Can you succeed without a degree?

The rampant fashion for startups of the last decade led many to a rather simple idea - why get a higher education if the most striking examples of businessmen of the 21st century - Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs - achieved tremendous success without receiving a diploma. This opinion does not lose its popularity despite the constant admonitions of the older generation, who persuade their children that normal work, and the success of life, in principle, is possible only after graduating from a "decent", or better "good" university. Is it really? Let's figure it out in this article.

Unfortunately, the statistics do not support the hypothesis that the lack of a higher education degree helps to achieve success in life. For example, a recent study from the United States found that of the more than 11,000 successful people in the United States who have achieved success in politics or business, 94% can boast a college degree, with 50% of them studying in one of the “elite "colleges (this list included Ivy League universities and several other prominent educational institutions - MIT, Stanford, as well as a number of Liberal Arts colleges). Moreover, if you try to study an even narrower group of outstanding citizens, it turns out that study at an elite university is starting to play an increasing role: for example, in the Forbes list of America's most powerful people, 80% already studied at elite universities. By comparison, only 2% to 5% of all American students graduated from universities that were categorized as "elite" in the study.

In addition, numerous studies show that studying at university has a huge impact on your life: for example, university graduates are less likely to commit crimes, get divorced less often, live longer, and finally just feelmore happy.Pretty good reason to think about getting a degree!

However, it is not completely clear why the university has such a great influence on human life, and most importantly, it is not clear why exactlygraduates of elite educational institutions achieve success. On the one hand, it can be assumed that here students gain access to the knowledge that will certainly be useful to them in their future careers. However, this is far from the only possible explanation.

First, it is quite possible that the point is not that universities teach students so well. Perhaps the reason for the success of graduates is that the most talented and capable enter elite universities from the outset. The examples of Zuckerberg and Gates fit well into this logic: both businessmen went to Harvard, managed to study there, but ultimately left the university, devoting themselves to business.It is quite possible that many other politicians and businessmen who entered the best universities in the world could well have achieved success without a diploma - the real reason for their career achievements was their abilities and perseverance, which led them to Harvard, and not the fact of having a diploma....

Secondly, knowledge is not the only thing that the university gives its graduates. Students of the best universities make many useful contacts that can later influence their careers - we are talking about professors who can help especially distinguished students start their careers, and about classmates, many of whom can later achieve success in life, while notforgetting about the friends of his youth.

However, in the past few years, thanks to the development of online education, we see that having a diploma from a top university is becoming a little less significant than before. We regularly hear stories about how the world's leading companies (primarily from the IT sector) are hiring talented guys from godforsaken countries who have brilliantly completed a dozen courses on Coursera. But such a career path is still an exception to the rule. In most cases, in the modern world, you will not be able to make a successful career without a university degree, and you will most likely be able to reach the very top of the social pyramid only after graduating from an elite university.