Why Degrees Are Losing Value: What Parents Need To Know About Higher Ed And Youth Unemployment
Last Tuesday, I stayed late in my high school guidance office to meet with the Hernandez family. The janitor had already come through, leaving the room smelling like lemon spray and emptying the trash by my desk. Javi, their oldest, is a senior, and he’d gotten an acceptance to the state university’s communications program a week earlier. Instead of celebrating, they were hunched over my conference table, twisted up in worry. Mr. Hernandez pulled out his cracked-screen phone and tapped open a screenshot his brother had sent him: his 24-year-old niece Mia, who graduated two years ago with the same communications degree, was selling her old textbooks on Facebook Marketplace, working 30 hours a week at a local coffee shop, and still couldn’t make her $310 monthly student loan payments most months. “Everyone says degrees aren’t worth what they used to be,” Mrs. Hernandez said, twisting her plain gold wedding band around her finger. “Are we throwing $40,000 away for a piece of paper that won’t get him a job?”
This isn’t a rare conversation for me these days. I’ve worked as a guidance counselor at this public high school for 12 years, and the shift has been slow but obvious. Ten years ago, the most common question I got from parents was which college had the most recognizable name to put on a resume. Now, more than half of the families I meet with lead with this exact question: is this actually going to lead to a job?
It’s hard to argue with the numbers. Back in the 1980s, fewer than 1 in 10 American adults held a four-year degree, so getting one automatically set you apart for middle-class work. Today, almost 1 in 3 adults have one, so it’s gone from a competitive advantage to a basic checkbox for most entry-level office jobs – if that. More and more employers in growing fields like digital marketing, skilled trades, and tech don’t even require a four-year degree anymore; they just want proof you can do the work. That mismatch is a big reason youth underemployment stays around 30% for new grads: we’re still pushing most kids to get generic four-year degrees, but the job market doesn’t want just a degree anymore.
Javi mumbled into his hoodie that he was already considering skipping college altogether. He’d watched Mia move back home after graduation, and he didn’t want to end up in the same spot. But he also had no clue what else to do with himself, and that indecision was scaring his parents as much as the risk of wasted tuition.
I didn’t give them some big speech about the future of higher education or tell them just to support Javi no matter what. I walked them through a few small, concrete steps we could take right away to cut through the uncertainty. First, before Javi commits to any degree or school, he’ll do two short shadowing stints with people who actually work in fields he’s curious about. Not a semester-long unpaid internship that requires you to live in a big city – just a few afternoons a week for a couple of weeks, sitting in on meetings, asking what their day actually looks like, and how they got their current job. Javi’s mom already had a connection: a friend who runs social media for a chain of local car dealerships, so I suggested he start there.
Second, if he does end up choosing a four-year degree, he’ll start adding small, specific industry credentials to his resume as early as sophomore year. Google offers free certifications in analytics and social media management, Canva has $100 design courses that are recognized by most marketing teams, and almost all of these take less than 10 weeks to finish. I’ve seen this work firsthand: last year, a student of mine with a 2.8 GPA got an entry-level marketing job three months before he graduated, beating out 20 other applicants with higher GPAs and fancier degrees, just because he had a Google certification and a small portfolio of sample work he’d done for the school’s social media account.
Third, if after shadowing he decides a four-year degree isn’t for him right now, that’s not a failure. The community college 20 minutes from here has a 10-month HVAC certification program that places 92% of graduates in full-time jobs before they finish the program, with an average starting salary of $55,000. Two years ago, a student of mine skipped a four-year degree to do that program, and he just bought his first small house last year, no student debt at all. Even if he’s still undecided, he can do two years of general education at community college for a third of the cost of the state university, work part time, and figure out his next step before he takes on big debt. No one gets a medal for borrowing six figures right out of high school.
I walked the Hernandez family out to the parking lot as the sun was going down, the oak trees along the street turning soft pink. Javi said he’d text his mom’s friend that night to ask about shadowing. Mrs. Hernandez leaned against their minivan and said she still worried that people would judge Javi if he didn’t go to a four-year school right away. She grew up believing a degree was the only way out of working-class life, and it’s hard to unlearn that.
I told her I get it. The whole system is shifting right now, no one has a perfect playbook, and it’s normal to be nervous. The old rule that any degree is worth any amount of debt doesn’t work anymore, but that doesn’t mean there’s no path for kids. It just means we can’t rely on a piece of paper to do all the work of building a stable career for us.
Last Saturday, I got a quick text from Javi: his mom’s friend said he could shadow her next week, and she’d even let him help write a few captions for the dealership’s Instagram if he wanted. I texted back good luck, and put my phone down. We’ll see how it goes.
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