I went to a good private school and have a Bachelor’s degree, and as a result, I’ve been able to create a platform for employment and a safety net from severe poverty. So school essentially helps you build cushions for when and if you want to take yourself to the level of business owner.
Will academic achievement alone help someone achieve entrepreneurial success? No. Not in isolation. I’ve read a lot of sales and marketing books since college, and to put it simply, there are people skills and aspects of human psychology that academia cannot teach or would be inappropriate to teach.

If you’d want to close the wealth and entrepreneurial gap and not be employed forever, you should read and experience what it’s like to sell something at a young age. This will help in determining what environment you’d require to succeed (as to talent and resources).

Learning is the most important. School provides a structured environment for learning, as well as accreditation. I personally find self-learning far more efficient than school. But at the same time having a degree changes people’s perception of you and if other people have better perceptions of you, that can make the social aspects of doing business easier.

You have to look at the conflating variables as well. People who go to good universities are from richer backgrounds on average and this means they have more support and fewer problems at the very early stages of building a business.

I worked in the trades and now I’m doing part-time work to pay my bills while improving my programming skills. I just signed up to go back to university and I find that much of it is just slogging through stuff without much immediate benefit, and perhaps dubious long-term benefit. Certain types of universities may provide you with support or at least a good environment for building a business, but I would guess those are hard to get into.

Conflating variable: income. People who attend big universities are more likely to be well-off and have more resources to spare than the average American. Most of those dropouts are from nicer backgrounds, very rarely from places like Appalachia, inner cities, the projects, the rez, etc.

Rich people get degrees. Rich people get lots of money from daddy to build their startups. They are more likely to succeed. They can afford to sit on their ass and program up wild ideas for years at a time, or hire someone to do it for them. They can save time by getting some dude on instacart to go get their groceries for them. Or they don’t have to cook cuz they use doordash. They can afford subscriptions to time-saving services for things like accounting and other business-related stuff. When something breaks they don’t have to fix it themselves. They have more time to focus on building their business, and more money to throw into the money pit.

If you’re from a trailer park and go get a degree from Central Cornfield County Community College then you’re likely to be flat broke and unemployed by the time you graduate. Then you might get a mediocre job and can spend the next 5 years saving up money to start a business. You can’t afford to take too many risks and lose much so you go for something with fewer capital costs and higher labor costs. You slog through for a decade and it can potentially become moderately successful.

Education is important. It doesn’t need to be a college degree, but having the technical background in your field so that you can build a competent business is vital to your success. I’ve always viewed the traditional educational path to be a process of creating great employees – if you let it. If you use the knowledge learned in school for something better, then it’s worthwhile.

School isn’t the vehicle that will help you achieve entrepreneurial success. There are numerous things you learn while in school that aren’t related to academia that will benefit your entrepreneurial aspirations. Far more than anything assessed by a teacher, school is merely a setting to help individuals grow, develop people skills, and to share ideas. The other elements that people cherish about school is pretty much just BS. An “A” in a subject, a high score on the SAT or other standardized test, even gaining admission to the University of your choice has little to no correlation to your future success, entrepreneurial or otherwise. Aside from having a piece of paper that cost 5 or more figures, higher education is merely a place to build your network for future endeavors. The are a few exceptions to this notion, for example people who aspire to become Medical Doctors, Scientist, and the other occupations that impose academic barriers to entry.

Success as an entrepreneur heavily relies on access to capital. Most of the stories you hear that relate to the sentiment of the “A students work[ing] for C students” disregard the class of the said C student. Society has propagandized the narrative of the mega successful drop-out while disregarding all of the things that underpin that success. What I’m not saying, is that they didn’t create something life changing. However, what I am saying is that these stories seldomly mention the small (6 figure) loans from family members, family ties to key stakeholders or other intangibles that provided a foundation for success. School has its place but to get the most out of schooling one needs to use it as a springboard to something greater… Grades mean nothing! Point in case, the next time you go to the doctor office or stop by to see you attorney and see their degree on the wall, that little piece of paper says nothing about how good of a student they were… Summa cum laude or straight “C’s” it just designates they graduated…

School for me, I just loved university, research and learning! And frankly those are the very same skills I brought to being a successful entrepreneur. My field needs you to be able to learn quickly and on the run.

