What's A Degree?

What is a college degree? Is it really important in the grand scheme of life? Or is it just a piece of paper that you pay thousands of dollars for and hang on your wall? Obviously, there are some careers that require certain degrees or certifications such as doctors, lawyers, CPAs, teachers, engineers, and the like. But is that business, graphic design, or journalism degree really necessary? How much do you learn in those classes that you can’t learn in job training or a quick Google search? Professors talk about the need to know the history of the profession or concepts in order to know why things work. However, when you get into your career field, you’ll find that the history of the profession is often useless; sure, it got the field to where it is, but you want to help move the industry forward, not back. Similarly, you will probably need the concepts, but you will rarely need to know who or how the concepts were discovered, you just need to know how to apply them; again, something that often comes in job training.

Take, for example my roommate, friend, and occasional inspiration, Jeffrey Hirsch. Recently, Jeff went to Nashville, Tennessee for a country music convention in order to meet people from the industry and learn more about the record label side of the business. This trip was completely unrelated to school and he had to miss a week of classes in order to attend. During this trip, he met many people in the record label and music business and, through conversation and seeing the industry in action, he learned straight from the source how different aspects of marketing and advertising worked together, how certain things could then lead to the need for public relations knowledge, and how all these things actually apply in the country music industry. Few of the people he talked to would have actually been able to tell him the name of the principles they were using, yet they are generally successful business people. In fact, Jeff found that he would meet people who were proud of the fact that they were successful with no education at all.

But education is so important! Yes, it is. But is it necessary? And how much are you really learning? You can go to class every day, get straight A’s, and I will still argue that you have not necessarily learned anything. Many students never actually learn the material presented in their classes, they simply stuff the information into their head long enough to spit it back out on a test. This is not learning. If I gave students a test made up of random test questions from classes they have taken and don’t give you time to “study,” which would actually just be stuffing as much information into your head as possible, I bet the majority of students would fail. Learning means knowing something so well you can recreate it, even years later. Memorization is simply storing information for a period of time. The problem is memory is faulty and you lose most things in memory if you do not regularly go over the information.

So what is a degree? A degree for the vast majority of people is a piece of paper that says “This person is very good at memorizing information for a short period of time, but they never actually learned anything.” I’ve told Jeff—and I truly believe this—that he has taught me more important and applicable concepts and ideas than any class in college. He’s taught me at least one way to make my money work for me instead of me working for my money. He’s also turned me on to a number of ideas and authors. As I read these books and listen to Mr. Hirsch, I find myself thinking more and more in terms of these concepts, applying them to my life when possible. This is true learning: discovering or hearing something and then applying it to life. This is exactly what a degree does not do. A degree is what Daniel Pink would call an “if-then” reward. These say, “if you do this, then you receive this.” Pink examines these rewards in much more depth in his book Drive: the Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us, but what you need to know is that “if-then” rewards actually decrease the target behavior, which would be actual learning in a college setting. Students are told that if they meet the requirements for GPA, credit hours, etc., then they will receive their degree. This encourages students to do anything they can simply to meet the requirements given them. They no longer have any incentive to learn for the sake of learning; they want to “learn” in order to get a piece of paper that supposedly opens all kinds of doors. Students are suddenly not opposed to taking shortcuts because they are only working toward that piece of paper instead of working toward mastery of a particular subject. When working toward mastery, taking shortcuts only hurts the individual student. But when a student is working toward a degree, shortcuts are simply the means to an end.

This is the problem with our college-driven society. In other countries and cultures, many people attend universities simply for the sake of learning. A degree is not needed in many countries because most people just take over the family business. In the United States, however, our society is obsessed with college degrees and higher learning, which actually causes an inflation in the value of a college degree. 30 years ago, you didn’t need a college degree to get a job in most places. 10 years ago, people started realizing they needed to get a bachelor’s degree to get a job, regardless of what the degree was in. Today, even bachelor’s degrees aren’t enough in some cases. Why the sudden need for higher degrees? Has the nature of jobs today really changed that much? You could argue that either way, but the majority of change has gone from mechanical work with constant rules and laws into a more fluid, creative sector that higher education simply cannot teach.

The most important knowledge you can have is in common sense and financial literacy if you wish to be successful in today’s world. You don’t need a college degree to know how to buy houses and rent them out, or to invest in stable stocks and ride them out for 20 or 30 years as they grow. Some of the most successful people in the world have no college degree, they simply had a great idea at the right time and jumped into it, refusing to fail because if they did, they would have nothing. Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and many others have either no college education or they dropped out well before receiving their degrees, and yet they are either on the cutting edge of today’s technology and communications or the richest people in the world…or both. Success does not hinge on your education. Success is made up of common sense, smart financial planning, smart investments, and just a tiny bit of luck.