Some of my friends are entering that age when their children are starting high-school. And the smart friends are beginning to think, and perhaps even worry a little, about college.
Of course, most of the smart parents have been thinking about college and their children’s education even before they were born. But right now, they are entering that phase where the rubber hits the road and their children’s future trajectory is actually being set.
It’s time to get serious about this business.
While parents hardly ever ask me for advice about raising their kids, knowing what I do, this is the one area where they make an exception. So… I often find myself in direct as well as indirect conversations about what their kids should do, and how they should be influenced and encouraged to find a high-value career.
I’ll share with you the top three facts I share with them. (Note: I don’t call this “advice” because that word has a negative, “lecture-ing” connotation and causes the listener to be defensive. With facts, however, there is nothing to be defensive about them. That’s why I’ll share some facts with you – and this is NOT advice.).
Fact #1 – A college degree is a “must”, but it must be a real degree
Make no mistake: college is less about education and more about sorting raw talent. Employers know this. And they expect you to learn all the hard lessons about your job on the job anyway.
In this context, what makes a degree what I call a “real degree”, is that it can be used to open doors and get you opportunities that kick start your career.
Let me explain…
If your degree is from an Ivy league university, it’s a “real” degree. And that’s not because your education is better, it’s not. The education itself is grossly overrated and most professors are in it for the research. But it’s still extremely valuable to get an Ivy League credential because the brand that these universities have built still hold considerable value, at least for the time being.
Attending a world renowned institution works as a “cognitive shortcut” that signals you belong to the ruling class. It also implies that you have a certain degree of intellectual and academic acumen, despite the fact that this has been getting significantly watered down in the past 50 years.
Therefore, it’s still valuable because a sizable number of hiring managers, gatekeepers, investors and executives keep falling for it. Eventually they won’t. There’s even some worthwhile facts coming to light which show that the school a CEO attended makes no noticeable difference in their performance (i.e. Harvard MBA and Community College MBA generate equivalent returns to a business). There are also cultural factors that are souring some groups of business managers from top institutions, and some are flat out antagonistic to elite schools.
Yes the numbers are still in your favor if you have attended a top school, but might not be over the course of a decade. We shall see.
Either way, right now, a major you get from top institutions can help you get into a high-value job more efficiently. But even if you can’t get into a top institution, as long as you major in something that aligns with growing demand, you’ll be able to open the doors you want, with a little extra elbow grease.
Fact #2 – Globalization & Radical Automation are here to stay
Figuring out what degrees have the blessing of demand is a tricky subject…
Our educational institutions have been set up for a time before automation and globalization. And they have failed to adapt, holding onto outdated practices and continuing to churn students using the “banking model of education”.
This is why, what you learn in a degree program is much less valuable than the skills you develop on the job.
In the past, when science moved more slowly, and when you couldn’t use AI to – let’s say – analyze x-ray films of someone’s chest to scan for disease, your training as a radiologist was insanely valuable. The hospitals and clinics that employed you physically needed you to provide their service.
Similarly, when AI couldn’t strategize, plan, and generate hundreds of ads for your marketing campaign – your advertising degree was golden. Company executives needed your expert input.
Today, we have AI programs that can scan such images at a fraction of the cost, taking only milliseconds rather than seconds to do their job, and at an error rate considerably less than the human eye. Today, I can personally create ad campaigns using AI, where the cost of an outsourced campaign used to average around $3,000, and the cost using AI is – literally – 0.68 cents for the same, perhaps even better output.
Just as manufacturing got disrupted by robots, knowledge work – which is the type of work most people get a college degree for – is also getting rapidly disrupted. Yes, other jobs will be created and take it’s place. But it will take a few decades before overpaid and over-funded institutions like colleges and universities catch up and create degree programs for such jobs.
Therefore, the most important thing a young professional can do is to develop skills that cannot be taken over by AI, over the next 30 to 50 years. Yes, ultimately, all of it will be automated away. But for YOUR career, there is sufficient wiggle room to leverage your skills to get into the corner office.
We cover what these automation proof skills are extensively in the Launch Your Career.
Fact #3 – Beware The Virtue Signal of Complexity
Here’s a lesson from the middle east. In the sophisticated middle class and upper middle class circles of the middle east, kids were being indoctrinated into a particular career path…
In past generations (think 1960s), this in vogue career path was becoming a doctor or a lawyer, or an engineer. Kids were told that if they did any of that, that they would be set. Which resulted in an overabundance of these professions and chronically low salaries. Doctors, lawyers and engineers all need to pinch pennies in the middle east.
Seeing the deteriorating economic conditions for these degrees, the narrative shifted. For the millennials, the indoctrination became: Study something “hard” like Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering or Industrial Engineering. Then work a year or two for a big company. Then get an MBA. Then you’re set, you’ll be a manager, a VP or even a CEO. That was seen as the golden career path.
Of course, you guessed it, this resulted in a glut of unemployed electrical engineers, mechanical engineers or industrial engineers. The vast majority of them could’t get any job doing any engineering (hard to do in countries where there isn’t much engineering going on). Engineers living with their parents well into their 30s became a social norm. And as a result, the lucky few escaped to the West, and survived driving cabs or manning food stands, while the rest suffered chronic underemployment and unemployment.
