I vividly remember crying when I got a 98 on a test in the fifth grade. And no, it wasn't a proud cry. It was a disturbingly full-body heave over my missing two points. That should tell you everything you need to know about my relationship with academics and success. Through school and into the working world, I continued to cling to my self-imposed perfectionist tendencies because I thought they would make me successful.

I was the obnoxious overachiever who pulled frequent all-nighters to tweak sentence structure on papers I'd already written and cram for tests I'd been studying for all along. I chased every scrap of extra credit I could get, like it owed me money: straight A's, a triple major in college, straight into a master's program, internships stacked on top of internships.

And every weekend I spent studying instead of being a regular teenager, some well-meaning adult would metaphorically pat me on the head with a version of the same line: you'll be so glad you did this someday, because it will pay off in the long run. I nodded and smiled, because I thought I was playing the game strategically and that I would win.

I naively believed the adults around me. Not because I'd ever witnessed the mythical payoff in the wild, but because every single grown-up I trusted spoke about success like it was gravity. Meaning, it was undeniable. If you do the work and accumulate the credentials, the doors to professional success will swing open for you.

That was the deal I was sold, and the one so many of us kept paying for. We’d put success on layaway, but when we finally walked up to the counter to collect it, we were told the product had been recalled.

And in hindsight it makes sense, because we were coached and mentored by people teaching us the terrain of how to build a successful career based on their own experiences. Shockingly, no one had handed them a crystal ball so they could plan their life lessons around what our futures would actually hold. Although, wouldn't that have been nice.

Our parents didn't see the internet coming any more than we saw the creator economy and social media. Who could have seen that a computer would sit in every home and every office, that information would live in our pockets, that hiring would move online, that entire careers would sprout on platforms that didn't exist while my fellow recovering perfectionists and I were too busy coloring inside those damn lines?

At some point I lifted my head, looked around, and realized I was working myself into the ground alongside a few million other former teacher's pets and overachievers, completely baffled that credentials just aren't enough anymore.

The Market Doesn't Read Resumes

Not long ago, a creator I follow posted a video that blew up. Almost overnight, her following jumped into the six figures and the comment section lit up like a beeper in the late 90s. She was making a sharp point about what some people call the "millennial career crisis." The catch, from where Janel Abrahami sat, was that she'd spent years making that exact argument, in her newsletter and from paid stages, long before it went viral in someone else's mouth.

The thesis was hers. There were also similarities with their wording. The gap between their view counts was about six million.

Abrahami has two graduate degrees in work psychology and a decade studying how careers develop. The woman whose video eclipsed hers was, until recently, in a very different professional space. "I have two degrees in work psychology," Abrahami later wrote in her newsletter, Going Places . "She has a furniture-flipping studio in her garage. The market chose her."

When we spoke on Zoom, Abrahami was honest about it. Her first reaction came from a raw, emotional place, she admitted, but writing the essay forced a harder look. "I really realized how much I had been resting on my credentials, resting on my laurels," she told me. And she's careful not to turn it into a knock on the creator: "Someone else was even better at communicating what I was trying to communicate, who didn't have the credentials. And they didn't really need the credentials in that moment."

Abrahami has a name for the people most disoriented by all of this. She calls them the credentialed class, and she counts herself among them. If it wasn't already clear, I count myself among them too.

These are the people handed the same instructions I was, the ones I could recite in my sleep: do the schoolwork, rack up the degrees and build the kind of resume that opens doors. It made sense, because the professional world on the other side was guarded by a velvet rope. We grew up certain of how the whole thing worked, and it ran on scarcity: you needed someone with standing to vouch for you, and a degree strong enough to get your application actually read instead of skimmed.

None of that was fake. Those advantages genuinely worked. They just worked for a world that no longer exists, or at least not in the shape it had when we were coming up, playing by those rules.

Abrahami named the injustice perfectly. "We entered a promise with the economy," she told me: work hard, stay loyal, collect every credential you can, climb the ladder, and you'll be rewarded with a stable, comfortable life. "We held up our side of the bargain," she said. "The economy did not."

So no, it isn't fair. But it is reality.

"Millennials trained for survival of the most-decorated," Abrahami wrote. "The new reality is survival of the scrappiest."

The reframe Abrahami offers is thrilling and deflating in equal measure. It's thrilling because survival of the scrappiest means opportunity is suddenly everywhere, open to anyone willing to reach for it, do the work, fail and try again. It's simultaneously deflating because a lot of us are standing around rethinking the last 20 years or so, wondering what exactly we spent them on. Because if the credentials were never really the thing we needed, then what did we invest all that time and money for?

