The Expiration Date of your College Degree

and How to Be Ready for It

Your college degree will expire. Just like every bit of knowledge we have now, most of what you learn in college will likely not be true someday in your lifetime.

Degrees are not a guaranteed ticket to the job market anymore, and the basic structure of modern day higher education does not look like the best solution for the kind of world we live in. This is not a small issue, especially for us college students, making a huge time and money investment.

Fortunately, there is a solution to it. And it all starts with actually understanding the problem.

Sam Arbesman, Kauffman Foundation scholar and Harvard mathematician, explains the science behind this issue in his book, “The Half-Life of Facts.” Using “scientometrics” (the science that measures science) he demonstrates how knowledge decays, and how nearly everything we know will simply not be true someday. And that ranges from all we watch on TV to every single fact we learned to take our last finals.

The solutions for the problem vary, and some seem more extreme than others. One of them, as proposed by the PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, is to drop out of college altogether. He supports this with his Thiel Fellowship, which recruits students under the age of 20 to drop out of college to pursue other projects. Each student gets a $100,000 funding to work on whatever their passion is, which could include social movements, startup creation, or scientific research.

Although dropping out might be tempting to some of us, I understand it seems (and might actually be) very risky. Besides, your mom might not be very thrilled about it. I know mine didn’t when I brought that up. But we can benefit from understanding why dropping out works for some people, and apply it to our lives even without quitting college altogether.

The solution is proposed by Sam Arbesman. It involves adopting a more flexible approach to learning, rather than treat formal education like we used to: a one-and-done deal. He shows in his book that to understand the decay of knowledge is to become more prepared to deal with it.

Personal approaches to it will vary. Dale Stephens, Thiel Fellowship member and founder of UnCollege.org, suggests a wonderful starting point: asking ourselves who we are, what we love doing, and where are we going. Although I did not drop out of college like Stephens, my own answers to these questions made me go for a flexible approach to learning. They made me experiment working and studying in different countries, trying my hands on a couple of startups, and even helped me find a job working in the same place as Sam Arbesman, the very cool mathematician who inspired this column.

Despite some of the problems pointed by many, college is still an awesome learning environment. It is true; degrees are far off from their previous promise of knowledge we needed to know from graduation and further on. But if we take a flexible approach to learning, and tame our school coursework to save time, college can still be a great bridge to a wonderful wealth of knowledge.

Arnobio Morelix is a social entrepreneur at PESSOA Institute

*This story was first published at the UDK