What China cutting degree requirements for public jobs means for American parents and students
I was sitting on the chipped aluminum bleachers at my 16-year-old son Jax’s high school soccer practice last week, stuffing crumpled practice jerseys into a grocery bag and wiping Gatorade residue off my white sneakers, when Lisa – the other mom who’s also our district’s head guidance counselor – pulled her phone out and tapped the screen toward me. The headline blared: China scraps four-year degree requirements for most national and local public sector jobs.
“Had three seniors ask me in the last two days if they even need to bother applying to college now,” she said, crossing her arms against the September wind. Jax trotted over a minute later to grab a water, caught a glance at the screen and grinned. “Told you,” he said. “My buddy Kai builds websites for local restaurants out of his basement and makes 70 grand a year. He never went to college at all.”
He trotted back to practice, and I sat there twisting the strap of my cooler, thinking about what my dad used to tell me when I was Jax’s age. Dad worked 12-hour shifts at an auto parts factory in Ohio, and he always said a four-year degree was the only ticket out of never-ending overtime and back pain. I’ve carried that with me my whole life. I have a 529 plan set up for Jax, I nag him about his GPA, I’ve got a folder of college brochures tucked in the hall closet. That headline didn’t just feel like a news story about a country halfway across the world. It felt like a question mark hanging over every assumption I’ve had about raising a kid right now.
A lot of people are framing China’s move as some isolated policy shift, but it’s not that. China’s struggling with record youth unemployment – more than 20% of young people can’t find work right now – and there’s a huge mismatch between the millions of four-year degrees their universities are pumping out and the skills that actual jobs need. It’s the exact same problem we have here. The Center for Education and the Workplace found a few years back that 4 out of 10 recent college graduates in the U.S. work jobs that don’t require their degree at all. Thirty U.S. states have already dropped four-year degree requirements for most state government jobs over the last five years. Companies like Google and Apple stopped requiring four-year degrees for most of their in-office roles years ago. China’s just making the shift bigger and more visible, that’s all. What’s happening there is what’s coming here next – or more accurately, what’s already here.
After practice we stopped for tacos on the way home, and Jax pulled out his phone to show me the invoice he just sent to the new coffee shop downtown. $2,500 for a custom website and three months of maintenance. That’s more than I made my first full month working as an administrative assistant after I graduated college. I used to call that little side project of his a “distraction” from his homework. Now I’m starting to see it’s the most useful thing he does all week.
I’ve changed a few small things in how I talk to Jax over the last couple weeks, things that don’t take any extra money or time, just a shift in how I think. I stopped asking him “what do you want to major in?” when we talk about after high school. Now I ask him “what’s the project you worked on this week that you didn’t get bored of?” Last week he spent three nights troubleshooting a booking feature for a local dog walker, and he didn’t even touch his video games. I never would have asked him about that before; I would have just asked how his AP Stats studying was going.
I also helped him sign up for the free Google Web Designer certificate program last month. It’s self-paced, he does an hour a week after homework, and when he finishes it in six months he’ll have a credential that almost every small business recognizes when you’re applying for freelance work. It cost nothing, it doesn’t require him to commit to four years of school, and it’s something he can use right now if he wants to take a year or two to work after high school before he decides what to do next. I used to think taking time off after high school was “falling behind.” Now I think it’s one of the smartest things a kid can do, if they’re working and building skills instead of just sitting around.
One other thing I stopped doing: I stopped bragging about Jax’s college prospects to other parents at get-togethers. It used to feel like the default thing to talk about, like how good your kid’s prospects are depends on what school they get into. Now I talk about that coffee shop website he built, and how he already has a waiting list for new clients. That tells me a lot more about what he can do than any acceptance letter ever would.
I still put money into Jax’s 529 every month. If he decides he wants to be a teacher or an engineer or a doctor, a degree is non-negotiable, and I want that option open for him. But I don’t treat a four-year degree like the only good outcome anymore. If he decides he’d rather keep building websites full time and skip the four-year track, that’s okay too.
Last weekend, he asked me to help him carry a second monitor up to his room for his new client. I used to have a little panic attack thinking that time he spends on client work is taking away from college prep. Now I just grab the other end of the monitor box and follow him up the stairs. There’s still a lot that’s uncertain about where all this is going, and I don’t have all the answers. But I know that the old rule that a degree is the only ticket to a good life doesn’t hold the way it used to, for people on both sides of the world.
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