Is a College Degree Still Worth It? Why Skilled Trades are Winning the Job Market
Date Posted: May 26, 2026
Posted In: Discussion, Workforce,
From Inc.: Compounding evidence is reinforcing suspicions that the post-WWII era of college degrees providing a ticket to higher paying jobs may be coming to an end. Not only does recent employment data indicate that salaries for skilled laborers are rising at the strongest rates in the workforce. But now a growing number of the world’s university graduates are also expressing buyer’s remorse over their investment in higher education, and the decreasing occupational returns those are generating.
Coinciding ground-shifts in business—the biggest being produced by spreading adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) tools—have accelerated the devaluation of a college diploma as a hiring criterion. As a result, a large portion of the 1,052 recent graduates from around the world told a May Kickresume survey they’d begun suffering from “degree regret.” Around 20 percent of respondents were skeptical their higher education would ever “feel financially worth” the small fortunes it cost. An additional 52 percent of participants expressed a lower degree of remorse about their university investment, but did question its value in today’s considerably altered labor market.
A large part of that second-guessing initially arose from the earlier trend among employers to place as much, if not more, emphasis on a candidate’s skills and experience over formal education when filling a position. Those doubts have since been supercharged by the swift spread of AI in the workplace, generating existential questions about the future of knowledge-worker jobs.
One reflection of that shift was only a fifth of all survey respondents said their degree was even applicable to their work. Around 20 percent reported their diplomas were rarely or never germane to their jobs, and nearly a third reported they were only of professional use “occasionally.” Former students of science, law, education, and the humanities expressed the highest levels of doubt that their education would ever pay off, with rates of regret ranging from 71 percent to 61 percent of respondents.