Modular University Degrees
By Leandro Carriego
The current structure of university degrees doesn't seem to adapt to the individuality of people, nor to the needs of today's job market.
Choosing a degree remains, in many cases, one of the most important decisions of early adulthood and also one of the most rigid, designed to be sustained over the very long term.
Someone is expected to choose early, commit for years, and stay the course. As if identity, interests, the job market, and the world were stable and never changed.
But they aren't. Interests change. People change. The job market changes. Even the way we define what our ideal life or a meaningful life would look like changes.
And yet, many educational structures still operate under the same logic: choose once, move forward in that direction, and reach the end of the predetermined path.
In this context, a question arises for me:
Should the university change its structure to adapt, or remain unchanged through all of these shifts?
When "changing" feels like "failing"
In their beginnings, European universities emerged in the Middle Ages as communities of teachers and students devoted to higher learning. Their initial functions were tied to the training of clergy, jurists, and administrators, as well as to the preservation and development of knowledge.
They didn't respond to the logic of a shifting job market like today's, but to far more stable social structures.
Since the beginning of the last century, university studies became much more democratized, and in many cases university study came to be approached with a vocational purpose and as a source of social mobility.
Today, many people start long degrees that they abandon halfway through for different reasons:
- Because they weren't what they expected
- Because they discover other interests
- Because the working reality is no longer the same as when they started
In other cases, people even finish the undergraduate degrees they started, whether out of commitment or because they don't want to "lose" the time already invested.
The result is a shared feeling: time invested that doesn't quite translate into clear job opportunities or formal recognition.
A suite of acquired knowledge left floating in the air.
It even goes further, as if leaving a degree meant losing an identity:
The future lawyer.
The future doctor.
My future self, my engineer self.
When this falls apart, it isn't always just a project that falls apart.
The personal narrative and self-image we had built around it begins to wobble.
Time wasted or time invested?
From what was mentioned earlier, we can identify a prominent idea:
If you didn't complete the path, the time before was wasted.
But is learning wasted time?
Learning something and then changing direction is still interpreted as a detour, not as continuity.
Even when a formal path isn't completed, what remains is knowledge, habits, mental tools, relationships, and new ways of seeing the world.
That means real value, or intellectual capital, accrues to the individual.
On the other hand, when someone leaves a degree after one or two years, that acquired knowledge is left in a kind of limbo. It usually isn't recognized, legitimized, or capitalized on institutionally.
Perhaps the problem also stems from the fact that we are taking too binary a view:
- Finished or Dropped Out
- Success or Failure
- Diploma or Nothing
So, how do we move from "wasted" time to "invested" time?
This is a topic to explore in depth in another post, but as a first intuition, it occurs to me that by dividing the 5 years of an undergraduate degree into 5 "modules" or "levels"—as if they were achievable, certifiable goals or milestones—you could on the one hand keep the student's motivation alive by providing the sense of "goal reached."
On the other hand, each module or level could be officially recognized by the institution, and in this way prevent that knowledge from being "lost" (because we understand it would never truly be lost, but it can be in the eyes of the job market).
University and the job market
Today's working and social reality demands new profiles, many of which didn't exist until recently, and university structures tend to adapt at a comparatively very slow pace.
As a result, many of these positions don't have a clear or direct academic path.
Often, these profiles—for which there is no defined university path or degree—are filled by graduates from related but more generalist degrees, who later specialized to fulfill that role, complementing their education through courses, certifications, or specific experience.
If the market needs specific professionals who don't yet exist, and if to fill those roles people must complement an undergraduate degree with external training, then something isn't working quite right.
So we could say that there is a large and growing gap between traditional educational paths and the emerging demands of the job market.
Unique people, unique educations
And finally, although this is just an intuition, it doesn't only have professional consequences—but human ones too.
Choosing a degree is presented as an almost identity-defining decision.
Abandoning or modifying it is often experienced as a personal mistake, a waste of time, or a sign of failure.
Linearity becomes a silent norm, and anything that strays from it is frowned upon.
For a long time, we were taught to answer the question "who are you?" with an occupation:
I'm a lawyer.
I'm an engineer.
I'm a designer.
While this offers clarity, it also confines.
So, what happens when I, who was the future engineer, am no longer that?
Obviously, we can agree that basing one's personality and identity on a degree or occupation isn't the most correct or ideal approach.
But, even though we understand this rationally, how easy is it really to do it, to apply it, to consciously separate—in each of our acts and introspective thoughts—our identity from our profession or occupation?
Because when identity becomes too tied to a single trajectory or a single part of ourselves, any change is experienced as a threat to that identity.
In contrast, thinking of our identity as a more flexible identity allows for another relationship with the journey of life.
I am not a fixed profession. I am not a fixed identity.
I am a person who learns, explores, combines interests, and above all: changes.
From there, changing the path stops being a failure and can become growth. A "natural" path.
Taking this into account, and considering that each person is different and unique in terms of tastes, interests, strengths, and expectations, being able to "build" one's own educational path emerges as the option that best represents each individual's "essence."
In this way, a modular system would allow you to: study different degrees or areas of knowledge, go as deep as you wish according to your expectations and interests, and in that way, combining different learnings, create a unique path that adapts and aligns with who you are.
Objections
There are two objections that kept turning over in my head while writing this:
Is education, or should it be, an end in itself?
If so, it would be an obvious objection to this proposal, since education shouldn't be reduced to a tool of the job market.
And from my perspective, this argument deserves to be taken seriously.
Broadening our view of the world, developing critical thinking, enriching our inner life…
With this in mind, measuring the university solely by its capacity to generate employability would be reducing its purpose (which can be very broad) to a very impoverished objective.
However, recognizing the intrinsic value of education doesn't erase the other reality from which this essay is born: for many people, studying also represents a financial, professional, time-related, and life-defining bet.
Is flexibility always "positive"?
Some complex bodies of knowledge or fields (such as medicine and certain branches of engineering) might not benefit from the proposed flexibility, since they require a continuity, depth, and high standards that aren't always compatible with the modularity of university degrees.
How to determine this will, I think, be the subject of another essay, but intuitively we can identify that those degrees directly and closely related to people's health and safety would be excluded from modularity, or should follow a more linear path like the ones currently laid out in university curricula.
Conclusion
Maybe the problem is that we keep operating with paths designed for the long term and in a "stable" way, in a world that changes faster and faster.
Thinking of university degrees in a "modular" way could open a new perspective:
Thinking of higher education as a cumulative, flexible, and customizable path, where learning something is never time wasted.
