The problem
The world changed.
The advice hasn’t.
Your teen is being prepared for a future that won’t stand still. Yet the advice still centers on grades, credentials, and deciding early what they want to be.
Eight years dedicated to being like everyone else. In a market where everyone else is the competition.
The market they’re walking into
Three changes in the market challenge the advice your teen is getting.
What a degree used to signal
Two generations ago, a college degree truly differentiated you. One generation ago, it put you ahead. Today? It simply keeps you even with your competition.
Share of U.S. adults 25 and over holding a bachelor’s degree or higher
11.0% in 1970, 25.6% in 2000, 38.3% in 2023.
A degree is no longer the only route to advanced learning. Your teen can learn from experts online, often for free, and build work that shows what they can do.
A degree can get your kid past a hiring filter. What sets them apart on the other side is what they can do.
One side now has the leverage
Applying became easier, and employers’ inboxes filled up. In Greenhouse’s dataset, job postings averaged 244 applications in 2025, up from 116 in 2022. That measures applications submitted, not distinct qualified candidates.
Average applications per job posting in Greenhouse’s dataset
Each mark represents one application. The orange mark illustrates one submission among many. Greenhouse recruiting benchmarks, 2025 data.
Roughly seven in ten employers surveyed say they have raised the bar on qualifications and experience:
- The same roles now ask for more of both.
- It is hardest on anyone switching direction.
- And six in ten expect to keep it there.
While companies are hiring more, they’re also receiving a flood of applications, making it harder for employers to select the right candidate and for employees to stand out.
Workday Global Workforce Report, 2024
Four years on a campus. Four years of not standing out.
A six-year bet, placed at sixteen
At sixteen, your kid is asked to name a career and commit years and money to preparing for it.
It is a long-term bet on a market that won’t hold still.
A 2025 survey asked young adults a simple question: are you working in the career you set out for? Sixty-two percent said no.
Not in the career they set out for
In it
Trends such as generative AI and rapid technological shifts are upending industries and labour markets, creating both unprecedented opportunities and profound risks.
Till Leopold, World Economic Forum
The report places graphic designers and some legal support roles among jobs employers expect to decline fastest by 2030.
Employers also expect 59% of workers to need reskilling or upskilling by 2030.
Choosing early feels like a plan. It is just an earlier guess.
The challenge is to develop something a credential alone can’t show: what your teen can actually contribute.
Sources and contextWhat they’re told to do
Despite the market realities, your kid is told to follow the same script as their granddad.
The path
The path promises that following its steps leads to success and happiness. Straying from it means settling for less.
Nearly nine in ten college juniors and seniors surveyed chose their major with a specific job or career in mind. Doing well in class feels like preparation for that future.
Students feel ready because they’re doing well in class, but you can’t prepare for a marathon just by reading about running.
Tom Brunskill, general manager of Forage
Six steps. No exits.
A decade of pressure
By the time your kid is asked to choose a future, they have spent years being measured, ranked, and compared.
When parents ask me where all of this pressure is coming from, I ask them: Where is it not?
Suniya Luthar, professor of psychology, Arizona State University
“My kid is such a perfectionist.” “My kid is so obsessed with their future.” Yet we tell them, “It’s all for your own good.”
Ten years of pressure. We call it preparation.
Most of us stopped believing. We did not stop paying.
The share of Americans calling college “very important” fell from 75% in 2010 to 35% in 2025.
Share of U.S. adults rating a college education “very important”
And yet 59% of parents still say they want their child to go straight to college after high school. Meanwhile the number on the invoice keeps climbing.
Price since 1985, both indexed to 100
Can you think of another product that costs eight times what it did in 1985 and does less to set its buyer apart than it used to?
Everybody doubts the path. Almost nobody leaves it.
The market changed. The pressure to follow the same steps remained.
Sources and contextWhere it leaves them
The decision is made, the time and money are invested. This is where it lands them.
The job they are certified to do
In Strada and Burning Glass Institute’s study, 52% of graduates whose highest degree was a bachelor’s were underemployed a year after graduation: working in occupations that typically don’t require a bachelor’s degree.
Underemployed, graduates whose highest degree is a bachelor’s
The study analyzed 10.8 million graduate records. Among those who started underemployed, 73% were underemployed ten years later.
Thirty-three thousand short
ZipRecruiter’s 2025 survey found a $33,100 gap between students’ average salary expectations and recent graduates’ average reported pay. These are two different groups, not the same people measured before and after graduation.
$68,400 can be a good salary. But when expectations run much higher, even a good outcome can feel disappointing.
Living costs add pressure: consumer prices rose about 30% from 2019 to 2026. Harvard’s 2025 housing report found nearly half of U.S. renter households spending over 30% of income on rent and utilities. The median first-time homebuyer was 40 in the 2025 report.
Say their own degree was a waste of time or money
What it costs them
Harvard’s Making Caring Common surveyed 709 young adults aged 18 to 25. Anxiety and depression rates were roughly twice those of teens in the study. Young adults also reported pressure and uncertainty about their lives.
Far too many young adults told us that they feel on edge, lonely, directionless, and that they worry about financial security. Many are “achieving to achieve” and find little meaning in either school or work.
Richard Weissbourd, lead author, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program, the World Happiness Report, and a forty-four-country analysis also document low wellbeing among young adults. Their findings and limits are on the sources page.
Your twenties used to be a happy time. Now it is the low point.
Nobody on this path stops to ask whether your kid should be on it. That question is yours. Ask it long before they are standing at the edge of the decision.
Following the prescribed steps is no guarantee of meaningful work, financial security, or fulfillment.
Sources and contextForty-eight sources sit behind this page, each with who was measured and what it does not prove. Six more are claims that did not survive checking.
See every figure and every source →There is another way
The deepest failure is funneling a generation down a single path, and never empowering them to direct their own.
You can raise a kid the path can’t disillusion.
By raising a teenager who is self-directed, adaptable, and clear-eyed about what things cost, years before the decision arrives. Not by rejecting college, but by refusing to make it the unexamined default.
Those are conversations you can start this week.
Prefer to dive in? Get the book →
It’s not theory. The book opens with our daughters’ real stories, including the stretch in the middle where none of it looked like it was working. Read Brooke’s story