Does a degree define you? -By Athul from XLRI Jamshedpur

Although the first person ever to be awarded an official degree has been lost to time, several organizations and universities contend for the position. But does a degree really define you? All agree that degrees were (and are) a means of social indicators. The etymology of the word degree traces back to an old French word which means ‘step’ or ‘tier’. The first-ever degrees issued were master's degrees and were used to demarcate those who had mastery of a subject from the uninitiated. Those who obtained the master's degree were eligible to teach others and decide who would become masters. An intermediate bachelor's degree (an under graduation) came into being as the amount of knowledge, and the amount of time required to master a subject, increased. And so on so forth, the complexity, and simultaneously the number of ‘steps’ or ‘tiers’, of knowledge increased.

Why are degrees important?

Even today, a degree serves the same purpose it was initially intended to – they indicate a person’s mastery over a topic, it is proof that they are knowledgeable in it. And degrees do matter. They are a huge investment – of time, money and effort – in order to get the payoff of social proof. And a degree is also a license to exercise this expert knowledge, or rather, the lack of a degree is often a deterrent to exercise knowledge, even if you are knowledgeable. For example, no rational man in a normal situation will be willing to subject himself to be administered medicines by a person without at least a basic degree in the same. Similarly, no person without a basic degree in engineering will be hired to design and build a bridge.

The changing scenario

But while degrees were useful to differentiate people with specialized knowledge from those who did not in the age before the internet, the borders are much more blurred today. As almost all of the human knowledge is available online just a mouse click away, universities have lost control over information that they had wielded in the previous centuries. Information proliferation has allowed for anyone with enough time and interest in a subject to become an expert in it without ever having to attend a degree conferring institute. The sheer number of drop-out entrepreneurs and innovators – people who have not obtained a degree and yet are respected experts who have changed the world – stands testimony to this. Several leaders and titans of today’s world have also gone on record stating how degrees do not define the people they hire, the most prominent of them being the visionary serial innovator Elon Musk. For a motivated individual, this means that he or she can focus on a narrow interest area exclusively and exercise his or her knowledge without having to go through the bureaucracy and lack of flexibility of a designed university course. This seriously questions the value of degrees in the 21st century.

This devaluing of the degree has further been exacerbated by the ever-increasing supply to meet the demand, even as the gap between industry demands and the offerings of basic undergraduate degrees (by and large) widens.  But at the same time, the examples of a medical or civil engineering degree still holds to reason. So why does this dichotomy exist? Can a degree define what you can be, and what you can do? Can the lack of a degree define what you can’t be or can’t do? The answer is not simple. But a careful analysis shows us a pattern, a useful framework of thought.

Practical vs theoretical knowledge - A thoughtful analysis

The area where the value of a degree has significantly eroded is the cutting edge tech industry, where the rapid pace of innovation negates attempts to codify the knowledge into a structured degree course. At the same time, in more traditional areas – such as medicine or engineering as mentioned above – degrees continue to hold importance. Looking a bit deeper, we come upon a more fundamental revelation – the power of practical knowledge over theoretical knowledge. The value of degrees in software engineering has fallen because anyone anywhere with a laptop can learn, assimilate and implement the cutting edge of the field, given enough time and effort. 

However, this is not the same for all fields. A doctor is defined as much by his theoretical knowledge as by his practical knowledge from years of experience – something which a person with nothing but a laptop simply cannot achieve. A person may know everything there is to know about an airplane, but unless he has the required number of flying hours, he will not become a pilot. What a degree should now promise is no longer theoretical knowledge, but rather practical knowledge; it should signify that a person is not only knowledgeable in the what and why, but also in the how. He or she should know to exercise the knowledge they have obtained. This is what the physical universities of today can work towards, to guarantee that their graduates are already scaling the experience curve even before they set foot in the actual industry.

Thus, we see how degrees define you, but only as a way to tell society that you know what you are doing. However, even without a degree, if you can conclusively prove that you have the necessary higher ‘tier’ of knowledge and experience in a field, you will be accepted. You are what you do on a day to day basis, and a degree is but a tool to let the world know. It can define what you can do, but it cannot define what you cannot. Because, ultimately, at the end of the day, degree or no degree, we are our own masters.

This article was submitted as an entry to Become an Author 2.0 with Dare2Compete.