Is a degree really that important?

An article from The Straits Times caught my eye recently when it was shared on social media - it was about the importance of a degree in Singapore. It has been ages since I have talked about getting a degree, not since my university season series last year. National development minister Khaw Boon Wan sparked controversy when he said recently, "You own a degree, but so what? You can't eat it. If that cannot give you a good life, a good job, it is meaningless." It is extremely rare that I find myself agreeing with a PAP minister but in this case, fair play - he is right. Is a degree really that important? It depends, but I don't think it is vital.

Now why do people want a degree in the first place? Do we want it because it is important for our careers? The most common reason is that it is an aspiration - from a young age, we are told that if we study hard and do well in our studies, we will get to go to university and get a degree. So many of us have that desire to become a graduate drummed into our heads from the time we are in primary school and this is often coupled with our parents' expectations that we would of course go on to university be it via the most direct route or via ITE and/or poly. Many people do not even question why they are getting their degrees - there is a sense of, "oh if everyone else is doing it, then I should too otherwise I may lose out." The word kiasu comes to mind here.

Do you really need a degree?

But of course, there are professions where you need a degree to enter - such as law, medicine and dentistry. Every single lawyer, doctor and dentist is a graduate. And then there's the applied sciences in engineering. Can you become an engineer without a degree? Yes, you can - there are some aspects of engineering which are very IT focussed and a lot of this cutting edge technology is developing so fast that no university can teach their students the relevant technology fast enough; and in any case, by the time you graduate, what you learnt a year ago is obsolete and irrelevant already. Such is the nature of IT today.

Likewise, I turn my nose up at business degrees. What a total waste of time - how can you possibly learn anything about business in a university environment, from a lecturer who is in an academic environment rather than a business environment? It would be like trying to teach a class how to swim in the absence of a swimming pool or any water in the room - sure we can talk about what we need to do, what we ought to do and even write long essays about swimming, but until you actually jump into the water, how can you actually start swimming? Likewise, any kind of degree to do with media (such as 'media studies') are equally useless. Such degrees are just too general to point you in a particular direction in terms of getting a real job.

Are their degrees going to be useful?

This brings me nearly onto my next point - not all degrees are equal. Some degrees are a lot more useful than others. This depends firstly on what you study at the university - now a degree in medicine or engineering would point you in a very specific direction, but what about a degree in history? Geography? English? Media studies? Business studies? Philosophy? Now an arts degree may not point you in any specific direction (I have an arts degree myself) but any degree from a prestigious university will be highly advantageous in helping you get a job.

Many employers just want to know that you are smart and not stupid - yeah, it really is that simple! So if they see that you're a graduate from Oxford or Harvard, then you're smart. If you're a graduate from some chapalang university that nobody has heard of, then you're stupid. When there are many applicants for one position, it is so easy for HR managers to dismiss those from crap universities. Welcome to the real world, HR managers don't owe it to you to find out what you have to offer despite the fact that you went to a crap university. They need someone they can rely on and train up and unless you've given them a very good reason to give you a chance despite the fact that you had a crap degree (say you won an Olympic gold medal), then most HR managers are just going to default to your university.

NUS is an excellent university. 

If you want to check whether your choice of university is good, then I would recommend the world ranking table.  Note that NUS is ranked 29th in the world, pretty impressive I say. Now I think that anything in the top 20 is excellent. Top 50 is respectable, top 100 is decent and anything beyond that... well, it will then depend if they have a department that is a specialist in a certain field, then fair enough, but do you know that a university degree from Oxford or Cambridge (the top 2 universities in the UK) costs as much as a degree from Bolton or Abertay Dundee (the 2 worst universities in the UK). Yup, there are 120 universities in the UK and the degrees costs more or less the same whether you go to the best or the worst university. Don't forget, they take just as long! It's not as if a degree from Bolton University (currently the very worst university in the UK, ranked 120th out of 120) is any cheaper or takes less time - even if the degree is not worth the paper it is printed on. Seriously, who on earth would want a degree that says, "I went to the very worst university in the country." Why not just have the word STUPID tattooed on your forehead.

