Do you need a degree to work in technology? CEOs share their opinions

Executives at big tech companies are asking young people to rethink the purpose of education, and even whether they should go to college at all.

Technology has seen a rash of successful college dropouts in its history, and the industry is being shaken up by the growing influence of artificial intelligence, leaving some recent graduates struggling to get high-paying jobs that were once plentiful.

CEOs from Apple, Nvidia, and Palantir have all weighed in on the college

Palantir ( PLTR ) CEO Alex Karp said during the tech company’s second-quarter earnings call in August that he doesn’t particularly care where employees go to college. Instead, he said it’s more important to focus on what you want to do at work, and described working at Palantir as “the best credential in technology.”

“If you come to Palantir, your career is set,” Karp said, according to the AlphaSense transcript, adding, “If you don’t go to school or you go to a school that’s not great or you go to Harvard or Princeton or Yale, once you come to Palantir, you’re a Palantir resident. Nobody cares about the other stuff.”

Apple (AAPL) CEO Tim Cook said a college degree is not a requirement to work at Apple. In 2019, Cook said there was a “mismatch between the skills coming out of college and the skills we think we’ll need in the future,” and said that about half of Apple’s U.S. workforce that year was made up of workers without four-year college degrees.

In another interview in 2023, Cook said that certain traits like an aptitude for collaboration or skills like programming could be more valuable than a college degree, and reiterated that a degree is not always required to work for an iPhone maker.

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia (NVDA), said earlier this year that he would likely change his major if he could return to college age again. The technology CEO said he would likely choose “more physical sciences” such as physics and chemistry rather than the bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering he earned before starting Nvidia.

Some of the most successful tech executives have been dropouts

Some of the most successful tech 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 “idiots.”

However, Gates said he regretted leaving Harvard after one year. He even tried asking one of Microsoft’s early programmers to run the company so he could go back to school full-time. Gates said CNBC Earlier this year, he said he valued a “broad range of knowledge” and would only recommend dropping out in an “exceptional case.”