. That’s why liberal-arts degrees, according to Sigelman, have “twice as much value when combined with some specific technical skills.”
For this reason, the Harvard University economist David Deming argues against what he described in a New York Times column as “the impulse to make college curriculums ever more technical and career focused.” He makes the case that even the early-career earnings advantage of college graduates in STEM majors—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—“fades steadily” after their first post-college jobs, while liberal-arts majors gradually catch up by middle age. Technical skills might garner a short-term salary premium, but they become obsolete over time and require refreshing. Meanwhile, Deming adds, liberal-arts soft skills such as problem-solving and adaptability have long-term career value.
Deming envisions a world, he told me, “where more and more people are getting a four-year degree, and then also going to a coding boot camp or to get a certificate in some specialized trade.” That won’t be possible for everyone, but many schools affordably offer both paths.
Some employers have begun to emphasize skills over degrees in their job listings, but hiring trends suggest that degrees are still king. A recent LinkedIn analysis found that many job listings on the site have dropped degree requirements. This shift, however, hasn’t translated into more jobs for workers without degrees.
Beyond employability, degree programs also offer another key benefit: social capital. College can be an excellent environment for people to build, access, and mobilize professional networks. That’s particularly important for first-generation students who don’t have inherited networks. Some colleges have found effective ways to give disadvantaged students extra help building social capital by offering internship guidance, regularly inviting industry leaders, hosting networking events, and providing career coaching to teach students how to leverage connections.
Degree alternatives still have a place. For in-demand fields—health specialties, for instance, or data science—specialized certificates allow students to improve their employment prospects quickly and cheaply. A growing number of employers—Amazon and Walmart among them—are subsidizing short-term credentials for their employees, in recognition that educational opportunities retain workers in a tight labor market. When those short-term credentials can be stacked together into degrees, so much the better.
Traditional degrees are not right for everyone, and our growing skepticism is a sure sign that colleges must become accessible to more Americans. But much of that skepticism is unfounded and dangerous. If we continue to ignore the unique value of a college degree, we’ll discourage students from pursuing the education that can best help them—and the country—get ahead.
This article has been adapted from Ben Wildavsky’s forthcoming book, The Career Arts: Making the Most of College, Credentials, and Connections.
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