A friend of mine who owns a mid-sized fintech company in Karachi informed me that he had stopped looking at resumes’ “education” section sometime in late 2022. Almost, but not quite. He immediately went to the Coursera transcript, the projects, and the GitHub link. He said the degree was, at most, a tiebreaker. It’s the kind of comment you used to only hear from libertarians in Silicon Valley. It no longer seems so radical when you hear it from people in Lisbon, Lagos, and Lahore.
Even though it seems like it happened overnight, the shift took time. For a long time, Dr. Alice Brown, an online learning researcher at the University of Southern Queensland, has maintained that the conventional lecture format, which consists of an hour-long monologue in a tiered hall, does not accurately reflect how people actually take in information. According to reports, Adelaide University students have protested to continue lectures despite mounting evidence against them. That has an almost poignant quality. defending a format even after it ceases to feel like learning because it feels like university.
It is more difficult to ignore the statistics underlying the unhappiness. Approximately 40% of Australian domestic undergraduate students—including Indigenous students, students from low-income families, students from small towns, students with disabilities, and the increasing number of students balancing part-time employment and education—face significant obstacles to attending college. The math becomes unsettling when you include the average HECS debt, which is close to $24,770. By the institution’s own admission, you are paying a hefty fee to attend something that is being completely rethought.
Industry, meanwhile, has quietly given up waiting. AWS specializations, Meta’s developer programs, and Google’s career certificates are not side gigs for the unemployed. These days, recruiters in cloud engineering, UX, data analysis, and digital marketing use them as a front door. A four-year humanities degree no longer ensures an interview, but a six-month certificate obtained at the kitchen table in between school drop-offs can. Writing that feels weird. Ten years ago, it would have sounded ridiculous.
This is a study worth taking a look at. A total of 240 students—120 from before and 120 from during the pandemic—were compared by researchers. The pre-pandemic group did better on job-readiness tests, such as aptitude and practicum, but they did worse academically. Academically, the group during the pandemic performed better, but practically, they performed worse. It’s interesting to note that both groups performed better overall on employability scores than on academic scores. One interesting finding about the diploma disease is that the system rewards the paper rather than the person who should be prepared for employment.
When this subject is brought up in academic circles, it’s difficult to ignore the unease. Universities are not ignorant. In an attempt to catch up, many are relying heavily on industry partnerships, stackable certificates, and micro-credentials. While some appear to be cruise ships attempting to turn in a canal, others do it with grace. Unspoken in most faculty meetings, the concern is that the four-year, lecture-centered, accreditation-heavy model was designed for a world where hiring practices have changed.
It’s still unclear if online courses will completely replace traditional classroom settings. They most likely won’t, at least not for theoretical research, law, or medicine. However, things have already changed for the broad middle of the labor market. Employers seem to think that someone who completed a demanding online course last quarter is more prepared for the workforce than a graduate who hasn’t completed any practical work in two years. They might be correct. It’s tempting to refer to this as disruption as you watch it happen, but that term seems too formal for something this slow and this human.
The universities with the longest Latin mottos or the oldest sandstone are unlikely to be the ones that make it through the next ten years. They will be the ones who discovered, before it was too late, that a credential is only important if it is trusted.
