Is A College Degree Worth The Effort?

photo courtesy of AskMen

The job market has been struggling for the past few years, and it seems the years of working your whole career for a single company are long behind us. With such a competitive job market becoming the new normal, it seems natural to ask whether spending the time and money on obtaining a college degree is really worth it.

I realize this may be a topic that sparks some debate but the truth is you can have a career without a degree. Certainly many blue collar jobs can be had without a degree, but there are also a lot of really successful, wealthy people who dropped out of college. Namely Bill “Microsoft” Gates and Mark “The Social Network” Zuckerberg. Seems they landed on their feet quite nicely.

To say that a college education is a requirement for success in the job market is no longer totally true. Many college graduates come away from their four year degree with a piece of paper and a lot of debt to go with it. Even worse, they often have no more luck finding a job than their non-college going peers. Hiring managers are increasingly favoring experience over education, understanding that real life experience is often more practical than the theoretical knowledge taught in the classroom. Though this doesn’t mean that finding jobs without a degree is easy or that you will end up running a multi-billion dollar company.

So is it worth it to skip the years of education and jump right into the work force? It probably depends on who you ask. At some companies, your degree is a pre-requisite for getting in the door while others may not care whether you completed college as much as they care how hard you’ve worked in your field. As always, it is a risk, but skipping college may save you a lot of money and lost opportunity cost by getting you in the door four years sooner than everyone else.

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