I was recently asked why a university degree is significant. I thought that was an interesting question. So in this post I’ll cover four main reasons a university or college degree is valuable. A degree teaches people to be collaborative, competitive, logical and resilient. It also builds a shared global culture of people using logic and evidence to test claims.

To be clear, I don’t think a university degree is necessary. I’ve worked in gas stations, restaurants, security, landscaping, warehouses, retail, etc. and enjoyed them all. And I think a career in the trades is a great idea, assuming you can find an employer who actively manages sexism and racism in the workplace. I’ll sit down to a conversation about the best procedure to sharpen woodworking tools any day. However I still think there’s still a benefit to a formal education.

I completed my undergraduate and graduate degrees in person on campus. As a young student this was both exhilarating and terrifying. I love meeting new people in person, and believe there is something to learn from everyone on our planet. At the same time it was a challenge to learn to speak up and defend a claim in lecture halls filled with dozens or hundreds of strangers. During my time as a student I became more adept at meeting new people and speaking in large crowds. The university setting gives students a chance to experiment and fail in a low-risk and (mostly) supportive atmosphere. Having a degree tells employers and clients that a person has learned a baseline of workplace and interpersonal skills.

Collaboration

Each new course was a chance to build new collaborative relationships with professors and classmates. When you are free to choose your courses or projects, it’s exciting to arrive on the first day and meet people who share your passions. You arrive with a sense of curiosity about others and a willingness to work towards a common goal. Even when you have to take a course because it’s required, you learn to give it the “old college try”! These experiences have served me well in the workplace because starting a new project, getting a new supervisor and meeting new colleagues are similar exercises. But shared passion isn’t enough, you also learn that every person has different styles (personality, learning, communication, etc.) and to respect those different styles. There is power in difference, and that is why there is power in collaboration.

Competition

At McGill each new course was also a competition to see who could perform the best. At the same time we were building collaborative relationships we knew that each class would involve logical debates, and that our performance would be evaluated in comparison with fellow students. There are strict requirements to get into graduate programs, and limited pools of grant money. You need to win the support of your professors to succeed in the global academic system. Most people figured out that winning the support of your fellow classmates was also important for winning support from your professor. Competition like this takes energy. I believe that’s why universities have fall and spring sessions, and professional sports have off seasons to heal and pre seasons to practice drills as a team. But competition like this is also very energizing. A degree teaches you to:

• balance competing priorities,
• learn what others know in a short amount of time,
• create good research plans,
• make compelling logical arguments, and
• clearly communicate how information can be applied to current issues.

It was tricky to learn to balance collaboration with competition. Sometimes tensions would flare up. Over time we learned to follow the subtle cues of our most skilled professors, and to deliver genuine apologies to our classmates. Balancing competition with collaboration is a tricky skill that I still work on every single day. I like winning, and I know that you can’t win unless you’re helping create a high performing team.

Logic

On top of that my McGill professors expected high quality logical arguments 100% of the time. This is another experience that can be hard to find in the workplace. Professors also expected transparency about the sources of evidence used in arguments. When I failed to make a good argument or provide proper citations they would point out the deficiency in my work and demand better quality. This taught me to appreciate people pointing out mistakes or oversights in my work. I continue to apply these high quality standards to my work to this day.

Resilience

Lastly, having a degree implies the abilitiy to participate in an imperfect enterprise system. Once you choose a degree path you have to learn to work with both central administration staff and faculty staff to identify and track the specific requirements needed to complete a degree. When I completed my undergraduate degree these requirements were not as easy to identify as they are today. Requirements were printed in paper publications, which were sometimes distributed in different buildings on different parts of the campus, and mix and match options sometimes meant requirements conflicted with each other. When you identified a conflicting requirement you needed to figure out who to inform and what authority to trust for an exception. It takes tenacity and good humour to borrow/pay thousands of dollars to participate in a system like that! I continue to bring that tenacity and good humour to my work today.

I loved every minute I spent on the McGill campus in downtown Montréal, the traditional territory of the Kanien’kehà:ka peoples. Getting a degree taught me to:

• enjoy meeting new people with different backgrounds and styles,
• speak up,
• collaborate,
• compete,
• create logical arguments using evidence,
• navigate through an imperfect enterprise system, and
• understand obscure rules.

Can you acquire those skills in a business setting? Yes, if you’re lucky to get into the right business. But you acquire those skills in a more consistent and concentrated way in an academic setting. Without disrupting the bottom line of a company. Plus a degree gives you a common point of reference with millions of people around our planet.

Getting a degree also taught me humility. I met a lot of very intelligent people specializing in many different subjects. It helped me realize that human knowledge is vast and one person can’t know it all! So getting a degree also helped me learn to put my own selfish pride and desires aside and work with other subject matter experts in a shared system.