Your Degree Is Losing Value Every Year: Paper Inflation Explained

Your parents were not wrong. They were quoting old prices.

Think of your degree as an asset. You paid for it, possibly with borrowed money, and it is supposed to earn you money in future. Like any asset, it has a market price.

Go back to the 1990s. A tiny share of Malaysians had a degree. If you had one, you were rare, and rare always gets paid. A graduate walked into a bank, a firm or a government office and the paper alone opened doors. That was my parents' world. So they made you a promise: study hard, get the certificate, and you are set for life. It was true, in their market, at their time, because degrees were scarce and value comes from scarcity.

Paper inflation

Then Malaysia did something genuinely good for the country and quietly terrible for the value of each certificate: it made degrees widely accessible. Public universities expanded, private colleges sprang up everywhere, and the national loan fund PTPTN has financed more than four million Malaysians since 1997.

One piece of economics, I promise. When a central bank prints too much money, each ringgit buys less. Not because the ringgit changed, but because more of it is chasing the same goods. Malaysia now produces around 300,000 graduates a year, all chasing roughly the same pool of graduate jobs. We printed certificates faster than we created jobs that need them. Every certificate buys a little less career than the one printed the year before. I call it paper inflation.

Your degree did not get worse. It became common, and markets do not pay a premium for common things.

The receipt, and the misleading number

About two million Malaysians are in skill-related underemployment, roughly 36% of everyone with tertiary education. Engineering graduates in admin, business graduates driving Grab, accounting graduates waiting tables. Remember the June video of a thousand people queuing two kilometres for around 500 openings at Infineon, many holding degrees? That queue is paper inflation made visible. When everyone in line holds the same document, the document stops being what gets you out of the line.

Here is the sneaky part. Officials love quoting graduate unemployment, which is about 3.2%. Almost every graduate has a job. But unemployment only measures whether you have any job. The graduate pouring coffee is employed. The graduate doing RM2,000 data entry is employed. 3.2% is technically true and completely misleading. The honest number is 36% underemployed. We lay out both figures in our research on the underemployment paradox.

Value did not disappear. It moved.

Here is the hopeful part. One industry study found 81% of Malaysian employers struggle to find the AI talent they need and are willing to pay over 40% more for people who have those skills. That is the definition of scarce. At the same time, the government says up to almost 700,000 existing jobs will be significantly affected by AI and digital shifts in the coming years.

Notice what is happening: the same wave devaluing your degree is creating a shortage somewhere else. Value did not leave the market. It moved, as it always does. Your parents' generation happened to live when value was parked in the degree. In ours it is parked in skills like AI, data, cloud and cybersecurity. Our State of AI Hiring report shows the salary premium.

What a degree tells me when I hire

I run a business and hire regularly. A degree tells me one thing: you can finish a long, boring commitment. That is not nothing. But it is the entry ticket that lets you queue, not the prize.

What I actually price is evidence. Show me something you built: a project, a case study, a system, a result with your fingerprints on it, something that would not exist without you. One real project beats a hundred certificates every time, because a certificate says you attended and a project says you can do it. Evidence is scarce. Paper is common. That is the whole hiring market in one sentence.

Three moves to stay scarce

These are the moves I would give my own kids.

The price list changed

Your parents told you the degree was the golden ticket. They said it out of love, and they were not lying. They were quoting prices from a market that no longer exists, like insisting a KL house is a bargain because of what it cost in 1965. The love is real. The price is outdated.

But scarcity did not vanish. It relocated, and for the first time the map is public: employers are literally advertising what they cannot find and will overpay for. You can stand in the queue holding the same paper as everyone else, angry about a broken promise. Or you can accept the market as it is, stack something scarce on your paper, and let the queue argue about fairness while you get paid.

If one of the scarce skills you want to stack is building software with AI, the free trial is a no-risk way to start, and our AI-Native Software Development Programme is the full 12-week path. And if you are weighing whether a degree is worth it at all, read is a Malaysian degree still worth it?