There’s a lot of debate these days about the value of a degree. Yet I spend perhaps a little bit too much time on social media seeing post after post from people commiserating about their horrible jobs, being overworked and underpaid, and at the same time joking about how they’re doing their best by just showing up.
So do degrees have value? Only if you do. You’ve heard it said that dreams only work if you do. Well guess what? Degrees work the same way.
The value of you as an employee or an outside professional to a business is really quite simple to calculate. How much return do you create in the business? You are an investment, an asset, to be treated as such. That means you are absolutely valuable to the business- as long as you’re valuable to the business. In order for a business to justify investing money into an asset, it simply has to show a return, otherwise they would be wiser to not expand, plunk that money in an outside investment somewhere, and carry on. So what kind of return justifies that investment? Well for an employee, you have their wages, their benefits, their employment taxes, and sometimes more difficult to quantify, the time invested in training them, supervising them, continuing to monitor their growth and development and offer them more opportunity, and of course the administrative time of managing payroll and benefits themselves. The exact calculation of this varies from business to business, but a general rule of thumb (at least in this state) is that it takes approximately 1.5x your wages before your employer breaks even. Of course then you also have opportunity cost- they could just as easily invest their profits into the market somewhere else rather than internally by adding an employee, and receive some margin of return.
So…what is your degree worth to me, an employer? Well, if you use the skills acquired in obtaining that degree to shorten the learning curve, hit the ground running and begin creating a return to the business faster, provide a higher value to my clients which can in turn result in greater revenue, then I can justify investing more into you under the assumption that you will create a greater return to me, with a shorter payback period.
Unless you don’t.
A degree isn’t worthless, but a degree without value creation is. Want to make more money? Make your employer more money. Want to be valued? Be valuable.
Oh unless you’re paid by the government. Then carry on with your memes, you’re doing amazing sweetie.