The latest NBC News poll shows two-thirds of registered voters down on the value proposition of a degree. A majority said degrees were worth the cost a dozen years ago.
Americans have grown sour on one of the longtime key ingredients of the American dream.
Almost two-thirds of registered voters say that a four-year college degree isn’t worth the cost, according to a new NBC News poll, a dramatic decline over the last decade.
Just 33% agree a four-year college degree is “worth the cost because people have a better chance to get a good job and earn more money over their lifetime,” while 63% agree more with the concept that it’s “not worth the cost because people often graduate without specific job skills and with a large amount of debt to pay off.”
You and I were on much the same path at about the same time.
I saw this same thing as I was advancing. I made the hard (at the time) choice to keep my full time IT role and go back to school part time at the same time. I did part time three years Community College getting an Associates Degree. While not the director level, it did get me a better, higher paying, job. My new boss actually called out that degree as working in my favor to get the position. That company had tuition reimbursement, so while working that full time IT role, I took advantage of that to attend a university part time, and after another 3 years got my Bachelors. My Bachelors degree got me a more advanced role yet at a new org. That lead to far more advancement.
Here’s the good news. University work will be easy for you! You’ve grown into an adult with organizational skills, an awareness of your responsibilities, and time management skills. It will be significantly easier for you now, as an adult, than an 18 year old that doesn’t understand life yet. So I encourage you to do it! Figure out your degree program you want, and get a Plan of Study from a school. Enroll in a single course and see how you do. I think you’ll be surprised how manageable it is. Its time consuming, yes, but you’ll find the time. I kept to taking only 2 classes at a time, only term did I do 3 and it almost wrecked me while still doing my full time IT job.
I,m not sure this place you’re imagining exists the way you’re describing. Each level up just trades for a different yoke to bear. At the director level you could be given unrealistic KPIs to meet, or a slim budget to do so. You might find you can’t achieve what you want because you can’t get or keep competent staff. Even if you do everything right, market forces or regulatory change can nullify all your plans which are then made meaningless or ineffective.
As you get higher into management, firing people absolutely sucks. Keeping on dead weight/underperformers/overstaff instead of firing them means you are robbing your ability to give raises or advancement to the other workers you have that are really performing well. So you fire them, but it still sucks.
I don’t say any of this to discourage you. This has just been my experience. Perhaps you’ll navigate the river differently and find what you’re looking for when you advance. But seriously, you can totally get a Bachelors degree, and you don’t even need to quit your current job.