Are university degrees still worth it, in the age of AI?
In my very first HR role the CEO told me he wanted every person we hired to have a degree. I thought he was a little mad.
You want our receptionist to have a degree? The people in our customer service team to have a degree? I asked.
But in many ways his reasoning was sound, and I have never forgotten it.
He wanted people in his organisation that could commit to something for the long haul and see it out. He also wanted people who could think critically about issues, and being able to complete a tertiary level qualification, in his mind, was one way to demonstrate this.
I couldn't disagree, as at the time I was towards the end of completing my second degree.
Many years later (many more than I would like to think about) the debate about university degrees seems to have gone south with many arguing that with AI gaining popularity, they are not needed anymore.
It seems Gen Z and millennials are leading the charge on this one. A recent Fortune article found that nearly half of this population now say their degree was a waste of money, with 51% of Gen Z expressing outright regret. AI, they argue, has already made degrees obsolete.
Closer to home, Indeed's Hiring Lab in Australia found that graduate job postings fell almost 15% last year, with roles highly exposed to AI down nearly 30% compared to 2019 levels. The headline of their piece "Nice Try, AI: Australian Graduates Are Still Getting Hired" is reassuring, and I appreciate the optimism, but the underlying data does give me pause.
But here's where I push back.
The argument that AI makes degrees irrelevant assumes that the primary purpose of a degree is to teach you a set of skills that you will then deploy at work. And yes, if that's all a degree is doing, then maybe a well-curated playlist of YouTube tutorials and a ChatGPT subscription could do the job more quickly and cost effectively.
But that's not really what a degree is for. Or at least, it's not the only thing.
My CEO from all those years ago understood something that the “AI-makes-degrees-redundant” crowd seems to be missing. A degree teaches you how to think. How to construct an argument. How to sit with a problem that doesn't have an obvious answer and work through it methodically. And how to research and write.
These are not skills that AI has replaced (though the large language models are getting better and better on the writing front). If anything, they are the skills that make AI useful, because we still need to know what questions to ask, what output to trust, and when the whole thing has gone spectacularly off the rails. (And it does).
Then there is the staying power argument.
Completing a degree is hard. It takes years. There are assignments and papers you hate, exams that humble you, and at least one semester where you seriously consider whether you could make a decent living doing something (anything) else. Getting through all this requires a kind of grit and commitment that employers genuinely value, and that no online micro-credential can replicate, however good the content.
US News and the Lumina Foundation put it well earlier this year: a bachelor's degree isn't obsolete in the AI age, it just needs an upgrade. The economy still runs on smart and educated talent, and the US alone is projected to need an additional 5.25 million workers with education beyond high school by 2032.
So, I don't think degrees are done. I think the people saying this have confused the delivery of education with its purpose.
The world needs people who can think critically, adapt, argue well, and see things through, not less. A university degree, for all its flaws and eye-watering cost, is still one of the better proving grounds we have for all of that.
My old CEO would agree. And honestly? So would I.
Lisa xx