Do you need a degree to be a designer?
The year was 1999. We were on the cusp of a millennium, when arbitrary not-round numbers were about to become arbitrary round numbers. I was working for a startup in Silicon Valley, with blowup furniture next to our desks, a pool table in the fully-stocked kitchen and a shark tank in the office. With actual sharks.
I was sitting next to those sharks and the light from their tank played off the face of our newly hired VP of Product, my boss, as she told me not to go back to school. “You don’t need a degree to be a designer, and in fact it’s better if you don’t because then you can be working right now. Degrees are a thing of the past.”
I didn’t believe her even then, but it was a convenient rack to hang my hat on for the time. I was 23 years old and a single mother, working 18+ hours per day, 7 days a week as UI Manager for a startup that I was pretty sure would enable me to retire before 30, so I could spend more time with my kid. It was nice having an authority figure tell me that I didn’t have to invest in my future beyond what I was already doing. It was nice to have someone say I didn’t have to stretch myself even further.
Of course, two years later, the dot-com bubble burst and I was laid off, jobless in a time when tens of thousands of other designers were job-hunting. I went from making $135K per year managing an e-commerce UI team to losing out on a $17 per hour web design job. The person who got that job had two PhDs.
This story has a happy ending. I kept calm and carried on and after a long fallow period I did eventually find a job. Started back at the bottom, in terms of salary and responsibilities, and clawed my way back up. Eventually I landed at NASA doing my dream job, but it took 20 years of inching my way along before I got there.
And here’s the thing: at NASA, the imposter syndrome was crippling. I made a game out of it, because that’s my typical response to debilitating fear. I counted the PhDs I was in meetings with. My peak was 23. 23 PhDs and me. With no degree, a college dropout. And while most of the time, imposter syndrome isn’t related to reality at all (in fact, there are studies saying that imposter syndrome might actually make you better at your job than others) in this case there was merit: NASA actually does care about your degree. There is famously a rule that NASA HQ passed in which you can’t have the title of an engineer if you don’t have at minimum a Bachelor’s degree. A 60-year employee of JPL who enabled the first space flights got demoted through no wrongdoing of her own.
And NASA isn’t the only place. Mozilla wouldn’t interview me, because I didn’t have a degree. I had a hell of a portfolio and a ton of experience, but they literally couldn’t talk to me. Google cut off an interview right in the middle — immediately after they learned I didn’t have a degree. Now, I might have been tanking the interview or they might have realized earlier that I wasn’t the right candidate. Who knows. But the timing of the abrupt end feels like it was connected to my statement, “Actually, I have no degree. I’m self taught.”
A year after coming to NASA JPL, I enrolled in school. My first class was actually with my daughter, which was unaccountably delightful to me. I now have two AA’s and I’m closing in on my Bachelor’s, trying to decide whether I want to pursue a Master’s.
I’m telling you these things because I think I’m uniquely qualified to weigh in on the issue of whether or not you need a degree to be a designer. I want to give you the benefit of my 26 years of lived experience, if you’re trying to make a decision of your own. This is advice that I wish someone had given me, and I hope these considerations will help you.
Degrees are a checked box
As my experiences with Mozilla and Google show, and as the NASA engineer’s experience shows, sometimes you’re lost in a giant bureaucracy and who you are doesn’t matter. How great you are doesn’t matter. There’s a box that has to be checked and an exception can’t be made.
You can have a career without a degree. I did. But there will literally be doors that aren’t open to you. I chose to take the moral stance that I didn’t want to be involved with a company that was so rigid it couldn’t see past the checkbox. But that also made my life much harder. I missed out on some of the high-profile, high-paying jobs that would have catapulted me further. Could I have been famous? Could I be making a lot more money right now? Maybe. I’ll never know, obviously.
And without that degree, I had to fight harder to get the jobs. I had to spend more time courting the company. I had to prove myself worthy more than the person who had letters next to their name. Those letters are a shorthand for competence in the eyes of many professionals.
Degrees don’t mean competence.
But let’s not kid ourselves. I’ve hired PhDs and Masters degree holders who didn’t know how to do the job. School doesn’t necessarily teach you how to work as a designer. Many professors are brilliant academics who understand the theory of design better than you ever will. But they’ve never applied it. They’ve never worked in the field. And so they can’t teach you the places where the process gets pinched, where you have to compromise, where you have to figure out scrappy ways to sneak research in because no one will fund it.
Only experience can teach you that.
