Jeremy Boreing, co-founder of The Daily Wire, doesn’t have a college degree. Neither do Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, or a host of other innovators who have shaped our contemporary world. Which begs an important question: Is a college degree really necessary for success?
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Depends on what you mean by “ success.” For better or worse, professions like law, medicine, accounting, engineering, etc. require degrees. So does officer rank in the military.* Entrepreneurship doesn’t. Skilled trades require rigorous training and often real education, far beyond what passes for education in many university programs.
MBAs are largely worthless as either training or education, beyond labeling or networking, and I speak as a former professor of both management and psychology.
* Whether they should or not is another, and more complex, question.
In fact, the practice of law does not require an undergraduate degree, if you can get admitted to law school without one. I know several successful attorneys who figured that out.
I didn’t realize that for law school. I thought a PharmD was the only advanced degree you could get without an undergrad degree.
People often don’t believe me when I tell them I and many others got into pharmacy school with prerequisites from junior college. I think there’s a big problem with thinking you need to take out a ton of student loans so you can go to a top school when you don’t need a top school to succeed.
Before pharmacy, I was pursuing a degree in education. I did great with the classes, but floundered in student teaching. Managing a classroom is hard and that skill doesn’t come from a degree.
I think there need to be a lot more internships, ways for students to get experience and figure out if that career will work before committing.
Those non-entrepreneurial professions mentioned are guilds. They require membership and membership requires going through all their hoops and spending plenty of money and time along the way. As Barry points out, law didn’t used to require anything but lots of reading. Law guild, for example, transformed law practice into a bizarre form of bookishness that depends on previous court case precedents rather than the law itself. In other words, don’t do what the guild demands and no profession for you.
Every other profession, you can probably teach yourself in a fraction of the time it would take you go through all the college stuff, including going through the unnecessary courses forced on unsuspecting students. This derives from 19th century educational thinkers who should have stayed out of it.
For most of us, a waste of time. Auditing a few courses will do, and put an end to the bourgeois snobbery that initiated this wave of nonsense sixty years ago.