Billionaire businessman Elon Musk recently took a massive jab at MBA graduates!
In an interview with Munro Live– a Youtube channel, Musk said individuals who graduate with a Master of Business Administration (MBA) do not possess the required experience it takes to run a company successfully or create a good product.
According to one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world, often MBA graduates speed past the learning curve believing they already know ‘how things work‘ and start running a business.
The world’s richest man further remarked that he has nothing against academic programs as he himself graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in physics and acquired a degree in economics from the Wharton School of Business.
But, having an MBA degree doesn’t automatically qualify a person to have the required experience to be an effective leader because success is attained by doing ‘useful things’.
Note here that this is not the first time Musk has revealed his strong opinions against degrees.
Previously, at the Washington DC Satellite conference which was held in March 2020, he reiterated the same sentiments towards degrees by saying college is ‘basically for fun’ and ‘to prove one can do their chores’. But, they are definitely not for learning!
During the same event, he also mentioned how everything can be learnt for free and therefore colleges are no longer mandatory.
Entrepreneurs vs Degrees: A Long-Standing Battle
The battle between the traditional academic route and successful entrepreneurs has been going on for eternity!
Many of current tech moguls and billionaires such as Bill Gates from Microsoft, Larry Ellison from Oracle, Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook and so on are college dropouts, And, in the initial period of their life, they took it upon themselves to hone their skills driven solely by curiosity.
Thus, it is no wonder most entrepreneurs advocate against colleges and degrees and encourage.
To further stress more on real-world skills, today many companies such as Musk’s Tesla, Apple, Google and more are phasing out the requirement of a degree for landing a job.
In 2019 Apple’s CEO Tim Cook mentioned that on average, half of the jobs at their company in the U.S. includes people who do not have degrees and further said that universities do not teach skills that business leaders tend to require the most.
Degrees In 2021 and Beyond: A Defunct Metric For Evaluating Ability And Competence?
After undergoing a year of tremendous difficulty fuelled by the pandemic, now that we are collectively moving towards a future dubbed as the ‘new normal’, traditional degrees such as MBA are going to become increasingly defunct simply because how inconvenient they are in terms of imparting hands-on experience and practical knowledge.
One glance at LinkedIn’s new report ‘Jobs on the RIse’ for 2021 will tell you most colleges are not at all equipped for teaching you the skills that are currently in demand such as- content creator, podcaster, social media strategist, growth hacker and so on.Â
Instead of even trying to catch-up to forward-looking trends, a majority of institutions today are still teaching run-of-the-mill academic courses that will push you towards career roles that have now become overly saturated and as a result harbour only the survival of the fittest!
Thus, all in all, degrees in the near future are definitely on their way to being considered a defunct metric of evaluating a person’s ability and competence in the professional world. What are your thoughts about the same? Let us know in the comments down below and stay tuned for more updates.