While we cannot ignore the geopolitical and economic realities of the middle east, we must not brush this market condition away and discard it’s wisdom… It doesn’t suck only because of a geographic location. It sucks because of job market conditions – specifically conditions of supply and demand.
Make no mistake: when there is a glut of degrees, it becomes worthless. And there are very important lessons in this drama for us…
While in North America people can get away with saying “I’m not a math person” and still expect a high-value job, in more competitive markets like the middle east, or China, or India; this would never fly. You have to prove that you are better than others, in all sorts of reasonable and unreasonable ways – which includes government clerks virtue signaling their mathematical acumen for jobs where they won’t even see numbers. And THAT is my key point.
You see… As I said earlier, college is less about education, and more about sorting of talent. This is why, in competitive markets, many students will study complex and difficult subjects, so that they can prove to the world that they are competent. It’s their path to social mobility.
The problem with this approach is twofold. One: popular degrees, be they hard or not, create an oversupply, which makes the getting of jobs much more difficult. That in turn makes pivoting from that profession into something else you actually want to do even more difficult.
Two: studying something you’re not passionate about just to match social expectations or impress employers is a losing game. Unless you want to dive deep into these complex subjects and study them for their own sake, you’re going to be – at best – mediocre at them. And that’s not the high-value path!
I admit, in North America we don’t have the same level of race to the bottom and degree inflation as they have in the middle east. But the same economic factors are starting to show their pesky influence…
Furthermore, in the current cultural zeitgeist, most kids dream of being social media influencers and entrepreneurs; those are the “cool” professions. Just like their parents dreamed of being celebrities or athletes. And their parent’s parents dreamed of being astronauts… We have different goals, true.
Every generation has it’s idolized professions that people dream about. And every generation has poorly thought out platitudes like “pursue your passion” that people want to buy into and practice.
But… When it comes down to the wire, they actually don’t…
Even with all our talk in North America, not just parents, but even kids still hedge their bets. They apply to college, go into degree programs, study something they like but also think is practical, something that they think there is a use for, or something that makes them look smart, and then try to get a job with it. (The rightwing talking point of the lesbian dance major is just that, there aren’t that many college students who pursue programs with negligible job prospects).
The bottom line is, kids in North America aren’t purely idealistic impractical dreamers. On the contrary, they can be extremely practical. But in their process, they don’t really see the big picture of life, as well as the big picture of the economy. And they are, day by day, inching closer to the middle eastern disaster of “the virtue signal of complexity”.
Let’s unpack this…
When it comes to the big picture of the economy, we need to realize that as the North American as well as the global market becomes more competitive, parents, and subsequently the kids, will start shifting their story. They will get more and more serious about the competition in the marketplace, about standing out, about differentiating themselves as more valuable.
In other words, as competition increases, the job markets of North America will more and more resemble the middle east.
Kids will move from “pursue passion” to “be practical and pursue passion on the side” to eventually “get this kind of hard degree and you’ll be set”. And as a result, kids will try to signal competence by studying complex subjects.
But this is a dead end path! It doesn’t work.
If pursued to the full, we’ll get the same unemployed electrical engineers with MBAs in American streets, except now they’ll be driving Ubers rather than cabs. That’s why, I vehemently preach against education to impress (I studied Math because it make me look smart), and toward education to match demand (I studied Data Science because the World Economic Forum predicts a 200% growth in Data Science jobs).
So… That’s the economy side of things. But what about the big picture of life?
Bonus Fact: Authenticity
When it comes to the big picture of life, we need to realize that success, whether it comes in the form of being a social media influencer or in the form of being a high-value professional, is not about signaling any kind of virtue or intelligence.
It’s not about signaling a “thing”. It’s about “the thing” itself. It’s about authenticity.
It’s not about accumulating knowledge to look smart, it’s about applying knowledge. It’s not about getting a hollow degree you don’t care about so that people will think highly of you, it’s about contributing to your field of study.
Ultimately, the most important fact I can share with you is: Be authentic.
Of course, you can be authentic in a mediocre way that gets you mediocre jobs, or in an effective way that gets you high-value jobs. Make no mistake, authenticity doesn’t get you into the corner office. It makes your life pleasant. What gets you into the corner office are a combination of in demand jobs skills, as well as universal career skills. (Job skills help you do the job, career skills get you the job)
While success in life is not formulaic, there are many formulas you can learn. These are the career skills we teach, like capturing employer attention or negotiating a top salary. Most people just wing these, or watch a few videos on social media before their interviews, and incidentally, that’s also why, most people never even set food in a corner office.
And THAT is the core lesson I share with my friends about their kids:
To have a high-value career, you need an Ivy League degree or a degree that gives you in demand job skills PLUS you also need to develop career skills related to discovering hidden opportunities, capturing attention, convincing employers, and negotiating from a position of leverage.
Don’t ignore one, assuming the other will be enough. It won’t…
And don’t try to fake it, studying subjects you don’t care about to look smart. It not only won’t work, but even if it worked, your job will likely be automated away.
Most importantly, develop key career skills so that you can become in demand, automation proof and in control of your destiny.