Whatrichard said

The argument is everywhere right now, and I get asked about it constantly, for the obvious reason that I stand in front of a classroom for a living: are degrees still worth it? Companies are hiring more people without one. Some of those people are earning more than the people who spent four years and a small fortune getting the paper. And the internet has a phrase ready for exactly this moment — a degree, some say, is just a piece of paper.

I want to take that argument seriously, because parts of it are true. And then I want to tell you why, as someone whose entire career sits on top of higher education, I am still not going to tell you to skip it.

The paper was never supposed to be the point

Here is where I actually agree with the skeptics, without reservation: a salary should be earned by proven effort and goal achievement, not by a document. If two people produce the same result, solve the same problem, and carry the same responsibility well, the one without the framed certificate on the wall has not done less. The paper was always supposed to be a proxy for something real — knowledge, discipline, the ability to finish what you start. When the proxy gets treated as the prize itself, the whole system starts rewarding the wrong thing.

And the market is, genuinely, adjusting. Roughly seventy percent of employers now say they hire for skills rather than degrees, according to the NACE Job Outlook 2026 survey, and just over half have dropped degree requirements outright — up sharply from around thirty percent a year earlier. That is a real shift, and it is being pushed hard by how fast the actual skills are changing: the World Economic Forum projects that close to forty percent of workers’ core skills will be disrupted by 2030, and a four-year curriculum simply cannot keep pace with a technology cycle that turns over every six months.

But here is the part almost nobody quotes alongside those numbers, and it is the part I actually pay attention to, because it is the variable underneath the headline: a Harvard Business School and Burning Glass Institute study that tracked eleven thousand job postings over nine years found that dropping the degree requirement increased actual hires without a degree by about three and a half percentage points overall. Roughly ninety-seven thousand people, out of seventy-seven million annual hires. The announcement is loud. The actual behaviour, for most companies, barely moved. A meaningful minority — something closer to a fifth of new hires — did shift at the companies that committed hardest to the change. But the average company that proudly dropped the requirement is still, in practice, mostly hiring the same way it always did.

That gap between the announcement and the behaviour is exactly the kind of thing I keep telling you to watch for on this blog. The simple story sells. The actual variables are messier and far more interesting.

Smart people without degrees, fools with them

Let me say the uncomfortable part plainly, because I think pretending otherwise insults everyone’s intelligence, including my students’. There are brilliant, disciplined, highly capable employees and entrepreneurs who never finished a degree, and never needed one. Some of the sharpest operators I have met in twenty years of business did not learn what they know in a lecture hall. And there are people walking around with degrees, sometimes good ones, who are genuinely incompetent at the job in front of them — who got the paper and stopped there, as if the credential itself did the learning for them.

A degree does not manufacture competence. Its absence does not manufacture incompetence either. Both of those claims are obviously true, and neither one settles the actual question, which is not “does the degree guarantee anything” but “what is the most reliable way for most people to actually acquire real knowledge and real capability.”

Why I still won’t tell you to skip it

So here is my disclaimer, and I mean it: I am a professor, and I do not recommend not getting a degree. I want to be honest about why, because it is not credentialism and it is not self-interest dressed up as advice.

My actual goal — the thing I care about, for my students and for myself — is knowledge. Real, applied, load-bearing knowledge. That is not the same thing as a diploma, and I know it. And knowledge can be acquired in more than one way. Some people are genuinely self-taught, and I have enormous respect for what that takes: the discipline to build your own curriculum, find your own feedback, correct your own mistakes with nobody grading the work. It is real, and it produces real capability, and I will not pretend otherwise.

But most people need help and guidance to get there efficiently, and that is not a weakness, it is just how most human learning actually works. Structured teaching exists because most of us learn faster, deeper, and more completely with someone correcting our errors in real time than we do stumbling through the same material entirely alone. That is not an insult to the self-taught minority. It is a statement about what works reliably at scale.

What a classroom gives you that a browser tab does not

Here is the part of this argument I think gets skipped entirely in the online version of this debate, and it is the part I actually believe most in: university and structured classes are one of the most optimal environments you will ever have for comparing ideas and debating them with people who see the problem differently than you do.

You can learn a skill alone. You can watch every video, read every paper, build every project by yourself. What you cannot easily replicate alone is the room — a group of people, forced into the same case, the same problem, the same deadline, who disagree with you and have to defend why. I put four words on the board in one of my classes and ask which one wins, and the value is never really in my answer. It is in watching twenty-five people from a dozen different countries argue about it, borrow from each other, get corrected in real time, and leave with a sharper version of the opinion they walked in with. That kind of forced, structured collision of ideas is genuinely hard to manufacture on your own, no matter how disciplined you are.

This is, honestly, my whole area of teaching, distilled: I am not there to hand you my answer. I am there to create a boiling point — a room hot enough that every technique, every experience, every theory, every plan and method on the table gets thrown in, compared, and argued over, until something usable rises out of the mix for each person individually. Not one method for the whole room. Twenty-five different working methods, each one stress-tested against everyone else’s, each one belonging to the person who actually built it under pressure. That process — the friction, not the lecture — is the actual product. It is very hard to get that from a solo browser tab, no matter how good the content is.

That is what I think a degree is actually for, when it is working. Not the paper. The guided path to knowledge, and the room full of people — and methods, and theories, and hard-won experience — to argue it out with until you find the version that is actually yours.

Read the variables, not the diploma

So no, I do not think a degree should be what earns you a higher salary. Proven effort and goal achievement should. And no, I am not going to tell my students, or you, that the paper does not matter and skipping it is a smart shortcut — because for most people, the guided, structured, debated path to real knowledge is still the most reliable one available, even if it is not the only one.

There is no universal formula here either. Some of you will build extraordinary careers without ever sitting in my classroom, and I mean that with complete sincerity. Most of you will get there faster, and further, with the help. The job is not picking a side in this argument. The job is reading your own variables honestly enough to know which path you actually are, and then doing the work either way — because neither the degree nor its absence was ever going to do the work for you.

Ricardo Jovani teaches Crisis Management, Operations & Supply Chain, and Family Business Management at Geneva Business School Madrid. He is the founder of Jolufoods S.L., author of The TriCore Method and the forthcoming 2+2 Is Never 4, and a TEDx speaker.