What is the value of a university degree today?
I posed that question to a panel of university leaders last weekend at the inaugural Future Ready Festival in Bengaluru. It may seem odd coming from someone who has spent decades helping students pursue higher education and working with universities around the world. But the longer I work in this industry, the more I find myself questioning the assumptions on which we have built it.
The festival only sharpened those questions. On the first day, students and parents turned up voluntarily, in numbers and with a level of curiosity I hadn’t anticipated. I’ve attended enough university fairs to recognize the glazed expressions of students dutifully collecting brochures and asking questions someone has told them to ask. This was different. One student told me how glad they were to have come because they now had a different framework to work from. They hadn’t necessarily found a university or settled on a career. They had found another way to think about their future.
The second day was for educators, counselors, and university leaders. The conversations suggested a growing willingness to reconsider how we prepare young people for a world none of us can predict with confidence.
Two days of conversations won’t transform education, of course. But sometimes progress begins when people become willing to question what they have long accepted.
Including the university degree.
I’m not suggesting degrees are worthless. Some professions demand rigorous academic preparation, supervised practice, and formal validation. I wouldn’t want an unqualified surgeon operating on me or someone without demonstrated technical competence designing a bridge. But university has never been the right path for everyone. As other ways to acquire knowledge, develop skills, and build meaningful careers become more accessible, we should be more discerning about when a degree is essential, when it is useful, and when it has become an expensive default.
What troubles me isn’t simply the cost or relevance of a degree. It’s how readily we confuse obtaining one with becoming educated.
Universities have served many purposes throughout history, and their record is too complicated to pretend they once existed solely to develop human potential. Still, the possibility of stretching the mind, cultivating judgment, encountering unfamiliar perspectives, and enlarging someone’s capacity to contribute to the world remains one of the strongest arguments for higher education.
Yet we have become remarkably good at documenting the machinery of education and far less capable of explaining the development it is supposed to make possible.
We know how many credits students earn, which courses they complete, and what grades they receive. We can account for years of academic activity with impressive precision. But can a transcript tell us how someone responds when the instructions are unclear? Whether they can work with people who disagree with them? What happens when their first attempt fails, or when the technically correct answer is not the right thing to do?
We have built something that often resembles a widget factory. Students enter, follow a prescribed sequence, satisfy the requirements, and emerge with a credential certifying completion. Universities measure enrollment, retention, graduation rates, rankings, and placements. Families understandably seek a return on an enormous investment. Employers use degrees as convenient filters. Everyone has reasons to favor what can be counted.
But a person is not a widget. And completing a process is not the same as becoming prepared.
This is why I believe we need to challenge something more fundamental than what universities teach. We need to reconsider how they determine that a student has made progress at all.
Why should accumulating credits, completing required courses, or spending a predetermined number of years in an institution be our principal measure of development? Those things establish that a student participated in an educational process. They cannot, on their own, establish what that student can actually do with what they have learned.
Imagine progression defined instead by evaluated thresholds of capability. A student advances when they can demonstrate that they can analyze an unfamiliar problem, assess competing arguments, make defensible decisions, collaborate across differences, or apply knowledge responsibly. They might work on a real challenge, explain their reasoning, respond to criticism, revise their approach, and show evidence of what changed because of their work. The assessment would be rigorous, transparent, and rooted in performance rather than attendance or elapsed time.
It would also need to draw on evidence gathered across situations and over time. One successful presentation cannot establish good judgment, any more than one failed attempt establishes its absence. We would need to see students testing their abilities, reflecting on mistakes, and demonstrating that what they have learned endures beyond a single assignment.
Some students would cross particular thresholds sooner; others would need more practice, mentoring, or different experiences. That is not a defect to be corrected. People develop unevenly. Why should we expect their learning to conform to a semester calendar?
Academic knowledge would remain indispensable. Nobody exercises sound judgment in a field they fundamentally don’t understand. But courses, examinations, research, and classroom instruction would be means of building capability, not the currency by which progress is automatically awarded. The credential, if there is one, would represent demonstrated preparedness rather than merely the successful completion of requirements.
And who should define that preparedness?
For too long, universities have largely answered that question themselves. Faculty set requirements, committees approve curricula, institutions confer degrees, and employers receive the graduates. When employers complain about a lack of practical capabilities, universities respond with another curriculum review, internship initiative, or industry advisory committee.
Perhaps we’ve got the sequence backward.
Employers ought to be involved from the beginning, alongside students, faculty, professional bodies, and communities. Not as occasional guest speakers or names on an advisory board, but as participants in defining relevant capabilities, contributing real problems, mentoring students, and evaluating evidence of readiness. If they expect graduates who can navigate ambiguity, solve problems, and exercise judgment, they should help create the conditions in which those abilities develop. They cannot demand experience while withholding opportunities to gain it.
That doesn’t mean handing universities over to employers. An education designed exclusively around today’s hiring needs would be obsolete almost as quickly as it was built. Universities must also prepare people to challenge organizations, create new possibilities, and act as citizens rather than merely workers. An English graduate capable of extraordinary interpretation and insight may be as prepared to contribute as an engineer, though in very different ways. The point is to establish what each can demonstrate, not to rank human worth by the title of a degree.
Nor should evaluated capabilities become a fashionable new collection of scores for resilience, leadership, or creativity. We would simply build a more sophisticated widget factory. Readiness has to be demonstrated through meaningful work, interpreted in context, and assessed by people who can explain their judgments. There will always be qualities we struggle to measure. That should make us humble about our methods, not indifferent to the question.
I understand why universities might resist. Accreditation, financial models, faculty workloads, and the expectations of families are real constraints. So is the difficulty of building trustworthy assessments that go beyond an examination. But institutional inconvenience cannot remain a permanent defense of a system that tells us so little about the people it graduates.
As knowledge becomes easier to access and alternative learning pathways gain credibility, universities will increasingly have to demonstrate the value they add. Some may be reluctant to reconsider how they teach, evaluate, and certify development. Reluctance, however, won’t protect their relevance indefinitely.
I keep returning to that student at the festival who was grateful to have a different framework for thinking about their future. They didn’t leave with an answer, and that was never the point. They left with better questions. The students were willing to reconsider the path in front of them. The educators, on the following day, showed signs that they were willing to reconsider how we guide them.
The more difficult question is whether our institutions will do the same. And whether we, the people who have helped sustain these systems for decades, are prepared to demand that they do.
Every year, graduates walk across stages to receive documents certifying that they have fulfilled academic requirements. Families celebrate, speeches are delivered, photographs are taken. And rightly so. Completing a degree takes work, commitment, and often considerable sacrifice. But when the applause fades, what exactly has been certified? That a student successfully navigated an institution’s requirements? Or that the institution has meaningfully prepared that student to navigate the world beyond it?
If universities claim to develop human potential, they should be able to demonstrate what that development looks like. Not through glossy brochures, employment statistics, or reassuring declarations about the transformative power of education, but through credible evidence of what their graduates have become capable of doing. We should expect more than a record of academic compliance from institutions entrusted with some of the most formative years of a young person’s life.
I don’t want universities to stop awarding “degrees”. I want those degrees to represent something worth defending. And I want universities to recognize that their continued relevance cannot rest indefinitely on tradition, reputation, or the assumption that the credential itself is proof of the education behind it.
For generations, we’ve asked whether students have done enough to earn a degree.
Perhaps it’s time we started asking whether universities have done enough to make that degree worth earning.
Ex Cogitatione, Progressus
Girish