Why is Bolton such a crap university? Simple. The best students fight to get into the universities in the top ten of the league table - like Oxford, Cambridge, UCL, LSE etc. Then if they cannot get into the top ten, they move down the league table and so only those with terrible results end up going to the universities at the very bottom of the league table. These are not students with straight As, no they are students who have failed their A levels but still want a degree (but don't want to resit their A levels). GIGO - garbage in, garbage out. If you start off with students who are all of a lower calibre, how are you going to make shit shine? By that same token, if Oxford has taken the very best talents from around the world, the tutors don't have to try very hard, the students are going to be brilliant anyway.

This is why employers look at someone with an Oxford degree and think, "ah if Oxford wants this guy, then he must be good." It is a vote of confidence that will make an employer give you a chance. However, a degree from Bolton isn't going to have the same effect because anyone can get into Bolton University, unlike Oxford, which is notoriously hard to get into. So a degree from any good university demonstrates that you are able to get through that rigorous selection process to earn yourself a place there - ironically, all that is decision based on your life before you even commence your undergraduate studies at the university, but there you go. The employers just wants an easy way for someone to tell them, "you can't go wrong with this guy, he was good enough for our prestigious university, we only offer places to the best students, so he must be good enough for your company."

Why is this the case? Well, there are quite a lot of companies who don't really care what you've studied at university at all. They will teach you everything you need to know for the job they want you to do - this is especially the case in banking. When you start off in banking, you will be doing very exactly what your manager wants you to do - nobody is expecting you to hit the ground running as a fresh graduate and everything will be explained clearly to you, you will be trained properly to do your job. Practically all of the stuff you've learnt at university will be totally irrelevant.

Now, let me tell you a bit more about my day job. I currently work as a consultant to a hedge funds consultancy providing solutions to deal with a very specific distribution problem pertaining to a piece of European Union legislation the AIFMD (the Alternative Investment Fund Managers' Directive) which will come into law on the 22nd July. This means that anyone selling hedge funds into the European Union needs to be aware of how the rules regulating their sales and distribution in the EU will change after the 22nd July and what they need to do to make sure they are legally compliant with AIFMD for marketing and distribution in the EU after the 22nd July 2013.

So you get the idea - we have a very niche market product for a very targeted clientèle. This is quite the opposite of a mass retail product, what we're offering is only relevant to a very small number of alternative investment fund managers, fund lawyers and fund service providers. No degree in business, finance or banking will prepare anyone for the job I am currently doing - there is just no degree in the world to deal with something as specific as AIFMD. Everything I needed to know I learnt on the job, from my bosses and through a lot of research in my own time. My arts degree is totally irrelevant and useless to me in this job and  my bosses don't have a relevant degree either.

My degree is totally irrelevant to my job today.

Quite simply, they have come across a business opportunity: there found a gap in the market, they realized that many hedge fund managers needed a solution to deal with AIFMD and there were very few people offering a comprehensive suite of solutions and so they did the necessary research, created a solution that they could sell to these hedge fund managers and now I am marketing that solution for them. There are two vital parts to this business: my bosses' basic business acumen on exploiting an opportunity and all of us climbing that steep learning curve so we can talk about the product intelligently. It's hard work and there's something new to learn everyday!

Did my university experience help me deal with my current challenges? Not really. Heck, I had already been studying hard, memorizing a large amount of facts and figures during my O and A levels already - there's not that much difference to what I am doing today. I have memorized everything there is to know about AIFMD and my company's solution to it, so that I can answer any question posed by the clients.

Would your degree lead you to your ideal job?

Hence if I were to hire someone to offer sales and marketing support to my team (which we will in the near future in fact), I wouldn't necessarily look for someone with a degree in finance or business. No, I would look for someone who can learn very quickly and memorize a lot of new stuff overnight and English literature graduates are famous for being able to digest a large amount of books in a short time. Maybe I could use an English literature graduate because an English literature graduates will know as much as a banking/finance graduate about AIFMD.  Nothing. It's just too niche and specialized. Or I might hire someone who speaks many foreign languages to help us target new markets - then this person need not even be a graduate at all to do this job well.

What is clear however is that I am not looking for someone who already knows anything about AIFMD - I will teach him/her everything he needs to know to support my team's work, I just need him/her to be a super fast learner. By that token, do I even need a graduate? No - not at all. But am I likely to hire a graduate from a good university? Possibly - but most of all, I would be looking for someone who is hungry to prove himself, someone who has a reason to want to succeed and has evidence of that in his life to show me that he has that determination in him.

