Why College Is Still Worth It in 2027

A college degree still matters, but not for the reasons most people argue about. What actually pays off is the experience you build along the way and the responsibility you take on before anyone hands you a title.

“Is college still worth it?” It’s one of the most common questions floating around right now, usually from a student weighing a decision or a parent trying to figure out if four years and a lot of debt still makes sense. It’s a fair question. Tuition keeps climbing, headlines keep asking whether a degree is a scam, and everyone seems to know someone who “made it” without one.

There’s no simple answer, but here’s a plain one: yes, a degree still matters. The idea worth pushing back on is that the degree itself is the point. It’s not the piece of paper, and honestly, it’s not even the specific content of a given class. It’s the experience you build while you’re there, including the responsibility you take on, the decisions you get to make when the stakes are still small enough to survive a mistake, and the muscle you build by doing real work before anyone’s paying you to do it.

Branden Pearson, experienced BCG Consultant and proud graduate of the University of Florida, wrote previously about how going to a large public university instead of an Ivy shaped how he approaches his work today, and gave him a perspective a lot of his colleagues didn’t have. This is the other half of that story. It’s not about where you go. It’s about what you do while you’re there.

Yes, the Degree Still Matters

Start with the economics, because they’re real and they haven’t disappeared just because the conversation online has gotten cynical.

Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce puts a bachelor’s degree holder’s median lifetime earnings at roughly $2.8 million, which is about 75% more than the $1.6 million a typical high school graduate earns. Weekly, a bachelor’s degree holder earns about 66% more than someone with only a high school diploma, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data compiled by Bankrate.

And that gap doesn’t stay flat, it widens. Research from Harvard economist David Deming, reported by Axios, found that college graduates start out earning about 27% more than high school-only graduates at age 25, and by age 55 that premium has grown to roughly 60%. Deming’s blunt conclusion was that it’s a disservice to tell a young person a degree doesn’t matter anymore.

So this isn’t an argument for skipping college. The degree is the entry fee. It’s not the education.

It’s About the Experiences You Build

Here’s the phrase Branden keeps coming back to when people ask him what college actually gave him: it’s about the experiences you build.

Not the transcript. Not the GPA, which employers are relying on less anyway. GPA screening fell from 73% in 2019 to about 42% in just five years, according to a NACE Job Outlook survey of employers. What’s replaced it is evidence that you can actually do something such as solve a problem, work with a team, carry a project across the finish line and hold up under a deadline.

You don’t get that from sitting in a lecture hall. You get it by putting yourself somewhere with actual stakes and actual responsibility, while you’re still young enough that the mistakes are cheap. That’s what experiential learning is, and it’s the part of a degree that never shows up on the diploma but ends up mattering the most.

Learning by Doing: Where the Classroom Handed Off to Real Life

For Branden, a lot of that growth came through student government. He got involved early and eventually served in leadership in the student senate, close enough to real decisions to feel their weight, and young enough to make mistakes he’d carry with him. That’s the part people underestimate about these roles. You learn that leadership isn’t the title or winning the vote; it’s the people on the other side of your decisions, including the ones who disagree with you, and being accountable when you get it wrong. 

Some of the most formative moments of his college years weren’t the wins; they were the ones that taught him to listen harder, hold responsibility more carefully, and measure himself by how he treated people rather than what he achieved. Those are lessons a classroom can’t assign, and ones he still draws on. 

He also served as a resident assistant, which sounds like a small thing until you’re the person a hallway of 18-year-olds actually turns to at 2 a.m. when something goes wrong. That role teaches you to make calls with incomplete information, to de-escalate, to be accountable for people who didn’t ask to be your responsibility but became it anyway. That’s not a class. That’s a job with real consequences, and it happens to be one most people only get access to because they’re in college.

None of this is unique to any one person. It’s the argument for the whole category of experience: employers now cite internship and hands-on experience as the top deciding factor when they’re choosing between two similarly qualified candidates. Nearly 90% of employers say they’re looking for evidence you can solve problems, and roughly 80% want proof you can work on a team and not evidence you memorized the material, evidence you’ve actually done something with it.

Interning Where the Classroom Meets the Real World

The other piece of Branden’s experience came from interning in his local county government’s budget and fiscal services office. It was the first time he saw whether the frameworks he was learning in an international business classroom held up against real public budgeting work, with real deadlines, real constraints, and public money attached to every decision. 

It’s one thing to study budgeting in a textbook; it’s another to do it inside an office that has to stretch limited public dollars across competing needs, on the county’s fixed budget calendar. That internship didn’t replace his coursework; it completed it. The classroom gave him the frameworks, and the budget office gave him the friction of applying them where the only test that mattered was whether the work held up.

This is the core of the argument. The degree is the entry fee, not the education. Employers like that county government, and the firm he works for now, where he’s a Project Leader at BCG, aren’t primarily hiring people for what’s in a specific course. They’re hiring people who’ve already shown they can take a concept and make it survive contact with a real problem and a real deadline.

Faith and Service: The Experience School Doesn’t Grade

There’s one more category of “learning by doing” that doesn’t get talked about enough in these conversations, and it’s the one that’s shaped Branden the most personally: faith and service.

It started his junior year at the University of Florida. He went as a student participant on a mission trip with CRU and Filter of Hope, installing ceramic water filters in rural communities in Central America. Nobody grades that. There’s no transcript line for it. But as a student, it taught him something a classroom genuinely can’t: what it looks like to serve people who will never be in a position to advance your career, and to do work whose only return is that it mattered. Those lessons stuck with him. He carried them past graduation and still goes back today, now as a trip leader and long after any class or requirement asked him to. 

That’s arguably the deepest version of experiential learning there is. Student government teaches you how to lead under pressure. An internship teaches you how to apply theory to a real client. Volunteering teaches you why any of that is worth doing in the first place. The point of competence isn’t status; it’s usefulness to other people. For Branden, faith is the frame that holds all of that together, and it’s why he doesn’t see service as a separate compartment from professional life. It’s the same muscle, just pointed at people instead of a deliverable.

If you’re a student wondering whether any of this counts, it counts more than almost anything on a resume. A hiring manager can teach you a technical skill in a few weeks. They can’t teach you to actually care about the people on the other end of your work. That has to already be in you, and service is where you build it.

So, Do You Need a Degree?

Here’s where this lands, and it’s not a hedge. Get the degree. The economics are still real, and in most fields it’s still the credential that gets you in the room.

But don’t mistake the credential for the education. The classes will teach you frameworks. The experiences such as student organizations, leadership roles, internships, jobs that hand you real responsibility, and yes, faith and service will teach you how to actually use them. That’s where the real learning happens, and it’s the part of your college years that will still be paying off decades after you’ve forgotten what was on the final exam.

If you take one thing from this: don’t spend four years chasing a GPA. Spend four years chasing responsibility. Say yes to the leadership role, take the internship that scares you a little, show up for the people who need something from you and can’t pay you back. That’s the degree behind the degree, and for Branden, it’s the one that actually built his career.

About Branden Pearson

Branden Pearson is a Project Leader at Boston Consulting Group, where he partners with aerospace & defense, industrial, and automotive clients and has helped roadmap more than $250 million in cost savings. A University of Florida graduate, Florida Blue Key member, and Reitz Scholar, he leads Filter of Hope and Cru service trips across five countries in Central America and writes about faith, work, and living unhurried on his Substack. Connect on LinkedIn.