The Degree Was Never the Point (And Now Nobody's Pretending Otherwise)

Saw a piece doing the rounds on r/technology about graduates in “AI-exposed” majors ending up stacking shelves and pulling coffees instead of doing the white-collar work they trained for. The comments were the usual mix of grim humour and old wounds reopening. One line stuck with me: someone pointed out this has been happening since 2008, long before ChatGPT existed. AI is getting blamed for a problem that’s been quietly compounding for close to two decades.

That tracks with what I’ve seen, and lived. I finished my IT degree in the early 2000s, right after the dot-com bust had hollowed out half the graduate roles that were supposed to be waiting for us. Everyone told us tech was the future. Everyone was half right. The future arrived, it just didn’t have a seat for a lot of us at the start.

What I find interesting isn’t the AI angle, it’s the honesty creeping into this conversation. For a long time the polite fiction was that a degree equals a career, that if you did the work and got the piece of paper, the job would follow. Nobody really believes that anymore. One commenter put it bluntly: the degree is a filter for “will this person commit to something and see it through,” not proof you can do the job. Employers know it. Universities know it. They just haven’t updated the brochure.

I think about this every time my daughter mentions what she might study. Not because I want to talk her out of university, I don’t, but because I refuse to sell it to her as a guarantee. It’s an investment with a genuinely uncertain return, and pretending otherwise does her no favours. What actually gets people hired, in my experience managing and hiring in IT for twenty-odd years, is some ugly cocktail of who you know, whether you can talk to people without making it weird, and dumb timing. The degree gets you through the automated resume filter. After that, it’s mostly other things.

None of this means education is worthless. I learned things at uni I still use, and I liked most of it, which is more than plenty of people can say about eight hours in an open-plan office. But we built an entire generation’s expectations around a pipeline that stopped reliably delivering somewhere around the GFC, and we never really told anyone. We just kept saying “go to uni” like it was 1985 and a commerce degree was basically a job contract.

Now AI gets to be the scapegoat, and to be fair, it’s not blameless. Entry-level white-collar work, the stuff graduates used to cut their teeth on, is exactly the stuff large language models are eating first. Junior coding tasks, first-draft writing, basic analysis. The bottom rung of a lot of career ladders is getting sawn off right as a wave of graduates reaches for it. That’s a real and specific problem, separate from the older structural one about credential inflation and connections mattering more than merit. Both things are true at once, and I don’t think there’s a tidy way to resolve that tension. I’ve stopped looking for one.

What I’d actually want for my daughter’s generation isn’t a return to blind faith in degrees, and it isn’t panic about AI either. It’s honesty about the odds, upfront, before the debt and the four years are spent. Tell them which fields are oversupplied. Tell them networking isn’t a dirty word, it’s just how humans actually find opportunities, always has been. Tell them the piece of paper opens a door but doesn’t walk them through it.

I don’t have a neat fix for the AI piece. Nobody does yet, whatever the confident LinkedIn posts suggest. But the older problem, the one about treating a degree as a golden ticket, we’ve had two decades to fix that one and mostly just kept printing more tickets. That part, at least, is on us.