If a Bachelor’s Degree Isn't Right for Your Kid

You’ve had the conversations, and it’s become clear: for your graduating senior, a four-year college just isn’t the right fit.

It’s time to consider alternatives — maybe even a bootcamp. We know: deciding on what comes next is not easy. So here’s the data that can help out.

Prospects

There are a lot of questions that come up. But let’s start with one the data addresses directly: employment prospects. Here’s a table of the jobs with the highest growth as predicted by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). And, to make it more useful for the topic at hand, we’ve included BLS estimates for typical degree requirements for each position. Click around and explore.

You might have noticed the asterisks. We put them in for jobs that are achievable after a coding bootcamp (we’ll talk more about that later). In addition, some of the positions for which the BLS said bachelor’s degrees were necessary might also be achievable with associate’s degrees, or they might need more context. 

For example, the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook page on registered nurses says, “Registered nurses usually take one of three education paths: a bachelor’s degree in nursing, an associate’s degree in nursing, or a diploma from an approved nursing program. Registered nurses must be licensed.”

The mention of the associate’s degree is valuable — we have other data backing up a trend you might have noticed in the BLS findings.

More education, higher earnings

In the BLS table, the correlation between more education and higher pay is less stark. This data from the National Center for Education Statistics is far more direct: More advanced degrees lead to higher paychecks. And it’s true across all levels. By gaining an associate’s degree after graduating from high school, median annual earnings go up by over $15,000. 

What does that mean? If a bachelor’s degree is out of the question, a shorter, cheaper, and more vocation-focused associate’s degree might be an option to consider.

In these two years of study, your kid might change their mind and decide they actually do want the bachelor’s. With the associate’s, that opportunity will be more accessible, and in most cases, their credits will seamlessly transfer — it’ll be like they were going for the bachelor’s the whole time.

And even if they choose not to spend those two additional years studying, they’ll still have a good basis from which to launch a career.

Why this matters for bootcamps

All right. Let’s finally turn to those asterisks in the table. When looking at the top five professions in any category, at least one of these post-bootcamp careers shows up. So that naturally sparks the question: Can people land one of these jobs by skipping college entirely and instead enrolling in a coding bootcamp?

We started out by talking about traditional education because of what our graduate data shows us. According to our 2024 Outcomes Report, nine out of ten TripleTen graduates had degrees of some sort.

Naturally, the inverse way of looking at this is to say that nearly 10% of our graduates didn’t have any degree at all. And we do have success stories there — Luke Schmidt_{Forging His Own Path to Tech: Luke Schmidt’s TripleTen Story}, for example. 

After enrolling in college and majoring in economics, he realized the degree wasn’t for him and dropped out. Following that, he held odd jobs, but found himself uninspired by the work he was doing. Then he discovered a passion for tech and started teaching himself the rudiments. To really hone his skills, he enrolled in TripleTen, and thanks to the know-how he gained at the bootcamp, he ended up landing a job at a fintech company.

So it’s absolutely possible to launch a tech career without a degree. Luke did. But look back up at that chart comparing education and pay. Having some college experience on your resume leads to an increase in median annual earnings of just under $4,000. Luke had that background.

Dillon Arnold_{Cleared for Career Takeoff: Dillon Arnold’s TripleTen Story} has a somewhat similar story. Initially set on a career in aviation, he discovered that a medical issue made him ineligible for a commercial pilot’s license. So he pivoted and enrolled in community college, where he got his associate’s degree in accounting — a focus that seemed just as good as any other. But he wasn’t enthusiastic about following this path. “I had to sit down and really ask myself, ‘Do I want to settle with this?’” he recalls.

While facing this decision, he discovered TripleTen, and something sparked inside him. He enrolled, gained new tech skills, and after a dedicated job search, landed a new job as a web software developer.

Want to know more about bootcamps? We have more data

If you want to keep exploring the numbers about bootcamps, we have a report that goes into greater detail. Check out our survey of over 1,000 decision makers to see what they had to say about hiring bootcamp grads.