The strangest part about all of this is that there's no one to be mad at. No institution, no person, not even ourselves. Nobody lied. My oldest, who is four, is learning what a lie is right now, and I'm realizing it's a tricky concept to explain, let alone grasp. Whenever we say something that turns out to be wrong, she accuses us of lying. We keep trying to explain the difference: lying is knowing the truth and hiding it; being wrong is doing your best with the information you had and finding out later it wasn't accurate.

That’s the situation we’re all in now. There was no way to see this coming, which somehow makes it harder, not easier, because we’re still smart, still capable and still able to learn whatever the moment demands. It’s the hamster wheel that’s completely and utterly exhausting. We graduated into a bad economy, clawed our way up anyway, and reached the rung we were told would matter, only to find out, oh, sorry, that one doesn’t count either. It feels like something is always getting pulled out from under us.

The Gate Is Being Walked Around

ZipRecruiter’s 2026 graduate report put the share of recent grads eyeing a business of their own at 37.5%. As Fortune reported, a generation watching AI hollow out entry-level work is increasingly deciding to skip corporate careers altogether rather than line up for a bottom rung that's disappearing anyway.

No one makes the disconnect more concrete than Zach Yadegari. As a high schooler, he co-built Cal AI, a calorie-tracking app downloaded more than a million times and reportedly on a $30 million annual revenue run rate, according to TechCrunch . He also had a 4.0 GPA and a 34 on his ACT. Of the 18 colleges he applied to, 15 rejected him, including Harvard, Princeton and Columbia. The gatekeepers said no to a teenager the market had already valued at eight figures. He didn’t need the degree because he had already built the proof.

The statistics have a face, and I recently chatted with one of them on Zoom. Morgan Sanner spent a decade in HR. She racked up five internships before she’d even graduated, then pursued organization development at Honda, a master’s in the field and the letters after her name. The whole shebang. In other words, Morgan is maximally credentialed.

Now, just 10 months into working for herself, the opportunities she describes are exactly the kind the old system rationed based on how credentialed you were: an invitation to speak at her alma mater, a full-time job offer she never applied for and B2B brand deals. "All inbound," she told me. The turning point wasn't a new degree but a rebrand. She stopped presenting as a resume writer and started showing up as what she wanted to be known for, a voice on the future of work. "As soon as you build a personal brand," she said, "you're able to bypass some of those things."

When I asked Abrahami why a personal brand carries that kind of weight now, she framed it as the inverse of a diploma. A degree tells an employer to trust you. An audience shows them. "I have my master's in org development, so trust me" is telling, she said; building a following where you actually help people with the thing you claim to know is showing. And showing is "evidence of a skill that you can't fake" by sitting through a two-day seminar for a certificate. "You can't fake that."

The obituary of credentials gets complicated, because inside the companies still doing the hiring, not much has changed. For years, big companies swore up and down they were going skills-based and ditching degree requirements. Then 2025 reversed the whole thing: 71% of employers now require a two- or four-year degree for entry-level roles, up from 55% a year earlier, according to research on skills-based hiring . And the skills-based hiring revolution companies love to announce is mostly a press release. When Harvard's Joseph Fuller and the Burning Glass Institute analyzed more than 11,000 employers' job postings from 2014 to 2023 , they found that fewer than 1 in 700 new hires actually came in through the dropped-degree reforms. So the credential is not dead inside these institutions. It's continuing to do exactly what it always has there.

What has collapsed is the credential's monopoly. Credentials used to be the only key to enter the castle of success. Now they are just one key on a very large keyring, to one door, in a building with more doors than the ones zooming around in Monsters, Inc. The skills that felt like a safe bet not long ago, the ones Abrahami and I and plenty of others once counted on, have become the price of entry. "The 'success infrastructure' that used to require credentials, capital, and connections," she wrote, "now requires a Wi-Fi connection and a willingness to feel stupid online for 18 months."

That openness isn't free, either, and Morgan Sanner named the cost for me. She helped build the shift toward skills-based work at Honda, and she's wary of what it demands. When companies hire for skills instead of tenure, she points out, the job hunt never really ends. Even once you're inside, you keep pitching yourself for the next project, over and over, like a consultant who never stops selling. "I have mixed feelings," she said. "In theory it sounds good. But it's a lot if you don't have an entrepreneurial bone in your body." She's watched a whole cohort get unknowingly drafted into what she calls forced entrepreneurship, made to self-promote whether they ever wanted to run anything or not.

