The problem
The world changed.
The advice hasn’t.
Your sixteen-year-old enters the working world in about six years. Your college sophomore, in two. This is what will be waiting for them.
Eight years dedicated to being like everyone else. In a market where everyone else is the competition.
The market they’re walking into
It is not the market you or your parents entered. Three things about it are entrenched, and each one changes what works.
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.
Through the 1980s and 1990s the demand for graduates grew faster than graduates arrived. Around the turn of the century that stopped. And while the degree used to be the only option for advanced learning after high school, anyone can now learn anything from the best in the world, mostly for free, and show the work when they are done.
The signal weakened.
Today a degree still gets your kid past a filter that others cannot pass. But it no longer sets them apart for the hiring managers on the other side of it.
The degree still opens the door. As it does for everyone else.
When everyone else has the thing that was supposed to distinguish your kid, distinction must come from somewhere else.
One side now has the leverage
The supply-and-demand seesaw has tilted to the employer. Not because the jobs disappeared, but because applying became effortless and free. Today the average job posting draws 244 applicants. One job on one side; 244 people offering to do it on the other.
The average number of applications for each job posting
Every mark is a person applying for the job your kid wants. The orange one is your kid.
What happens when the seesaw tilts this far? The employer can afford to be highly selective. Roughly seven in ten employers say they have raised the bar on qualifications and experience. Which means:
- 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.
With no leverage and nothing to set them apart, your kid is one of 244 with every application. And hopes to be picked.
A six-year bet, placed at sixteen
The path asks your kid to name the thing they are going to be. Then it asks them, and you, to spend six years and a great deal of money preparing to be it.
A long-term bet placed on a market that does not hold still for six months. Most bets miss.
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
And that was before anything sped up.
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 same report ranks graphic designer among the fifteen fastest-declining jobs in the world. Legal roles appear on that list twice more. Those are careers a sixteen-year-old could plausibly have named.
And the degree does not settle it. Of every hundred workers worldwide, employers expect fifty-nine to need reskilling or upskilling by 2030.
Choosing early feels like a plan. It is just an earlier guess.
The bet is not the problem. Placing it once is.
The market they’re walking into
Three trends, all pointing the same way.
- 01A college degree no longer differentiates your kid.
- 02When the average opening draws 244 applicants, differentiation is critical.
- 03In a rapidly evolving job market, picking a career six years out no longer makes sense.
What 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 makes a promise. Conform, and you will be eligible to maximize your potential; success and happiness follow. Resist, and you will play for consolation prizes.
So they obey. Nearly nine in ten college juniors and seniors say they chose their major with a specific job or career already in mind. And the script tells them that doing well in school is the same as being ready.
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.
It is not a conspiracy. It is just the only map anyone follows.
A decade of pressure
Step one is get good grades, and it begins the year your kid learns to read. By the time step three asks them to decide who they are going to be, they have spent ten 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
Every parent of a path follower sees the impact. “My kid is such a perfectionist.” “My kid is so obsessed with their future.” But we tell them, “It’s all for your own good.”
Ten years of pressure. We call it preparation.
We would not put a child through this for something we doubted.
Most of us stopped believing. We did not stop paying.
The doubt is not fringe. In 2010 three in four Americans called a college education very important. Fifteen years later it is barely one in three.
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.
We write the check or they sign the loan. Either way, they live with the answer.
What they’re told to do
One script, and three things it asks of your kid.
- 01Comply, decide, hope.
- 02Carry the pressure for a decade, with anxiety already the biggest problem they name.
- 03Pay eight times the 1985 price for something most of us stopped believing in.
Where 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
A degree is supposed to buy a particular kind of work, and for some it does. For more than half it does not. Among those whose highest degree is a bachelor’s, fifty-two percent are underemployed a year after graduating.
Underemployed, graduates whose highest degree is a bachelor’s
Out of 10.8 million graduate records, more than half end up in jobs that do not require a degree. And of those who begin underemployed, roughly three in four are still underemployed ten years later.
Underemployed at twenty-three. Still underemployed ten years later.
The job never required the degree. The cost was already sunk.
Thirty-three thousand short
The path’s defining feature is bloated expectations. Graduating seniors, finally about to step off after eight long years, expect to earn six figures. Then comes the $33,100 reality check.
To be fair, $68,400 is a good starting salary, well above the American median. But it is not what they expected, which is how disappointment works: happiness is reality minus expectations. Raise the expectation high enough and a “good” reality arrives as a loss.
Even worse, their salary must stretch further than yours did. Consumer prices are up 30% since 2019. Half of American renter households spend more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities. The median first-time homebuyer is forty years old, the oldest on record.
So it should not surprise anyone what they conclude.
Say their own degree was a waste of time or money
One in five boomers calls their degree a waste of time or money. Two generations later, half of Gen Z does. That trend is not likely to reverse.
They enter the world with grand expectations. The world does not meet them.
“Good” outcomes can still land as a loss. That is what the path does.
What it costs them
The mental health of young adults is at a crisis point. They report anxiety at twice the rate of teenagers, and depression at nearly twice. Harvard’s Making Caring Common asked seven hundred of them what was driving it. The answers are not what a parent following the path would expect.
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
Unfortunately, this is not one study. Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program, the World Happiness Report and a forty-four country analysis all reach the same conclusion: wellbeing now climbs with age, and young adults sit at the bottom of it. All three are on the sources page. Far too many young adults are disillusioned and unhappy after dedicating themselves to a supposedly known outcome, only to find they lack meaning or purpose in their lives.
This is the world your kid graduates into, and it is not the one you graduated into.
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.
Where it leaves them
Three things the path delivers.
- 01Fifty-two percent are underemployed a year out. A decade on, forty-five percent still are.
- 02They expected $101,500. They earn $68,400, in an economy 30% more expensive than 2019.
- 03Nearly three in five say they lack meaning or purpose. Their twenties are now the low point of life.
Forty-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