a 🔥 take on education from Gen Z

2088 of our Gen Z'ers said this ASTOUNDING thing about their education beliefs.

Apr 28, 2021

It’s been a few weeks since our last post - thanks for hanging around! We’re wrapping up finals and for me, my senior year of college. Pretty crazy time of year (and life)…but speaking of college…

1. The newest, hottest 🥵, fastest-growing 📈📈 TikToker shows us another example of a new world education

Through our research and social listening, we’ve been keeping a close eye on higher education trends. As a “non-traditional” generation, we’ve always looked out for ways Gen Z is learning new things. Remember the @partyshirt people from our previous post? (Fact or Cap: Gen Z’s source of truth). There’s a new “education” TikTok’er, and he’s the fastest-growing TikTok star we have EVER seen. EVER.

Introducing Khabane Lame. A 21-year-old Italian and Senegalese rising legend, Khabane never says a word in any of his videos but manages to pull in tens of millions of views, instantly. Check out his recent video that casually accumulated 120M views.

The comment sections are filled with people obsessed with these, but also almost sarcastically mocking the simplicity these videos show.

Besides accumulating 23 MILLION followers in the last 3 weeks, Khaby shows us another valuable insight into the way Gen Z feels about higher education. It’s not really necessary. And people like Khaby show that it doesn’t take a $200,000 education to make millions.

But wait, there’s more.

We took this one step beyond TikTok. We wanted to know from other Gen Z’ers, what they actually believed about a 4-year degree. So we asked. And the response is pretty astounding.

With our pretty incredible new service, we were able to poll 2088 Gen Z’ers (in 24 hours, might I add).

We asked, do you think a 4-year degree is important for having a successful career?

Of our 2088 respondents, 1359 said they did NOT believe a 4-year degree is important for having a successful career. That’s 65% of Gen Z.

The question is (or at least the one we always ask), why?

For our generation, we’re growing up watching people like Khaby make millions. We’ve seen people like Charli become one of the world’s most influential people at 16 years old. And the list goes on. But beyond the creator economy, we’ve also grown up with unparalleled access to tools and resources that other generations just did not have. You can learn anything, literally anything on YouTube. For free. We grew up with Sal Khan teaching us math and chemistry, with Hank Green teaching us history, with all of these non-traditional education platforms that are 100% free.

But even if we’re using these platforms to learn, the ball is not in our court to accept these non-traditional paths. It’s in yours. You are the ones shaping our ability to succeed, with or without a 4-year degree. As you hire your next intern or full-time role, I encourage you to look beyond the education listed as “college” or “university”. Look for the education listed as “Twitch Streamer”, 150K YouTube subs, or the TikTok-educated cryptocurrency-trader. These are just as valid, if not more.

Thanks for your time this week :) See ya soon.

btw…if you’re interested in getting 1000s of Gen Z responses in 24 hours as we did for that poll, shoot me a quick message at andrew@genzdesigns.com. We are just launching this awesome new offering, and are super excited for its ability to bring Gen Z voices to the table.

as a special note, I encourage you to check out Pat Timmon’s new book “Feel Something”, about using empathy to build trust with your audience. Pat has been super supportive of us on our journey, and we owe it to Pat to return the favor. You can support Pat on IndieGogo here!