Nofie Iman

• As Carol Hymowitz wrote, getting to the corner office has more to do with leadership talent and a drive for success than it does with having degree from a prestigious university.
• Most CEOs of the biggest corporations didn’t attend Ivy League or other highly selective colleges. They went to state universities or to less-known private colleges.
• Companies seeking to fill CEO and other senior jobs rarely consider candidates’ degrees. It’s what you’ve accomplished that matters, not what you were doing at 21.
• A lot of people who earn degrees from tier-one schools usually aren’t willing to start at the bottom of a huge company and spend years scaling layers of management and hoping to reach the top.
• A friend of mine had the pleasure of having a lot of high profile visitors come to his campus. One of them was the CEO of Enron and another one was the CFO of Tyco. These two specific individuals were in fact Harvard Business School graduates.

We know that sometimes parents and their college-bound children believe admission to a top-tier school with a powerful alumni network is a prerequisite to success in the upper echelons of business management.

It also has come to our attention that top-tier schools are embarrassed about the behavior of some of their graduates. They knew they had a problem with at best thing associated with unethical leaders and at worst being associated with criminals. They may not be able to 100% control their graduates.

Personally, I don’t really care where someone went to school. What counts most is his/her capacity to seize opportunities. I like to see students who recall immersing themselves in their interests, contributing actively to extracurricular activities, becoming campus leaders, and forging strong relationships with their teachers.

As you might already know, Bill Gates quit Harvard to start Microsoft. Michael Dell quit the University of Texas-Austin to start his own company: Dell Computer. Steve Jobs also quit Reed College in Portland, Oregon, to work at Atari for a while and then found Apple Computer. None of them ever returned to college to pursue a formal degree. They found that their classroom studies less compelling than their own ideas.

Warren Buffett also didn’t even want to go to college. Although he enrolled at the Wharton School-University of Pennsylvania, he did it at his father’s behest. He stayed there for only two years, then returned home and graduated from Nebraska a year later.

By then, he was devouring the books by David Dodd and Benjamin Graham, who advocated investing in companies that had “intrinsic business value“–a view that became his guiding investment principal. When he learned the two men were teaching at Columbia University’s business school, he wrote to them to ask if he could attend their lectures. He then earned a master’s degree in economics at Columbia in 1951. But he didn’t go there for a degree. He went for those two teachers, who were already becomes his heroes.

I’m not going to tell you that going to the top-tier schools is useless.

I’m not going to tell you to quit your school and start your own business right now.

Going to the top-tier schools will give you unforgettable experiences and access to the top professors as well as prestigious alumni networks. It will also help you to get a better job and bring you a lot of money into your pocket as soon as you’ve graduated.

On the other side, starting your own company, as Steve Jobs said, “is the best decisions I ever made.” However, it’s the exceptionally inventive person who can do this. If you have a big, big new idea, you can get venture financing–and if you wait to graduate someone else may capitalize on your idea first.

So, should I go to the top-tier schools or should I start my own business now?

As Steve Jobs said in a graduation speech at Stanford last year, like any life decision, is up to each individual. “You have to trust your gut,” he said.

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