For anyone who does not know me: I graduated from Abertay University in 2026 after four years studying Ethical Hacking, with an average grade of 95%. So it is fair to say I tried hard and squeezed everything I could out of the place. Yes, the missing 5% annoys me. No, I do not lose sleep over it. Much.
So, back to the question. The word “anymore” smuggles in an assumption: that university was, at some point, worth it. And “worth it” is doing even more work than that. Ask ten people what it means and you will get ten different answers. So before getting stuck in, we had better pin down what I think both of those mean.
My mother was the first in our family to go to university, and back then it was a genuine privilege. Difficult to get into, and difficult to survive. No laptops, no lecture slides posted afterwards, no ChatGPT. Paper, a library, and a lot of grit. And the degree carried weight on its own. The simple fact that you had been to university nearly guaranteed you a job, as long as you did not write it off entirely.
Which points at what “worth it” usually means. Some people will tell you that university is about knowledge for its own sake, and for a few of them it genuinely is. But in the popular case, it is about one thing: getting a job. And on that measure, the ground has moved. In 1990, roughly 15 to 20 percent of young adults went to university. Today it is around half. Every graduate is now competing in a far bigger pool, holding a certificate that far more people also hold.
Underemployment has moved with it. A growing share of graduates work in jobs that do not require a degree at all, even though they count as employed. Recent HESA data puts 75% of employed graduates in highly skilled work, which sounds healthy until you flip it round: one in four is in a job that never needed the degree. So finishing university is harder to convert into a job than it used to be, and the degree no longer guarantees a skilled one. Which invites the brutal question: is university now useless?
There is one more shift worth naming before I answer. In my mother’s day, the information itself was the scarce thing. It lived in universities, in books, behind the door your degree opened. Today you can find almost anything in seconds, for free, and an AI will patiently explain it to you at two in the morning. If university were only an information dispenser, it would already be finished.
And yet I still think it is worth it, with caveats attached. Because the information was never really the product. I just did not understand that until I was there.
What university actually gave me was four years of structure with a deadline attached to everything, a building full of people obsessed with the same things I was, lecturers who had done the job I wanted, and entry to rooms I could never have walked into alone. I did not reach the finals of a national cyber competition because I was special; I got there because university put the sign-up sheet in front of me. The degree also does one thing the internet cannot: it gets your CV past the first filter. Nobody hires you for it, but plenty of places will not look at you without it.
The caveat is the part most students learn too late. It is not enough to simply attend. Turning up, passing, and leaving with the certificate is the baseline, and the baseline is now shared with half your generation. University is not a product you buy; it is a platform you extract from. The projects, the competitions, the societies, the things you build alongside the syllabus with your own fingerprints on them: that is what separates you from the other fifty percent, because it is the only part they cannot also have by default.
So, is university worth it anymore? If the plan is to attend, pass, and let the certificate do the talking, then honestly, no. You would be paying a lot of money for information that is now free, to end up in a queue with everyone else who had the same plan. But if you treat it as a base camp, four years of structure, people and cover to build proof that you can actually do the work, it is still one of the best deals going. The degree gets your CV out of the bin. What you did alongside it gets you hired.
University did not make me employable. It gave me four years to make myself employable, and it would have happily let me waste them instead. That is the honest deal on the table, and I would take it again.