The Degree Is Losing Its Power. What Replaces It?

The degree is not becoming worthless. It is becoming insufficient, which is a different and more awkward problem, because the cost has not fallen to match.

What the degree actually did

A degree performed three jobs at once: it taught you things, it signalled that you could complete a long project under supervision, and it gave employers a cheap filter. Only the first is irreplaceable, and it was always the least of the three.

What is replacing the signal

Not certificates. Certificates are a weaker version of the same signal and everyone applying has them. What is replacing it is inspectable work: a portfolio, a public contribution, a project with numbers attached.

This is visible most clearly in software engineering and digital marketing, where output is directly checkable. It is least true in law, medicine and accountancy, where the credential is the licence and nothing replaces it. The middle case is data analysis, where large institutions still screen formally.

What the official position is, and what it leaves out

Government says the problem is a mismatch rather than a shortage of qualifications. The Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Higher Education, Professor Richard Tabulawa, told the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Government Assurances in June 2026: "The jobs are there. In many cases, we do not have enough skilled people, or the skills available are not good enough to meet market demands."

Note what is absent from that and from every official statement we could find on it: a number. The Human Resource Development Council’s own 2026 report says only that graduates’ "skills become outdated" while they wait, with nothing quantified behind it. There is no national graduate tracer study and no job-search duration series, so the familiar claim that a given share of graduates is unemployable has no retrievable source. We have examined the figures that do exist in how many graduates Botswana produces.

The uncomfortable distribution

Evidence-based hiring is fairer in principle and harsher in practice. Building a portfolio requires unpaid time, which is not evenly available. A degree, for all its cost, at least had a defined end.

Any honest account of this shift has to include that it advantages people who can afford to work unpaid, and that this is a real cost of the change rather than a footnote to it.

What to do about it

• If you are studying, treat the degree as the floor and build evidence alongside it
• If you are choosing, ask what proportion of that field’s hiring is licence-gated
• If you are hiring, be specific about what evidence you accept, because vagueness costs candidates time