You’ll Never Be a Success Without a College Degree
That’s what most people say, but the truth of the matter is that quite a few highly successful individuals never earned college degrees. Some of them have created great companies that ironically demand college degrees for jobs far less demanding than that of their non-college CEOs.
In this week’s Pope Center Clarion Call, Jenna Ashley Robinson writes about people who are very successful but who don’t have any college credentials.
Maybe a future piece should be about people who have college degrees but can hardly even keep a low-skill job.
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Categories: Value of College Degree
So Bill Gates, after going to Harvard and meeting up with his future partners, hires Ph.D. graduates, at very good pay, for his company (which by the way is showing strong signs of being over the hill, maybe you can be that lucky only once in a while). I know a couple of them myself. What lesson is this supposed to provide to the typical person starting out?
By the way, is the person who wrote the blog for the Pope Center a college dropout?
To answer the poster’s second point first, the writer of the article in question is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of North Carolina, a fact that had no bearing on the decision to hire her to work at the Pope Center. We evaluate people on their capabilities, not credentials.
As to the first comment, the point of the piece is that getting a college degree is not necessary for success. Bill Gates and the other people she wrote about were able to perform the entrepreneurial function with little or no college coursework. In fact, most college curricula contain just about nothing that is pertinent to entrepreneurship.
The argument of the piece is that it’s mistaken to think that successful careers can only be enjoyed by those who spend years of their lives and lots of money to get a college degree. There are some (I think many) young people who have the brains and ambition to succeed without that “paper chase” detour. Classrooms are not the only place where individuals can learn, after all. Jenna was not contending that no one should consider postsecondary education, but simply showing that the BA is not essential to success.