The countdown to graduation should feel like a victory lap, but for many students it feels more like a cliff edge. As convocation gowns are ordered and resumes polished, the looming question isn’t “What comes next?” but rather “Will anything come at all?” A university degree, once considered a golden ticket to financial stability, now seems less like a guarantee and more like a gamble. Recent surveys show that nearly half of Canadian undergraduates are underemployed, working in jobs that don’t require the very diploma they spent years and thousands of dollars earning.
What, then, does a university degree actually promise today? Is it still a pathway to meaningful work, or has higher education become another costly rite of passage into an increasingly precarious job market?
The Changing Value of a Degree
A generation ago, a bachelor’s degree was widely seen as a near- guarantee of stability. Graduating in the 1970s or 1980s often meant stepping into a secure full-time job: frequently with benefits, pensions, and a clear career ladder. The degree itself was enough to signal competence and open doors.
Today, the picture is drastically different. In Canada, tuition fees have climbed far faster than wages. The average undergraduate student’s tuition has more than doubled in real terms since the early 1990s, while entry-level salaries have remained stagnant. Canadian graduates now leave school with an average of nearly $28,000 in student debt; in the United States the figure is closer to $40,000 USD. At the same time, the job market has become precarious. A bachelor’s degree is no longer the differentiator it once was in the job market. For many entry- level jobs, employers now prefer or require graduate credentials, a pattern researchers call degree inflation. The surge in post-bachelor programs within Canada reflects that shift. While some graduates desperately search for stable employment after finishing school, others find themselves cycling through unpaid internships, short- term contracts, or gig-economy work, in hopes of eventually securing a foothold in their field.
Credential is a major proponent of this crisis: the more degrees people hold, the less any one degree seems to matter. The result is a generation that is paying more, working harder, and receiving less security in return. However, more people going to university isn’t the only cause of the worsening job market.
Structural shifts add another layer that has eroded a university degree’s value: automation has replaced entire categories of work, globalization has widened competition across borders, and decades of wage stagnation and inflation have left young workers scrambling to keep up with soaring living expenses and a labour market that offers less security than it once did.
Student Realities: Stuck between Passion and Security
For undergraduates today, the decision of what to study often feels like a high-stakes gamble. The arts and humanities, once celebrated as cornerstones of critical thinking and culture, are increasingly treated as impractical luxuries.
Ask an English or Philosophy major about their plans, and the nervous laughter that follows is almost as telling as the answer itself. By contrast, STEM or professional programs are framed as “safe bets”, chosen not always out of passion, but out of fear.
Many students describe a sense of quiet resignation when weighing their passions against the financial realities of debt and employability. One might admit to loving history but ultimately choose accounting because it felt like the “responsible” choice. Another, knee-deep in engineering, may confess they never liked math but couldn’t imagine justifying another career choice to their family.
Even within the supposedly secure fields, unease persists: medical students worry about residency bottlenecks, and law graduates contend with an oversaturated legal market where entry positions are increasingly scarce. The trade-off is clear: pursue your passion and risk underemployment, or play it safe and risk dissatisfaction. Either way, a university education is increasingly seen as transactional, its worth measured not by intellectual growth but by marketability.
What This Means for Students
The crisis, then, is not in the degree itself but in the systems around it. Higher education is marketed as the most certain path to financial stability, yet the ground beneath that promise has eroded. Students are funnelled into universities with the assurance that their time and debt will pay off, only to find a labour market that is oversaturated, underpaying, and dicey. The mismatch between one’s expectation and reality is not incidental: it reflects institutions clinging to an outdated narrative while the conditions that once supported it have collapsed.
This raises uncomfortable questions. By touting success stories while ignoring the growing number who cannot secure work in their fields, are universities complicit in setting young people up for disappointment? Should universities be more transparent about employment outcomes? Should higher education rethink its purpose entirely, shifting from promising job security to cultivating adaptability, creativity, and resilience? And beyond academia, what responsibility does society bear in perpetuating the illusion that a degree is the only legitimate marker of success, while offering few viable alternatives?
For students, these contradictions are deeply personal. University students are told to dream big but simultaneously warned to be realistic. They are encouraged to pursue their passions but also chastised when those passions don’t translate into “marketable” careers. Urged to invest in themselves through education only to discover the returns aren’t what they were led to expect. It is no surprise that so many graduates emerge ambitious yet disillusioned, eager to work but uncertain whether the work they desire will ever be accessible.
Where do we go from here?
As graduation season approaches, students will cross stages, shake hands, and hold diplomas with the hope that these pieces of paper still mean something. Yet behind the smiles lingers the quiet fear that the late nights in the library and the mounting tuition bills may not add up to the future they were promised. For some, this fear is already reality: siblings are burdened by debt, friends are stuck in jobs unrelated to their fields, and peers wonder if the sacrifice was worth it.
And yet, education still matters in ways not captured by employment statistics. Universities remain spaces of discovery, friendship, and ideas that shape how we see the world. The challenge is not to abandon the degree, but to confront the system around it. We must demand that institutions be honest about outcomes. We must question economies that value more than profit, and encourage a society that measures success beyond paychecks.
The question, then, may not be “Is a degree worth it?” but “What should it be worth?” That answer is still unwritten. And it is today’s students, fearful of the future but daring to imagine more, who will ultimately define it.