Twenty million new college students will be starting their semester this fall and most of them will be taking on debt with little certainty if their degrees are worth the investment. According to a survey carried out by Freelancing in America 2018, the results revealed that freelance placed greater emphasis on skills training. 93 percent of freelancers with a university degree stated that skills training was useful in contrast to the 79 percent who said that their university education was beneficial to their present work. Further, 70 percent of full-time freelancers engaged in skills training in the past six months compared to only 48 percent of full-time non-freelancers.
Another research conducted by the Edelman Intelligence and co-commissioned by Upwork and Freelancers Union, polled 6,001 U.S. workers and discovered that the dynamic technological advancements with increasing education costs, have led the conventional higher education system to face an increasingly dated and uncertain route. The cost of a college education has now outweighed the possible return of investment. Degrees are still deemed as a lifelong stamps of professional competence even though the future of work would not be about degrees. Instead, it will increasingly be about skills.
Freelancers, the most dynamic segment of the workforce recognises the important of lifelong learning, and are twice more likely to reskill. New nontraditional educational options are also multiplying. Often, laser-focused on the most in-demand skills, potential college students can now enroll in campus-based, project-focused institutions or online programmes such as e-learning platforms.
Source: CNBC
Join us in the upcoming QS-APPLE 2018 from 21-23 November 2018 in Seoul, South Korea, as we discuss the topic on “Future Universities in the Asia-Pacific: The Changing Face of Higher Education”.