The Most Successful People Explain Why a College Degree is Useless

Speaker: *Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Seth Godin, Donald Trump and more

I am not usually a massive fan of these montage-style videos comprising of snippets of a variety of famous people’s words of wisdom, but this is an exception.

I went to university and did two post-graduate qualifications too, so you’d think I’d be a massive advocate of further education, but the truth is I’m not. For some people it is, with doubt, a fabulous thing to do, and for many people it will be their passport to a better life (whatever that means), but for many others it will be a complete waste of both time and money.

When I went to university in the 1980s it was pretty much the only way of tapping in to the business knowledge I wanted to acquire, but these days this same knowledge is available in your living room on sites such as:

• Youtube
• Edx
• Coursera
• Futurelearn
• Khans Acadamy

And that’s just for starters.

But don’t take it from me. The people on this well-compiled video have some very valuable thoughts and words of wisdom to share.

If you are considering going on to further education have a watch of this before making your mind up. If you still want to go after watching this then the chances are that you are doing the right thing. But, on the flip side, if these entrepreneurs make you think twice then that has to be a good thing. it is an important life decision and you need to hear it from all sides.

Transcript

Time: 11:25

Well often times business education today, and I see it all the time. Kids come out of college, the best colleges Wharton and Harvard and Stanford and some of the great business schools, and they'll come out and they won't have practical experience there's too many case studies that aren't practical.

You know we ask kids that are 16 to 18 years old to make hundred thousand dollar debt decisions when they go off to university, and they're not prepared for that. They don't know what they're getting themselves into. They just assume okay I'm going to pay for years of education and twenty five thousand a pop. And when I come out the other side somehow I'll be able to pay it back. Right. That's not how life works anymore.

There's no need even to have a college degree at all or even high school. I mean if somebody graduated from a great university that maybe it may be an indication that they will be capable of great things, but it's not necessarily the case. You know if you look at say people like Bill Gates or Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, these guys didn't graduate from college. But if you had a chance to hire them of course there would be a good idea.

I think having the flexibility to explore a lot of different things which you can do when you're in college which is one of the amazing things about being in college is you can work on all these hobbies and encode a lot of stuff and try a lot of different things. It's this amazing flexibility that I think most people take for granted and once you decide 'ok I'm going to start a company I'm going to do it with someone else', you immediately now need to convince someone else if you want to change your mind on something and I think people really undervalue the option value and flexibility. I think explore what you want to do before committing is really like the key thing and keep yourself flexible. And it's no I think that that's ... Yeah I agree. Yeah.

It's actually kind of funny. You know if you like what is education like you're basically downloading data and algorithms into your brain and it's it's actually amazingly bad in conventional education. It's like it shouldn't be like this huge chore. If someone standing up there kind of lecturing people and they've done the same lecture 20 years in a row and they're very excited about it. And in fact I think a lot of things people learn probably there's no point in learning them because they never use them in the future because kids just in school kind of puzzled as to why they're there.

They're people who are doing the work that we care about are figuring out what to do next. Not following the person who told them what to do next. And the problem with most colleges is they are high school but with more binge drinking. The entire purpose of a good university is to give you a foundation to fail, not a foundation to get an A. If you graduate from college or straight A's. You have to do some serious soul searching as to why you chose to spend your time doing that.

A student's work for the B students. C students run the businesses and the D students dedicate the buildings.

It's like the newspaper industry right. More printing presses. More big buildings right. Makes us look grander. We have brains that we're putting them out there. There's there's a point of diminishing returns in terms of what it's worth for a college education and how much debt you're willing to solve yourself with a lot of people file a lot of people are followers.

Generally if not we'd have problems. We have too many entrepreneurs we have too many successful people. Look I mean people go to business classes and everything you needed was in that actual business plan in that book it be to many successful business people right. How many people graduate? Matter of fact the professor wouldn't have the time to sit there and teach you. He knows this book. Then near verbatim. Page by page he knows because he'd be out at the noon. He too busy. He's doing way too much right now. I've got the palm trees and if we do it.

We sell us so much stuff that I'm doing it ain't quite got time so much laughs right now because I'm winning and so when you walk into a boardroom with a bunch of guys in suits who all went to college you're fine.

Yeah. I mean because they read a bunch of words I've lived a bunch of life relative to their law degree doesn't intimidate me. It kind of even does out whether they know it and not get that self-esteem from seriously. I mean most my mom first and foremost I just live in life like you know being in real situations and happen to be a person of high integrity and honesty and you know you never embarrassed yourself. Of course not. You never walked in and said Hey everybody thinks I'm ignorant here I'm stupid.

