Do You Need a Degree to Work in Tech? CEOs Share Their Opinions

Executives at top tech companies are telling young people to rethink the purpose of education, and even whether they should attend college at all.

Tech has had a range of successful college dropouts in its history, and the industry is being shaken up by the growing influence of artificial intelligence, leaving some new graduates struggling to land the high-paying jobs that were once plentiful.

CEOs From Apple, Nvidia, Palantir Have All Given Their Thoughts on College

Palantir (PLTR) CEO Alex Karp said during the tech firm’s second-quarter earnings call in August that he doesn’t particularly care where employees went to college. Instead, he said focusing on what you want to do for work matters more, and called working at Palantir “the best credential in tech.”

“If you come to Palantir, your career is set,” Karp said, per an AlphaSense transcript, adding, “if you did not go to school or you went to a school that’s not that great or you went to Harvard or Princeton, Yale, once you come to Palantir, you’re a Palantirian. No one cares about the other stuff.”

Apple (AAPL) CEO Tim Cook has said that a college degree isn’t a requirement to work at Apple. In 2019, Cook said there was a “mismatch between the skills that are coming out of colleges and what the skills are that we believe we need in the future,” and said about half of Apple’s U.S. employment that year was made up of workers without four-year degrees.

In another interview in 2023, Cook said certain traits like a willingness to collaborate or skills like coding can be more valuable than a college degree, and repeated that a degree isn’t always needed to work for the iPhone maker.

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia (NVDA), said earlier this year that he would probably change his major if he could become college-aged again. The tech CEO said he likely would opt for “more of the physical sciences” like physics and chemistry rather than the bachelor’s and master’s degree in electrical engineering he earned before starting Nvidia.

Some of Tech’s Most Successful Executives Have Been Dropouts

Some of tech’s most successful leaders never finished college, including former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, Meta Platforms (META) Founder Mark Zuckerberg, and Microsoft (MSFT) Co-Founder Bill Gates.

Jobs’ daughter wrote in a book that the former Apple CEO said college professors “teach you how other people think, during your most productive years,” and said college can kill creativity and turn people into “bozos.”

However, Gates said he regretted leaving Harvard after one year. He even tried asking another early Microsoft programmer to run the company so he could return to school full-time. Gates told CNBC earlier this year that he values “a broad set of knowledge” and would only recommend dropping out in an “exceptional case.”