“He spent the last month of his summer spending a lot of time with peers at Ivy League schools and other notable undergraduate programs who are wrestling with exactly that tension,” Krane said.
Krane said Gen Zers are asking themselves: “Is this education worth it? Do I want to take on additional debt? Can I go build now? Because there’s certainly people that will back me and give me a little bit of capital to begin to figure those questions out.”
GV CEO David Krane told Fortune #BrainstormTech that Gen Z is questioning whether a college degree is worth it. #GV #college #student #university #GenZ #Fortune #business #leadership #IvyLeague
Hiring professionals are asking similar questions.
Gen Zers looking for work in tech, like Krane’s son, could see higher return on investing in skills than the average. The tech and media industry, for example, stands to gain more from a skills-first hiring approach, with potential to broaden the talent pool by 24 times, according to the survey.
However, the computer science field for recent graduates has been significantly impacted by AI, resulting in fewer job opportunities and even making it challenging for high-skilled job seekers to secure an interview.
Experts tell Fortune that as companies adopt AI, workers who utilize the technology daily often don’t have an education in coding.
Some experts argue that education is even more paramount in the age of AI.
“Anyone can prompt an AI tool to generate a block of code, but knowing whether that code is efficient, secure, and ethical requires human insight,” Dana Stephenson, CEO at Riipen, a platform that connects students with experiential learning through real work projects from industry partners, told Fortune. “A student might prompt an AI to build a simple app, but without training in software architecture, debugging, and responsible data use, they risk creating something fragile or even harmful.”
Anant Agarwal, Chief Academic Officer at 2U, an educational technology company that contracts with nonprofit colleges and universities to develop online programs, told Fortune that as AI develops rapidly, the skills it demands are appearing in jobs across industries more than ever.
“In this environment, learning deeply and building real expertise is more important than ever because the AI roles and applications are in the context of these other fields,” Agarwal, who is also an electrical engineering and computer science professor at MIT, said. “Degrees also future-proof your career by preparing you for the next big technology, whatever it might be.”
When it comes to coding LLMs or building agentic AI applications, degrees are still needed to provide a rigorous foundation in math and computer science necessary to truly understand how the systems work, Agarwal added.
“At the same time, the four-year degree is evolving,” Agarwal said. “People are increasingly combining certifications and online programs to create flexible, personalized learning paths. Degrees still matter, but how we earn them is becoming more adaptable, modular, and directly tied to the skills the market actually wants.”
