Student Loans and Your Degree
Have you heard of the idea of “degree creep”? A lot of people have not, but it helps explain why there is such a high student loans default rate right now. This problem is becoming endemic in the United States, and its causes are obviously very complex, but degree creep is the one of them that is probably most often overlooked.
Degree creep is when a job description starts requiring higher and higher levels of education over time. For example, being a line worker at a factory once required no education at all, now it requires a high school diploma. Being an accountant once required an associate’s degree, now it’s a four year degree and a certification. Being a lobbyist once required a four year degree, now it takes a Master’s degree, and so forth. These higher expectations in education level don’t necessarily reflect any change in how difficult or complex the job is. Sometimes they reflect changing standards in the industry, but more often, they are just a result of lots and lots of people having college degrees. Since an employer can get someone with a degree easily, they expect all their employees to have them.
The problem here is when a job that used to take a four year bachelor’s degree now takes a Master’s or PhD. Often these people are being asked to go through 6+ years of school with highly focused study in order to do a job that anyone could do. You can see why this might be insulting to graduates, but it has a more sinister effect: lots of college graduates are no longer “fit” for the careers they went to school for.
If this trend continues, we will only see more student loan defaults.