Of course, there are other fields that don’t require this as much. But it’s a handy skill to have and saved me money in setting up my business.

I never let my children darken the doorway of a government-run school. I sent them to a Mae Carden School, and I’m so glad I did.

It’s been my experience that school is great for socialization and forming lasting relationships. However, If your personal goals are geared towards financial success, school simply doesn’t teach you how to make money. School is the starting point of learning. not the end point. Too many believe it’s the end. Learning never stops. I attended a very expensive private university, and I will tell you that the best part of it was the experience of moving to another city and actually living on my own and doing the things that need to be done as an adult by myself. Also the people who you meet play a big role in that. When you’re going to school with successful people, it changes everything because you start to understand that you can be successful as well. Who you spend time with is so critical. If most of your time is spent with kids from poor families, you’re going to adopt the viewpoint of the poorer class that thinks the only way to make money is to get a job and work for someone else. They don’t see anything else as “real”. Thus they typically end up living paycheck to paycheck.

Everything that I’m doing today to earn money I had to find out on my own and seek out people who we’re also doing it successfully through my own proactive research and sheer ambition because school just doesn’t teach it. I definitely wish I was 25 again.

Finally, my biggest issue with school is the complete failure when it comes to financial literacy. 95% of people who graduate from college don’t even understand what a personal financial statement is or how to read it. People have no idea how credit system works. They have absolutely no idea how insurance works for creating long term wealth. Theh have no idea how to start a business and keep assets safe from personal liability. These are critical things if you want financial freedom.
School is more of a place to go to learn how to be an employee. School punishes failure and mistakes so people end up thinking that making mistakes and failing is bad. Perfect for the obedient employee. However, truly successful people have failed many times and take failing as a learning experience, not a message that they shouldn’t be doing something which is what most believe. Just my 2 cents!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Some people need it ansd some don’t. If you can make $10 million with school, then you don’t need to go. The majority of people benefit from going.

Be honest with yourself and decide which group you’re in.

What matters if school is good or bad for you. It’s a personal decision.

The things they neglect to mention is the successful first made a million, and couldn’t manage both the business and school, then they quit. That’s not what we discuss here.

Successes are going to succeed, even with the crippling setback of a college education. You will quickly notice people like Fred Smith, founder of Federal Express, using his business ideas as the subject of college assignments are missing. So too using college as a place to network with partners and affluent parents. Odd, that.

Just like everybody is never going to quit …immediately after they quit college.

Experience > degree

I just finished an MBA with a concentration in data analytics thinking I would use it to pivot out of retail management…. Well I’ve been job searching for over 6 months now and no luck, the few places I’ve gotten a nibble from decided to go with people with years of experience instead for the entry level positions, and given all the lay offs in tech recently there are a lot of people with experience competing for entry level jobs.

I studied a lot, finished a PhD, but honestly, this is not how you make money at all. Not even talking about academic life which pays rather crap. School just mainly prepares you to be an employee, not an employer. I knew nothing about business when I finished school, didn’t even know how it worked. All I knew is I was supposed to go get a job.

So if u wanna enjoy company benefits while having a 9-5 job and working your ass off for someone else’s profits while counting down for that one summer vacation a year, school’s ur thing.

School (university) was not for me. Why? because it was NOT teaching me a tangible employable marketable skill set that I could hit the ground running…I decided to learn some tangible skills early on (Computer Aided Drafting) granted me the ability to get a job within the automotive industry. Like many others, I worked hard for 10+ years to make a good 6-figure income. While being laid off, I started a side hustle (trades) and now make 2-3x what I did as a designer!..my skill set cant be taught in school, nor can a work ethic. Sure, when laid off I could have spend 50k on a degree with the chance of being over educated and under employed OR invest that $$ into ME and start something…which I did. So its all subject to YOUR personal skill sets, drive, work ethic, demographics.

School seems like a good place to grow your confidence and knowledge until your ready to try it out on your own.