We reexamine the value of college, utilizing a seven-year (2014–2021) longitudinal interview study at a public, research-focused university. Previous work often measures college’s value through career status and earnings. We dig deeper, considering 29 recent STEM graduates’ perceptions of major-career alignment, whether and how college prepared them for post-college life, and how they assess the value of their BA/BS degrees. Beyond coursework, we assess how respondents perceive institutional prestige, resources, and other supports colleges often tout. Our nuanced analysis considers variation within STEM disciplines, and by social factors including gender, race/ethnicity, and family income, to show how “STEM” experiences differ by social location. Our longitudinal analysis attends to nuance in another way—by considering today’s dynamic career trajectories, including job and career track changes. Finally, we consider whether and how Covid-19 disrupted career-seekers’ trajectories. Throughout, we investigate the value of “hard” (discipline-specific) and “soft” (portable communication and interpersonal) skills for STEM graduates (Matteson et al. 2016). Our findings challenge the notion that portable skills are “soft” in any way; for our respondents, they provided a widely accepted hard currency in a job market staggered by upheaval in formerly “safe” disciplines (e.g., computer science) and a global pandemic.