5 Reasons why Millennials don't look for a fancy degree anymore
With the rising demand for quality talent and the increasing costs to hire them, the employers also want someone who can just get the job done for them rather than those who come with some level of qualification.
Millennials are the most easy-going people who like to be unconventional and away from the herd. They have opinions on almost everything, and they are always cooking up some crazy ideas. They want to change the world but are often criticized for not keeping their own together. If you ask millennials something they don’t know of, they would most probably google it. At both workplaces and educational institutions alike, this segment of the population is often the most-talked about. And it is not all surprising.
The terms ‘millennial’ and ‘dropout’ often fall in the same sentence across most of the content that we consume today. Afterall, millennials constitute about 34% of the country’s total population, which is about 44 crore people. They are all over the place. They are bold, innovative, smart (also street-smart), quickly adaptable and more importantly they are open to taking big risks.
India has a lot of successful businessmen and startup founders who happen to be a part of the millennial population. Some of them happen to be college dropouts, school dropouts but have gone on to chart out their growth journeys by themselves. More and more of these success stories are proving to be setting remarkable examples for the younger generations and there is a tremendous amount of faith and confidence that it is not all that impossible.
Contrary to the yesteryears when expensive college education was a reliable career investment and the subsequent employment is proof that it is worth the financial burden, today’s millennials are scripting their own rules. They do not run after the fancy degrees with fancy titles, they do not want the prestigious universities or the Ivy Leagues to be on their resume.
Millennials only want what works best for them, and what they love doing the most, and whether the both of them match with each other.
Here are a few reasons why 21st century millennials no longer look for a fancy degree:
A fancy degree equates to an expensive education
Education loans are not a very comfortable affair. By their own nature, they are tedious in processing and the periodic payments are something a millennial would not want to take on over multiple years. For some, it could be decades. Millennials don’t want that liability or financial burden. Instead, they want to travel, they want to splurge on food, movies, experiences, or even invest in cryptocurrencies.
Millenials want exciting but also rewarding experiences
Whether they are short-term or long-term, millennials are all about instant gratification and joy. And they are willing to go to any lengths to acquire the same. Millennials want to be recognised and appreciated enough for the work they put in, they don’t want to be a part of the corporate cog machine as they fear of becoming irrelevant and inconsequential in the larger scheme of things. Startups and small and medium businesses on the other hand offer exactly the thrill, the excitement, the perks and benefits millennials crave for.
Millennials are purpose-driven. Not money-driven.
Environment, Pollution, Global Warming, LGBTQ rights, Gender equality. Social causes cease to exist as causes when the tectonic changes finally happen. And millennials know that very well. They understand the gravity of persistent efforts being made towards these changes and how much it is very much possible to eliminate some of these societal problems by taking the revolution to higher places of authority. Millennials believe their identities are defined by the kind of purposes they are driven by, but not money.
“Millennials are eager to make an impact which makes them ideal for startups.”
~ Neil Blumenthal
They know that hard work and skills are everything
Millennials are quick, and they can get dirty very easily. They are always ready to go above and beyond their comfort zone and experiment with crazy ideas no matter what the consequences might be. Many millennials find themselves picking up multiple skills in all of which they are equally proficient and are also passionate about. They can pull all-nighters, they can work over the weekends, they are flexible, and also expect the workplace culture to be flexible. The belief is that this trade-off is also evenly balanced for them, so much that they are willing to take the risks involved.
Employers themselves don’t look for fancy degrees anymore
Over the recent few years, the hiring industry itself has had no choice but to change its own dynamics. With the rising demand for quality talent and the increasing costs to hire them, the employers also want someone who can just get the job done for them rather than those who come with some level of qualification. They also fear that this category of candidates come along with a level of entitlement. Besides, high-quality talent need not necessarily be a product of high-quality education. There are several short-term bootcamps and outcome-driven institutes in India like Masai School, Stoa School, Pesto Tech who are solving this demand gap in the hiring landscape. More often, the candidates that graduate out of these institutes turn out to be more valuable assets to organisations than their top-university counterparts.
For instance, Sumanta Mallik, being a non-tech B.Sc graduate, studied Web Development for 7 months at Masai School and currently works as a web developer at Revv.so
Watch Sumanta narrate his own story here: