Right Answers Only: Graduating from college is important

Graduating college is the final step on a long journey. You spend 13 years grinding through the public education system to reach the coveted destination that is college. Then, after four more years of specialized education, you are deemed ready to enter the workforce with a set of skills that you paid to get. 

Despite the existence of this path, many people seem to believe that college is a step that can be skipped, and that they don't need a college degree to be the next tech billionaire out of Silicon Valley. 

As UAA is set to have our Fall Commencement, I couldn't be a bigger believer of the opposite: graduating from college is important, and the value placed on having a college degree is not overblown.

Let's start with the trend of college degrees being required for jobs. A report put out by Georgetown's Center on Education and the Workforce indicates that within six years, 42% of jobs will require a bachelor’s degree. A common belief of those who don't have college degrees is that locking higher salaried jobs behind a college degree is unfair. I would argue that this is actually an incredibly fair system. 

Employers are looking for people who will persist through their work come hell or high water, and there is no group more persistent than college students. Clearly those who do not have a college degree are either lazy or unwilling to persist through the ups and downs of college, therefore indicating that they don't have what it takes to enter the skilled workforce. 

Another common point made against college degrees is that they are overvalued compared to other professions like trades or jobs requiring no degree in fields like service and retail. When it comes to trades, it is infinitely more impressive to tell the person next to you randomly that you're a doctor compared to telling them you're an electrician. And for fields like service and retail, I often find that those who have degrees are far more qualified to do the job. I have more trust in the liberal arts major to not mess up my Starbucks order than I do a degreeless barista. 

Speaking of baristas, I've heard many rumblings of there being alleged "pipelines" that take qualified degree-having individuals and put them in other professions. Supposed pipelines include liberal arts to barista, engineer to bartender and mathematician to unabomber pipeline to name a few. I do not believe these pipelines exist, but simply that people who are not able to get a job in their field with their college degree have what I like to call a "skill issue." 

Some people don't go to college for an education, but instead go for the campus life — a concept foreign to all students attending UAA. At party schools like Arizona State and Miami, super seniors are everywhere, changing their degree for the eighth time so they can stay for another year of partying. In this regard, I am happy that UAA has no campus life, as there is no incentive for students to extend their time at the university, instead focusing on getting their degree as quickly as possible so they can contribute to society.

Now, for those who still believe that they can somehow find success without a college degree, let's look at a few successful college dropouts and find out how they found their success. 

Bill Gates - Harvard: The United States government needed a gaming console to rival those being put out by Sony and Nintendo, so they propped up Microsoft to design the Xbox.

Mark Zuckerberg - Harvard: The lizard people planted him at the top of the social media giant that is Meta to gain control over the masses.

Steve Jobs - Reed College: Found that people's apathy for a green text bubble would drive them to buy any product Apple made. 

I could go on and on with other examples, but all it would prove is that no one is able to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" if they don't have a degree from their college of choice.

Ultimately, I think there needs to be even more of an emphasis placed on the importance of graduating from college with a degree. It is the only reliable indicator of success, and if people suddenly start to devalue college degrees, university administrators won't have enough students paying tuition to support both their salaries and the football team — or in UAA's case just the administration's salaries.