PARTNER SPOTLIGHT: Is a College Degree Still Relevant?
by Jun Salipsip, President, Enderun Colleges
A young person entering college today might reasonably ask: Is a college degree still relevant?
I think it is a good question. But perhaps it is being asked with the wrong date in mind.
A student entering college in 2026 will probably graduate around 2030. The education that student receives should therefore not be judged simply by whether it is relevant today. Its real value will be tested in 2035, 2040, and perhaps for decades thereafter.
So, I would ask a different question: Will the education a student receives today prepare that person for a world we cannot yet fully describe?
That is a much harder question for colleges and universities to answer.
The degree is still valuable
Let me begin with something that is sometimes lost in discussions about the future of education.
The college degree is not obsolete. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) data continue to show a substantial economic advantage from higher education. Across OECD countries, workers with bachelor's degrees earn considerably more, on average, than those whose education ended at the upper-secondary level.
So, I would not advise young people to abandon college because artificial intelligence has arrived.
But neither should universities take the continuing value of the degree for granted.
The more interesting question is not whether the degree has value today, but what will make it valuable tomorrow.
The old pathway is changing
For much of my lifetime, the pathway from education to work was fairly predictable.
College degree first job experience promotion career retirement.
College provided knowledge and credentials. The organization provided experience.
A graduate entered at the bottom and was given relatively simple assignments. A young accountant checked figures. A junior marketer gathered information. A new management trainee prepared reports. A young lawyer researched cases.
Much of that work was routine. Some of it was tedious. But we may have underestimated its importance. It was how inexperienced people became experienced.
Artificial intelligence can now perform an increasing amount of that work. It can research, summarize, analyze data, prepare presentations, write first drafts and suggest recommendations.
From the organization's point of view, the economics can be compelling. Why employ several junior people to prepare work that one experienced employee assisted by AI can accomplish?
There is already some early evidence that this may be affecting younger workers. Researchers at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, using U.S. payroll data, found that workers aged 22 to 25 in occupations most exposed to generative AI experienced a significant relative decline in employment, while more experienced workers in the same occupations did not show the same pattern. The researchers are careful not to claim that AI is destroying employment generally, but the disproportionate effect on entry-level workers deserves attention.
It raises a question I think universities and employers should be asking now: Where will the experienced worker of 2035 come from if we stop giving experience to the inexperienced worker of 2030?
College may have to provide some of the experience employers once did
If companies eventually provide fewer entry-level opportunities, colleges cannot simply say, We provide the education; employers will provide the experience.
Universities may have to provide more of that experience before graduation.
This raises a practical question for universities. If AI begins taking over some of the routine work traditionally assigned to beginners, where will students acquire the experiences through which beginners become professionals?
I have been thinking about this question because our Entrepreneur Program Head and Director of Academic Services at Enderun Colleges has been developing what he calls an Experience Bank. The idea is still evolving, but I find the underlying principle compelling: perhaps we should begin treating experience itself as something students deliberately accumulate during college.
A student already has an academic transcript showing courses taken and grades received. But imagine graduating with another kind of record—not simply of what you studied, but of what you have actually experienced.
Have you dealt with a real client? Sold something? Led a team? Worked under somebody else's leadership? Resolved a conflict? Managed a budget? Had an idea rejected? Made a consequential mistake? Worked with people from another culture or discipline? Used AI on a real problem and discovered where its answer was inadequate?
These experiences need not always end successfully. In fact, some of the most valuable entries in an Experience Bank may be failures - provided somebody helps the student reflect on what happened and what was learned.
This suggests a different relationship between classroom and workplace. Traditionally, the university provided knowledge and the employer provided experience. But if employers increasingly use AI for the routine assignments through which young people once acquired their first experience, universities may have to move some of that apprenticeship forward.
The objective is not to simulate employment inside a classroom. It is to ensure that when graduates encounter their first difficult professional problem, it is not also the first difficult problem they have ever encountered
The educational value comes from:
Experience reflection abstraction application to the next experience.
The student does something, thinks seriously about what happened, extracts a lesson, and then tests that lesson in another situation.
That is fundamentally different from simply saying, “I completed a 400-hour internship.”
Two students can spend 400 hours in exactly the same company and emerge with completely different levels of learning. Time spent is not the same as experience processed.
AI can give students enormous amounts of information. It can even manufacture simulated situations. But education must increasingly provide opportunities for students to encounter reality - and then help them make sense of what reality taught them.
We can now answer “Is a College Degree Still Relevant?” on three levels.
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