I never I don't. I don't feel ignorant right. I don't. Felt like I came up in this situation a while or a time you know where I wasn't afforded certain opportunities and if afforded opportunities I could be Oprah I could be. BILL GATES I could be Warren Buffett and my experience. In business. There is very little difference if any between a very high priced business education

And what's available for a lot less money. I went to the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. High last year in college I went to Wharton for a couple of years before that. I learned just as much of the universe in Nebraska as I did at Wharton. And you need to be prodded in the right direction but an awful lot of it is itself. Self-taught. It isn't necessary to pay thirty or thirty five thousand dollars a year. I go to some. Big named school. To get the education at all. I mean if you're going to learn accounting if a guy which is above me the most important course you'd take in business if you can learn the car you learn accounting absolutely as well. And maybe you're going to you aren't always going back. To Harvard. I mean I see here. I would. I. Bet on that. And. So. I wouldn't run up

Huge bills. And education is very good at training people to do the same things that we've done over and over again. And I think there's always a question what the nature of the educational good is you know you can say it's a it's an investment good. We're investing in the future you can say it's a consumption good like college the for your party. You know I think most of the parents and students think of it actually as an insurance policy where you're buying this really ever more expensive insurance so that the students don't fall through the really big cracks in our society and we should be asking some big questions why the insurance costs are going up and up like that. And if you were the president of Harvard or Stanford if you wanted to get a lynch mob of students alumni faculty to come after you and try to lynch you what you should say is something like this you know we we live in this much larger more global world we offer great education to everybody and so we're going to double or triple our enrollment over the next 15 to 20 years and people would they'd all be furious because the value of the degrees comes from this massive exclusion. And what you're really running is something like a Studio 54 nightclub.

I hate it I hated school I really hated school. I know I hated school generally right because it was this instruction following thing now. I bet you it's probably also because I wasn't good at it and some people like I've got a great conceptual memory and a terrible rote memory. So if I have a story I could tell you. Year by year kind of what happened within a story within a context. But if I was to go into you know like a memory based learning it's terrible.

I have a terrible rote memory ego barrier is the worst thing. And if we were raised differently. Just imagine in the schools that all along that people will always say everybody makes mistakes. Everybody has weaknesses. The key is really to understand what your mistakes and weaknesses are so that you can learn from them. Right. I think punishment is it is it is a terrible concept. Punishment means that you made a mistake and you're being punished. I think instead of punishment every time somebody makes a mistake it's you should say the only thing that you need to do to get out of your punishment is first think what kind of mistake was that. So if I'm in a situation that is like that again how would I do deal with it differently. Not to make that mistake. So that learning should come from the mistake not punishment. Because you're teaching people not to make mistakes which is where the learning comes from not the appreciation that if you keep doing this over and over again you're going to keep encountering the same outcomes.

You know it's an extremely corrupt system we have at this point. There's we have an education bubble in the U.S. we have a trillion dollars of student debt to a first approximation. This has gone to pay for a trillion dollars worth of lies about the value of the education people have received and and I. It's not at all obvious yet though what's going to what's going to replace this or how it's going to change my. You know the the you know the. I'm somewhat skeptical that it will be replaced by any sort of single unitary system and this fellowship for young people to start companies and it's not my claim it's not that everybody should do this. I don't think everyone should become an entrepreneur and I think I think there is no one size fits all. And so I think the future will be much more heterogenous much more diverse in terms of what people do and what's what's really anomalous is the sort of unitary tracking where you have to go to an elite college you go to Yale or you go to jail. There's nothing else you can do you know.

And so I think the universities are perhaps in perhaps in the same place as the Catholic Church was in fifteen hundred fourteen if we go back 500 years where you have sort of this monolithic way get this universal way of body of knowledge of teaching things the difference between the Yale and the Harvard political science faculties are probably no greater than the differences between the Dominicans and the Franciscans who have all kinds of small debates within this context. We are we have a system of indulgences that's costing more and more to support this priestly or professorial class of people. We are told that it's the only way to salvation you must get a diploma to be saved if you've not got a diploma then you will go to hell. And I think. And I think the I think the the the message that I have that's. Like the 16th century reformers. That's a somewhat troubling message is that you have to work out your salvation on your own you have to save yourself. And and and that's that's I believe that is the truth. But it's a it's it's a somewhat uncomfortable one.