Sipu Jha
For decades, the promise of college rested on a simple assumption: Learn first, work later. Skills would be acquired in stages—foundational knowledge in classrooms, practical competence on the job, confidence somewhere down the line. That sequencing no longer holds. Work has changed too quickly, and learning has become too continuous, too embedded in daily labour, for the old order to survive intact.The 2025 Deloitte Gen Z and Millennial Survey—23,482 Gen Z and millennial respondents across 44 countries—reads like an audit of this breakdown. Not a cultural essay. Not a generational lament. An audit. And its implication is uncomfortable: The workplace has evolved faster than the institutions meant to prepare young people for it.So ask the question without cushioning it. What exactly are colleges preparing students for? And just as importantly, who decided that this—this syllabus, this assessment model, this distance from real work—was adequate preparation?The world Gen Z is entering does not reward neat recall. It rewards navigation. It rewards speed without sloppiness. It rewards judgement under uncertainty. It rewards collaboration across teams and tools. And it increasingly rewards a basic fluency with machines that now sit inside everyday work. Deloitte reports that 57% of Gen Z already use generative AI in their day-to-day work. That is not a future trend. It is the present tense.This brings us to the blunt, inconvenient question: is higher education still the main factory of work readiness—or has Gen Z already moved that work elsewhere, building employability through experience, online learning, feedback loops, and AI-assisted trial-and-error?
Why college credentials are losing their hold
Start with the number universities prefer to treat as anecdotal. According to the survey, 31 per cent of Gen Z respondents did not pursue higher education at all. Millennials report a near-identical figure of 32 per cent. This is not a fringe trend. It is a structural share of the cohort. Cost still dominates the explanation—39 per cent cite financial constraints. But cost alone does not account for what the data reveals next. Among those who opted out, 16 per cent of Gen Z say higher education is not providing the skills they need in a world shaped by fast-evolving technologies such as artificial intelligence. Another 25 per cent say their chosen career path does not require a degree, pointing instead to vocational routes, apprenticeships or trade-based learning. This is not ideological hostility to universities. It is a calculation. College is no longer assumed to be the most efficient place to acquire employable skills.
Where college loses Gen Z
When Gen Z turns its attention to higher education itself, the critique is operational. High tuition costs and concerns about quality feature prominently. But threaded through the data is a sharper indictment about practice and relevance.About 28 per cent of Gen Z respondents point to limited opportunities for practical experience, while 24 per cent question the relevance of college curricula to actual job requirements. A further 20 per cent highlight the lack of flexibility in learning models, signalling discomfort not just with content but with structure. This isn’t a rigour problem. It’s a reality problem. Learning is happening at a safe distance from work. Colleges don’t lack content. They lack exposure.
How Gen Z defines work-readiness
If institutions still imagine work as the downstream application of academic mastery, Gen Z sees something else entirely. Asked what skills are required for career advancement, the survey reveals a hierarchy that rarely finds its way into assessment rubrics. About 86 per cent of Gen Z respondents identify soft skills—communication, leadership, empathy—as essential. The same proportion cites time-management skills. Eighty-four per cent of the Gen Z survey participants emphasise industry-specific knowledge, but they place it alongside creativity, innovation and project management, each cited by roughly four in five respondents.So what does this hierarchy tell us? It tells us that Gen Z is describing work as a setting where knowledge has value only when it can be used with others, under time pressure, and within constraints. An idea, on its own, is not enough. It has to be explained, defended, adjusted to context, and delivered on schedule. Knowledge becomes employable only when it moves beyond understanding and turns into decisions, coordination and output.That distinction also explains why many graduates emerge feeling qualified but not ready. Most academic assessment still rewards individual performance in stable, controlled conditions—a paper, a project, a set of marks. Work rarely operates that way. It involves shared responsibility, trade-offs, and judgement calls made with incomplete information. The capability being tested is not memory, but prioritisation; not fluency, but clarity; not effort, but execution.
AI has already moved from experiment to infrastructure
No gap between education and work is clearer right now than artificial intelligence—not because of what it might do in the future, but because of what it is already doing. According to the survey, 57 per cent of Gen Z respondents already use generative AI in their day-to-day work as part of routine functioning. They rely on it for data analysis, content creation, design and creative tasks, project management, strategy development and even training. In many white-collar roles, AI is no longer an optional skill. It is built into how work gets done.What this reveals is a quiet shift in expectations. Workplaces are not asking whether employees should use AI; they are assuming that they already can. AI has become part of the baseline—like spreadsheets once were—rather than a specialist capability.Higher education, meanwhile, is still negotiating guardrails: questions of ethics, plagiarism, assessment integrity and appropriate use. These debates are necessary, but they are unfolding at a slower pace than the workplace itself. The consequence is a widening mismatch. Graduates are stepping into jobs where AI fluency is taken for granted, having passed through institutions where exposure to these tools is uneven, informal or actively discouraged.
Degrees still matter but readiness is no longer guaranteed
The Deloitte data does not support apocalyptic claims about the death of higher education. Degree-holders continue to report higher levels of financial security than those with vocational qualifications or only secondary schooling. Fifty-five per cent of Gen Z respondents with university degrees say they feel financially secure, compared with 44 per cent among those with vocational credentials and 40 per cent among those who ended education after high school. The degree still pays. What it no longer reliably delivers is confidence at the point of entry into work. That confidence is being built elsewhere—through experience, feedback loops, self-directed learning and tools that evolve faster than curricula.
Two systems, two speeds
Strip away the rhetoric and the mismatch looks almost banal. Colleges are not teaching the wrong subjects so much as teaching them in the wrong rhythm. Higher education still treats learning as something you stockpile first and spend later—content now, application after graduation, confidence somewhere down the line. Work has inverted that logic. It rewards people who can use partial knowledge in real time, revise a plan without taking it personally, and learn while the task is already moving. In that environment, mastery is not a trophy you carry out of campus; it is a practise you keep rebuilding, under deadlines and alongside other people. The trouble, then, is less a failure of intent than a kind of institutional jet lag. Education is still running on semester time. The workplace has shifted to update time.
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