If you look to hire anybody today you will find thousands of people with MBAs and they all want to work for you. The question is, how much can they produce for you. I do not know the answer. If on the other hand, I look for a reliable electrician, carpenter, or plumber, it is very difficult to find. So I think that the generation that grew up say during the depression and in the 1950s, when a worker in America had a very high social standing and could travel to Europe, and with the prevailing exchange rate spend a lot of money in Europe. The view then became, whether it came from the government, the media, or from the workers themselves, was that a workman’s job is a lower class job. We want our children to be academics. A lot of people are not suited to be academics or they do not know how to apply the knowledge they acquired in universities, if anything is acquired, and that is a very big question. So you now have an army of people that came out of universities, and I tell you, a lot of these people I would not dream of hiring. They are completely useless. I am not saying that everybody is useless, some have a very good education and a very good personality. But the ones that I would hire I would hire them with or without a university degree. I would look at them and say, “Can they do something? Are they effective? Can they accomplish something or not?” I would not even ask them if they have a university degree, I am not interested in that.
In general, if you want to be a medical doctor, I can understand that you need to go to medical school. If you want to be an engineer or an architect, I can understand you need to go to a technical college. If you want to be a teacher, then maybe it is useful to know something and go to a university. But for most people, I do not think that education is that important. It is probably important in that, at least when I studied, you were given a job to do or a paper to do, maybe on a subject that you had no idea about. Then you had to go and study and learn about this subject. Through this you may learn how to learn and how to talk about things about which you have no clue, which is very important in business.
- Source, The Prospect Group:
