In many ways, today's economy actually makes having a college degree less important.
It used to be that just having a college degree was special. If you applied for a job and you'd been to college, you instantly stood out. That's not true anymore. Lots of people have college degrees. Just about any job for which a recent college grad might apply, there will be at least a dozen other candidates with college degrees who look virtually identical on paper.
Some people argue that the economy just makes it even more important to attend a prestigious college. Not true. There are lots of unemployed Ivy League grads right now. There are lots of unemployed Ivy League grads who went back and got masters degrees, too. It's rough out there.
So you could pay up to $150,000 to go to college and come out as just another recent college grad who can't get a job. If you're going to college just to go, if you're going because you don't know what else to do after high school, that's an awful lot of time and money to invest in something whose rate of return isn't guaranteed at all.
But I think there's a huge opportunity for future college freshmen here. Recognize that college is a four-year opportunity to become remarkable–someone future employers won't be able to ignore.
You could coast through your college career, endure your classes and have some fun. Or you could lean into it. You could make it your mission to spend every single day of your college career discovering what you're good at, learning as much as you can, finding mentors who can guide you, pushing yourself in classes that scare you (and you could still have plenty of fun).
Four years later, instead of being just another college grad looking for a first job, you could tell potential employers about…
- The relief work you did in Haiti when you traveled there with an on-campus service organization.
- The mistake you found during an accounting internship that saved the company a million dollars.
- The $250,000 you raised for a non-profit where you volunteered over the summer.
- The on-campus business you started that later had 20 employees.
- The changes you made to the athletic department's intramural program during your three years of work that started as an unpaid internship.
- The political campaign you worked on as an intern, and the on-campus speech for the candidate that happened because of you.
- The drawings you completed in your art classes that are now featured in the school's largest performing theater.
- The 22 websites you built for free for every campus fraternity and sorority.
- The teaching experience you gained when a professor asked you to TA for her and later to run her discussion group.
- The speeches you gave to faculty and administrators as part of your work with the ombudsman's office.
- The work you did with your physics professor to help her publish the latest textbook.
- The computer program you wrote with a fellow student that you later sold to a software company for a ridiculously large sum of money.
- The campus coffee shop you managed during your senior year, and how you grew it 40%.
- The marketing lessons you learned while working in your college's admissions office to help them recruit under-represented students.
- The counseling skills you developed as a resident advisor, and how you put them to use when a student was considering committing suicide.
- The campus photographs you took that the school later paid to have posted on the website.
- The training program you created from scratch for the campus tour guides that was later adopted by the entire state university system.
- The speech the new chancellor asked you to help her write.
- The meeting you had with the university's president to lobby for additional campus safety officers, and what you learned about beating bureaucracy.
- The music you wrote that was later commissioned to be an opera.
Every single one of those items has actually happened. A few happened to me, others were my college friends, and lots of them are from our former Collegewise students. But they were all products of students who sought out the opportunities and made them happen during their brief four years of college.
In today's economy, it's easy to ignore a kid with a college degree. It's a lot harder to ignore one who pairs that degree with a remarkable college career. It doesn't matter where you go. Now more than ever, it matters what you do while you're there.