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&lt;p&gt;As if we needed any reminder of how different today&#39;s economic environment is than the one that the Baby Boomer generation graduated into, consider the following chart, which comes to us via some research by the &lt;a href=&quot;http://americanadvisorsgroup.com/2016/09/19/retirement-millennials-vs-baby-boomers/&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot;&gt;American Advisors Group&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Note that this isn&#39;t a then and now comparison: this data represents attitudes &lt;em&gt;today.&lt;/em&gt; And, despite everything they&#39;ve seen, more than 1 in 4 boomers don&#39;t think that college education is important to career success &lt;em&gt;at all, &lt;/em&gt;compared to fewer than 1 in 6 millennials&lt;em&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://americanadvisorsgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/how-important-is-a-college-education_.jpg&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://media2.vault.com/18716/millennial-boomer_college.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Millennial-boomer college&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;A few possible explanations for that disparity:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;1)&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Life experience: If you&#39;re in the twilight years of your career, your education (or lack of it) is likely a distant memory; while it may have played a role in getting your career underway, it&#39;s everything you&#39;ve done since that will have decided where you are today. But if you&#39;re at the other end—lighter on work experience, long on education, then it&#39;s understandable that you&#39;d weight it higher.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;2)&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Confirmation bias: if you&#39;ve invested the majority of your young life, plus a significant amount of money into gaining an education, &lt;em&gt;of course&lt;/em&gt; you&#39;re going to say that education is a defining factor of career success.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;3)&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; The employment wage gap is much wider today:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://media2.vault.com/18717/pew_college_earnings.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Pew college earnings&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;4)&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Competition: back in 1975, just 10.6% of women and 17.6% of men in the US had college degrees. In 2015, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attainment-of-college-diploma-or-higher-by-gender/&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot;&gt;almost 33% do&lt;/a&gt;—in both genders. That&#39;s a growth curve that shows no sign of stopping anytime soon—and one that limits the ability of non-college grads to make the kind of career progress they could have a generation or two ago.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Whichever way you slice it, in the economy we operate in today, a college degree gives you more chance of making career progress, and boosting your lifetime earnings—no matter what you might hear from your older relatives around the Thanksgiving table this year.&lt;/p&gt;

Phil Stott

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