JULY 24, 2008

College Degree Not Enough In The 21st Century

As a parent of two teenagers – one a rising high school senior and the other a high school freshman – college is a looming reality. It’s a part of our daily household conversation thread, and the source of not just a little anxiety. We talk about it at the dinner table, during long car rides to out-of state softball tournaments or while sitting on the back porch in candlelight on summer nights. We talk about the challenge of getting admitted to your first-choice school at a time when there is a glut of qualified applicants. We debate the merits of small colleges vs. big ones. And we try out different majors and discuss essay strategies. However, one thing we don’t talk about is the value of a college education.

But that’s just what Wall Street Journal economics writer Greg Ip did in a story this month, “The Declining Value of Your College Degree.” For much of the last century, a college degree pretty much guaranteed that your income would rise faster than it would for someone without one. But around the turn of this century, that equation began to change. Since 2001, Ip reports, the inflation-adjusted wages of all U.S. workers – including college graduates – did not grow.

Ip’s point is not that a college education is worthless; it’s that it’s not enough anymore. It’s simply the price of admission to the modern workforce. Employers are demanding more specialized knowledge – what Ip describes as skills that are “more narrow, more abstract and less easily learned in college.”

And the cause of this shift? The same basic forces that are reshaping every aspect of modern life: globalization and technology. Today’s graduates are competing not just against one another, but against immigrants and foreign nationals who have similar educations and skills. And, as we all reside today in a borderless Web environment, they are direct, not distant, competitors.

That competition has caused some political backlash against globalization. A decade ago a solid majority of college grads said that globalization had been good for the U.S., according to a poll conducted for the WSJ and NBC News. But in March, the same poll found only a third of graduates thought globalization was good and nearly half thought it bad. But globalization is not an exclusively negative economic force. It produces winners and losers. Increasingly, specialized knowledge and skills are what separate the two.

So our late night conversations about college with our daughter will become broader. Yes, she’ll still be going to college. But the question of “what unique skills should I acquire” needs to be added to the list of all the others. Because her post-college life will be lived in what we at New Persuasion call the Brain Race – the global competition for specialized knowledge that will define the power of individuals, corporations and nations going forward. And a college education will be only one piece of the required 21st century skill set.