Degrees are more than paper
That said, the degree isn’t JUST a checkbox. In the course of my education, I’ve learned things I apply every day on the job. I didn’t learn a single new method in my research methods class, but I learned how to read and write academic papers. The reading part especially was useful, because I rely on other people’s research a lot to support and inform my own research. Statistics have been invaluable to me — both the lower division and the upper division versions. I now can work with my data in a much more informed, capable manner. I have visualization superpowers. I know how to mislead people — and how to prevent them from being misled.
Cognitive science and Social psychology have also been amazing tools for me as a designer. I took a digital illustration class and learned a couple of Illustrator techniques I didn’t know even after 20+ years of using the software professionally.
More than these tactical factors, the education I’m getting is providing me with a scaffolding of language, approach, perspective and substance that I absolutely could not get as an autodidact. I could teach myself statistical methods. But could I teach myself the deeper significance of a skewed population’s unintended consequences on a whole ripple of future research? I’d be arrogant to think so. There is great power in the exchange of questions and ideas between a teacher and a student.
You don’t know what will happen
My career is a perfect example of not being able to predict the future. I never imagined the dot com bubble would burst. I never imagined I’d end up working in this role at NASA. You never know what’s going to happen. You can’t. Even if you think you’ve got a perfect straight line mapped, life happens. Markets dissolve. Companies go under. Industries buckle. You change, your values shift, your needs shift.
The more tools you have in your belt, the more ability you have to shift when things change around you. Could you pivot if your job disappeared right now, and there was no more need for designers? What would you do?
Having a degree may help you make that pivot, both in merits of the doors that it opens and in merits of the exposure to other options. Most Bachelor’s programs are aimed at making you a well-rounded adult. The perspective and skills boost you gain from cross-training are real and precious. And in some cases, perhaps you’ll discover something in your degree process that theoretically you’ll love and could pivot to in a pinch. I found American Sign Language. If suddenly the world were to not need UX designers tomorrow, I might dedicate my life to ASL interpreting and Deaf advocacy. Who knows.
It’s nice to have backup
I’ll tell you a secret. At JPL, a lot of people assume I am a PhD. I’ve learned how to present my work and cite my sources and speak with confidence but couched in pragmatism. That’s not the secret. The secret is, I let them believe it.
Chill a minute there, I don’t lie. If someone calls me Dr. or in any other way makes it clear that they think I’ve achieved this difficult thing, I set them straight right away. That’s how I know that a lot of people just assume it — they always tell me so.
That works to my advantage. The more senior and educated people think you are, the more they listen to you. I’ve seen people dismissed because they don’t have the credentials to back up the perfectly rational thing they’re saying. Then someone with credentials says the same thing and suddenly everyone is nodding and agreeing. Hell, I’ve had that exact thing happen to me. It sucks.
Even with only a Bachelor’s degree, you’ve got a piece of paper backing you up. And in the process of getting that degree, you learn more ways to speak with confidence couched in pragmatism. In the course of my degree I’ve learned the right way to share my results so that they’re unquestionable. I’ve learned when I should open them up for interrogation and how (and when) to show that no interrogation is necessary. I’ve learned the value of the peer review process and how to share work in progress without looking sloppy. All of those things are superpowers I can and do apply daily to give my work credence. The subtle skills of formality make a difference in how your work is presented, and you only learn those in an education environment, when a professor is critiquing exactly those things in addition to the content of your deliveries.
My human factors professor told me that he’s seen a person with no degree do a great job as a professional, but not be taken as seriously by clients and peers as they should have. I imagine that works the other way too — with a degree you have the piece of paper to combat your own imposter syndrome. I’ll let you know.
So do you need a degree to be a designer?
The short answer is no.
But the medium answer is that if you don’t get one, you’re setting yourself up to work harder than everyone else in every way at every moment. You’re basically signing up for a handicap in a race a lot of people are running.
You can do it without a degree. I did it. Maybe it’s even the right answer for you. But if you’re going to do it, please do it with your eyes wide open that your road will be narrow and steep. You’re going to feel like Sisyphus, pushing the rock up the hill. By realizing that in advance, you can steel yourself, you can set your own expectation for a long slow push. You can structure your life to support that push. And you’ll be fine.
A degree is a lot of work to get. Even an undergrad degree — trust me, I’m living that. But it WILL make your path easier in both tangible and intangible ways. And instead of Sisyphus you’ll be Hercules, given the power of heavy lifting instead of having to go and take it.
If you do decide to get a degree, just do yourself a favor and take an internship, or do some work in the field while you’re getting the degree. Investigate your professors and choose the ones who’ve done the work they’re teaching. Make sure that you finish that degree not just steeped in theory but awash in application. You’ll get more from the education, and you’ll get more from life as a result.