What makes you stand out from the crowd?

So would having a degree give you access to more jobs? Not necessarily so - you need to have a good degree from a respectable university for that to happen. So for a law degree from Oxford would open many doors, but a media studies degree from Botlon (the worst university in the UK) would probably slam even more doors shut. How can we talk about degrees as if it is a cohesive entity? Thus in a Singaporean context: a law degree from NUS is so much more respected than some business degree from SIM. NUS has a global top 30 ranking whilst SIM is not even amongst the top 5000 - NUS attracts students of extremely high calibre whilst SIM attracts students who failed to make it into the better local universities. Can I point out the obvious? SIM sucks - but you knew that already.

Would all students be able to earn themselves a place at Oxford or Cambridge? No, only the best would. Likewise, only the best students can get into NUS/NTU. Is this elitism? Of course it is - but let's look at the IQ bell curve again and remind ourselves what the distribution of IQ is amongst the human population. We're not made equal, life is massively unfair, some people have higher IQs than others - so when some naive ITE student claims that we're all equal and should be treated as such, I can only roll my eyes and laugh at just how delusional she is.

Where are you on this bell curve?

So really, it boils down to the pay off: the number of years spent at university, vs increase in pay and career opportunities and you really have to consider if it is worth your time and money to get a degree if it is not a degree that is going to be respected. I shall be blunt - don't waste your time and money on a degree that isn't going to help you. If you cannot get into a good university, you may as well enter the working world a few years before your peers and gain some useful work experience. After all, in terms of your salary, it is not where you start that matters, it is what you earn eventually that matters. Focus on long term goals, not short term gains.

Lastly, I want to talk about the subject of graduate underemployment - that is the situation when graduates end up doing jobs that don't require a degree. It is actually surprisingly common and it is when having a degree does not earn you a penny more than a non-graduate co-worker who is doing exactly the same job. Bearing in mind that the graduate would have spent a lot of time and money obtaining that degree, this is a really disappointing situation for the graduate to find himself in! A degree is a major investment of time and money - one that you hope will pay off in the long run, but one has to be very aware of the risks of graduate underemployment if your degree is not going to open many doors.

Are you being paid more because you are a graduate?

Many of us do end up doing jobs that are not that relevant to our degrees at the end of the day - after all, we cannot predict what job we'll end up doing at the point when we're choosing what to study at university. Is this graduate underemployment? It depends. My bosses don't even know what degree I have - they just care about what I can do for the company. Am I an underemployed graduate? I don't know - maybe (if you want to be pedantic about it), but I am certainly being paid a lot more than my peers who are non-graduates and my degree did get me to where I am today (not directly, but still it played a part in a long chain events that got me where I am).

Would I have been able to get my job without a degree? It is a hypothetical question I can't really answer as I got my job based on my work experience rather than my degree and the same could be said about my previous jobs. And yes, I guess it did play a bigger role in my first job upon graduation (which I hated and left after a year anyway) so even for someone like me, a good degree from a very respectable university didn't actually play a significant part in my career development - I ended up using my other talents like my languages and people skills which I did not pick up at university, aka 'soft skills'. Sure I enjoyed my time at university, but was my degree vital to my career? No.

How much of our university education is actually useful?

I guess my conclusion is that we really shouldn't be that hung up about degrees - if you have the opportunity to do one at a good university, great! Do it, you'll have a brilliant time and it may serve you well in the future. If not, it really isn't the end of the world and there are many so other ways for you to prove yourself worthy of a job. There is something very strange going on in Singapore where people are so obsessed with getting a degree to the point where they are willing to invest a lot of time and money in a degree from a Chapalang university that is not even worth the paper it is printed on. It is a shockingly bad investment because you know that the chances of that degree helping you in the long run is actually very low. What is the point of having a crap degree like that?

In any case, even for those who did make it to good universities, competition is so intense for the good jobs these days that you need more than a good degree to secure a job. You need that extra sparkle to make a HR manager say, "s/he is special, s/he is exceptional, s/he stands out from the crowd and is different from everyone else." It is time for you to think outside the box and find your edge in this competitive environment.

As usual, please feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you think. Thank you for reading.