Gen Z Students Graduate College This Month — This Is What the Majority Are Thinking
For many college seniors across the United States, this month is it. It’s the month when they say their final goodbyes to college friends, have their final meetings with professors, and take their final … finals. May often marks the end of a college era and the start of something new. And as these students don their caps and make their way across the stage while “Pomp and Circumstance” plays, chances are they are thinking the same thing:
“What a waste.”
According to a recent study of professionals with an associate’s degree or higher, 51 percent of Gen Z see their diploma as a “waste of money.”
Fifty. One. Percent.
In the survey, which was conducted by Indeed, there was a clear generational divide. While the majority of Gen Z graduates think their diploma was a waste of money, only 41 percent of Millennials agree, and that number drops down to 20 percent for Baby Boomers.
Regardless of their generation, respondents with student debt were more likely to think their degree was a waste of money than those without. And 38 percent of respondents believe that debt hindered their professional growth more than their degree helped them. Hindered more than helped.
Though a college degree was once worshipped, it now seems to be getting the side eye from a generation that is burdened by student loan debt and a job market that increasingly favors AI and doesn’t necessarily reward college graduates with higher wages.
Perhaps most staggering is that nearly 70 percent of Gen Z respondents think they could do their current job without a degree (and all the student debt it might have come with), versus around 50 percent of Baby Boomers who felt the same way. And that shouldn’t necessarily be seen as either generation being full of themselves. Especially since they aren’t the only people thinking that way.
Employers are increasingly considering high school and college diplomas as more interchangeable than before. So it really begs the question, what incentive does Gen Z have to go to college? Why wouldn’t they view their new piece of paper and the cap that they threw in the air and immediately lost as a waste of money?
These celeb parents have gotten very real about their kids growing up.