The gate hasn’t swung open everywhere though. I don't want the person operating on me to have picked up surgery from YouTube. Some avenues still demand the credential, and always should: medicine, the sciences, the professions where the stakes are public and the training is real. Journalism belongs on that list, which is probably the exact reason I call myself a writer and not a reporter. The difference between a trained reporter and a confident person with a ring light still matters.

Paula Faris would agree. She spent nearly a decade at ABC News with roles that included anchoring Good Morning America 's weekend edition and co-hosting The View , and when we spoke on Zoom she was sharp. "Everybody thinks they're a journalist now," she said, and it worries her, because a few fields still genuinely require the training: "you need the credentials to be a journalist, to be a doctor, a physician, a scientist." And yet Paula is living proof of the other half of the story. She left that anchor chair to start a media company, and she's the first to admit she had no obvious business doing it. "I didn't have any business acumen," she said. "I'm a journalist, I'm a storyteller, I ask questions." "A lot of people called me crazy," she added. "You don't give up an anchor seat. And I did."

But those credentialed corners are the exceptions now, not the rule. The domains where the work speaks for itself, baking, fitness, building an audience, building a business, don't check for credentials at the door.

Abrahami, for all her survival-of-the-scrappiest talk, drew that same line when we spoke. "Credentials are not enough," she told me. "They are necessary." If anything, she argued, a world where everyone has a microphone makes them matter more, not less. The louder the room gets, the more it's worth asking what actually qualifies the person you've decided to believe.

If credentials were the old swamp and AI just drained it, the question left standing is, well, what is left to defend?

Abrahami's answer, the one she reaches after admitting her own jealousy of the creator who eclipsed her, points at everything a tool can't counterfeit. Two she names outright: "trust built over years rather than reach built over weeks" and the "real relationships" no algorithm can manufacture. The others are quieter but just as un-fakeable: the taste to know what actually matters inside a firehose of information and the discipline to work a problem through yourself before you hand it to a machine.

Notice that none of those appear on a university transcript.

Morgan Sanner showed me what that looks like from the other end of the resume. Toward the end of our chat I asked her, very bluntly, what qualifies her to talk about the future of work. She called out her 10 years of experience, the research she does obsessively and the audience that has learned to trust her. Then she smiled, having caught something. "Not one of my first answers was my education," she said, the bachelor's and the master's in HR. "That used to be the first thing." She reached for the credential last, and only after she'd named the things that actually earn her a seat at the table now.

The question of what makes someone an expert clearly stuck with her, because she followed up by email afterward with the sharpest version of the answer. She'd done more than 1,000 resume reviews as a freelancer for Indeed, and even after all of them, she told me, she had hesitated to call herself an expert, snagged on the old belief that the title is something you're granted after a set number of years. Then she turned it inside out: "How is it possible to do something 1,000 times and NOT be an expert at it?" That's the whole shift compressed into a tidy sentence. Expertise stopped being about tenure and became about reps.

But none of it pays off on its own, and that's the point Abrahami hammered hardest when we spoke. "Your hard work will not speak for itself," she told me. "You need to speak for your hard work." The credential used to do that speaking for you. Now the only thing standing between doing great work and anyone knowing you did it is your ability to communicate what you know and make people actually care.

This is the same shift I've spent the last year and a half writing about, just from a different vantage point: the operators going fractional and the women who stopped climbing one ladder to build several income streams at once. The tidy story about all of them is retreat from the mainstream version of success. I've argued the opposite, that they aren't opting out, they're reallocating, refusing to keep paying rent on a credential that stopped opening the doors it was bought to open. The credentialed class is that same story told from the top down.

Paula Faris put a face on exactly that. She hired a mother of three returning to work after years at home, who kept apologizing in the interview for the gap on her resume. "She was totally downplaying her credentials, because that's what the world does," Paula told me. "The world says, oh, you've just been a mom. And I'm like, no. You just became a badass employee, because of what you learned."

The credential itself doesn't vanish in all this, either. It converts. Paula, for all her reinvention, is clear-eyed about what her old career still buys her. "It gives me a certain level of clout, for sure," she said. "But what I do doesn't define me." The pedigree becomes something you carry, not something you hide behind.

None of us in this piece share a pedigree, but we've all felt the same seismic shift move the floor underneath us.

The credentialed class is not dying because credentials stopped meaning anything. It is dying because credentials stopped being scarce, and scarcity was the source of their power.

Which brings us to the question that actually matters: strip away the credential, and what's left that still creates value? The skill. The trust. The thing you can actually do.