How to sell the value of education in our 'get rich quick' social media age

Growing up, I understood success through a relatively simple formula: work hard, become good at something and, eventually, you might do well.

It was never entirely true, of course. Luck, opportunity and circumstance have always complicated the relationship between effort and success.

Nevertheless, the underlying lesson was consistent. Expertise took time. Qualifications required study. Professional success required experience. Wealth, for most people, accumulated slowly.

The social media trap

Young people today are growing up with a competing model. Every day they encounter apparently ordinary people becoming extraordinarily visible. A video filmed on a smartphone receives 20 million views. Followers accumulate. Sponsorships follow.

Then come the cars, holidays and houses. The apparent distance between obscurity and extreme wealth can seem to be one well-timed video.

The creator economy is real, and many successful creators have worked extraordinarily hard. My concern is different: what does repeated exposure to these exceptional outcomes teach young people about effort, time and reward?

Early research gives us reason to ask this question. Shabahang et al (2022) found that the desire to become a social-media influencer was associated with materialism, desire for fame and a preference for immediate rather than delayed gratification.

How education suffers

Of particular interest to educators, stronger aspirations to be an influencer were also associated with placing less value on education.

Perhaps that is not surprising. Education asks young people to accept everything that is the opposite of the social media virality and fame they may crave: they have to invest effort long before its value is obvious. They practise unfamiliar skills and accumulate knowledge that may not pay off for years.

Education relies on compounding: small gains in capability, repeated over time, eventually become something much more valuable. Clearly this is a hard sell to children.

The latest Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) data shows this tension. Across countries within the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development in Pisa 2025, only 60 per cent of students reported applying additional effort when work became challenging, while 52 per cent said they finish tasks even when they become boring. Since 2022, these measures declined in 32 and 40 education systems respectively.

The evidence does not establish that social media has caused declining perseverance.

But perhaps the better question is not whether young people are less willing to work hard - every generation says that about the one that follows - but to ask what it reveals about whether young people’s sense of what sustained effort is worth is beginning to change.

In short, do they want a tangible benefit from work they do there and then - not just the promise that one day it will be worth something?

Make the alternative visible

Yet schools have to tackle this mindset. How can this be done amid the clamour for immediate success?

One starting point is this: when students encounter the extraordinary success of others - often seemingly achieved overnight - encourage them to ask: out of how many attempts? How many aspiring athletes reach the highest level? How many businesses succeed? How many videos were uploaded before one attracted 20 million views?

It is a simple habit that helps students to distinguish between what is possible and what is probable, without dismissing their ambitions.

We also need to make compounding visible. Put the first piece of writing from September beside the one produced in June.

Compare baseline performance with what a student can do six months later. Return to the mathematics problem they once could not solve or the skill that has since become automatic.

Ask not simply “What grade did you get?” but “What can you do now that you could not do before?”

Finally, give students opportunities to create genuine value: mentoring a younger student, writing for a real audience, solving a community problem, taking responsibility for a team or completing a project over weeks rather than minutes. The important thing is that the work matters beyond the grade attached to it.

This is also why our Misk Schools Diploma contains four elements - Academics, Internships, Leadership and National Identity - to give students different ideas of what success looks like and how to find meaning in their achievements. In Saudi Arabia, National Identity is tied to Vision 2030, which asks this generation not simply to benefit from the country’s transformation, but to help lead and contribute to it.

So yes, grades are important, but so, too, is building relationships, learning to lead, being proud of where they are from and how they can play a part in something bigger than themselves. Taken together, these experiences offer a different model of success.

Accepting a new reality

None of this means schools should discourage content creation or entrepreneurship. We should embrace both.

Our job is not to convince young people that those possibilities are fake, but to help them distinguish between what is visible and what is valuable, what is possible and what is probable, and success that arrives quickly and capability that accumulates over time.

Today’s viral sensation may command the attention of millions and be forgotten soon afterwards. Knowledge, capability, character, reputation and contribution are less spectacular. But unlike attention, their value can compound long after nobody is watching.

Shen Megalaa is vice principal of assessment and data at Misk Schools, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia