When most people think about successful entrepreneurs who started their own business, a few people may come to mind, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell. There’s one thing in common with all of these guys – they dropped out of college. Their success has helped to propagate a common belief that if you drop out of college you can just work at a startup and everything will be fine. However, how true is this? Do entrepreneurs care about degrees when they make hiring decisions? Well, the answer isn’t too clear cut.
Experience Matters
Google has actually run studies and found that good grades aren’t necessarily correlated significantly with success in employment. There are a few exceptions in roles for finance, law, engineering and medicine, which are highly technical specialties, but early-stage companies tend to need a core team that benefit from experience and attitude. It’s the combination of those that can lead a team over obstacles and hurdles. But this poses an issue – where do you get the experience from if you haven’t been working for years?
From Education
Education gives you a certain amount of experience. It may not be real-world experience, but if the head of a startup is looking at one candidate who doesn’t have either, they’ll probably pick the applicant who has an education degree instead of neither of those things. Degrees are an investment in yourself, they add higher value to you as a product. What’s more, those with degrees are considered to have more discipline and can execute projects with more efficiency because they’ve had to do that for 4 or 5 or 6 years of education. They’ve invested the time in being a valuable hire, and that shows tenacity.
Good Fit for Business
Some people just get lucky and seem fit for business immediately. There have been many great minds that have done amazing things without a formal education, and some people give an aura that they can get things done. Character can be a great determinant in the employment process and many entrepreneurs pride themselves on having an open mind.
At the end of the day, it’s pretty difficult to do a quantitative analysis of whether somebody will be a good candidate based on their CV and education record. As Mindy Lubber, President of Ceres and graduate of Buffalo MBA program says: “[It can be] a business issue and a financial issue. It’s about investing in business opportunities.
If you present yourself as being able to contribute as part of a good business opportunity, you’ll have a significant advantage over those who haven’t positioned themselves in that way. The trick then becomes to do enough research into the company and who they want to employ to be able to sell yourself as a valuable investment for their business – because that’s what employees are, after all, investments for the company looking to employ.
However, look at the role models
If you’re considering dropping out or going straight into the startup world without a degree because you feel you’re just perfectly suited for business and would make a great catch for any employer, think back to the famous dropouts everybody knows. They might have been successful entrepreneurs as well as dropouts, but they didn’t build a team of dropouts around them.
There are many rules in many different fields of business, and if you’ve been through the higher education process, you are more likely to understand them and guide the CEO dropout that’s trying to push the boundaries. A degree serves the additional benefit of being able to translate your focus onto other senior team members, as well as transfer the lessons you’ve learnt.
That means that when a startup hires somebody with a degree, they share the benefit of having some of the lessons that they acquired from their higher education shared with the rest of their team. That can make those who have obtained a degree highly valuable.
So, what’s the verdict?
The answer really isn’t clear cut, there are many different situations that may prioritize those with different degrees. Some say that formal education is less important than employment experience for sales, customer service and operations roles, but for tech and product roles, companies want to hire mavericks.
In these cases, top schools can be a safer bet as the stringent selection criteria suggest that most of the due diligence has been done for them, which puts employer’s minds at ease.