Were Oprah and Branson right to skip university?
Ellen DeGeneres, Karren Brady, Anna Wintour, Oprah Winfrey. What’s the list that unites a talk show host, the UK’s so-called first lady of football, the long-time editor of Vogue and one of the richest women in the world?
The answer? None of them has a university degree.
These women have climbed their way to success without graduating. Wintour went to work at 17 and has emphasised the importance of creativity and curiosity over intellect. “We [at Conde Nast] are so busy working at being the best, being perfect, we haven’t always been open to disruption, to new ways of thinking and that’s not good,” she told
Yorkshire Life magazine. Brady, meanwhile, didn’t decry her own children going to university but as an ambassador for Barclays bank’s LifeSkills programme, she is keen for schoolchildren aged between 11 and 19 to learn more of the basics needed to survive in the workplace.
They have their male counterparts too. Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard University after two years as his fledgling computer software company took off, Steve Jobs quit his studies at Reed College in Oregon and Richard Branson has credited his success with the belief that “entrepreneurial drive beats a fancy degree anytime”.
(Many of them have since accumulated honorary degrees, but they didn’t have to study for them.)
So what are we to make of their success when every careers adviser tells us a university degree is critical to financial stability and long-term employment? My students pose versions of this question quite frequently – usually when a big project is going badly or when they’re trying to decide what to study.
If the Bransons and Oprahs got to where they are without a degree, why bother scrutinising those art history slides or memorising the intricacies of Arabic vocabulary or reading Dostoyevsky? Because, let’s face it, if any of us were confronted with a choice between our lives and Oprah’s, all of us (myself included) would want hers. So why bother with university at all?
You might be expecting me, as a literature professor, to say something about the importance of a university degree making you a more reflective person, giving you a fuller understanding of yourself and the world in which you live. But I’m not going to say any of that.
Instead, I’m going to talk about being an entrepreneur. I hear that word a lot. Undergraduates want to be a part of the next big thing, the next successful start-up. To that end, they flock to degrees in economics, business, or Stem subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) in the hope that they will lead to fame and financial stability. But as any start-up veteran will tell you, there is no straight path to entrepreneurial success. A recent study cited in Forbes mentioned that “for every cliche of a barista with a liberal arts degree, there were 10 with a degree in business”.
So what should you study if you want to prepare yourself for entrepreneurial risk-taking? Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team and a billionaire investor, predicted that the liberal arts are the way to go because “you need a different perspective in order to have a different view of the data, someone who is more of a freer thinker”.
A freer thinker. That’s another trait that is shared by that list of successful non-graduates: they are free thinkers and none of them left the university path with the express idea of making a fortune. They left in pursuit of ideas and opportunities that spoke to their passions and problems. As more than one person has quipped, none of us would have Facebook if Mark Zuckerberg had been able to find a date on his own.
Zuckerberg’s wealth and innovative power make his realm – the world of technology – seem particularly seductive. The Stem disciplines are important, of course, but as Peter Hellyer mentioned recently on these pages in his article about the benefits of the 10-year UAE visa expansion, it’s important to cultivate not just scientists but artists, historians and writers as well.
They too will contribute to the vision of the UAE as a “global incubator for exceptional talents”, said Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, the Vice President and Ruler of Dubai.
Whenever Stem gets invoked as the key to the future, I am reminded of a cartoon I have on my office door, which shows a ferocious dinosaur chasing a man in a white lab coat. The caption reads: “science can tell you how to clone a T-Rex…humanities can tell you why that’s not a great idea.”
It might be still possible to become the next Oprah, Wintour or Brady without a university degree. But a better bet, it seems to me, would be to use the time at university to explore what fascinates you, whether that’s creating a gentler T-Rex or making a film about the dangers of cloning or writing a comedy routine about being chased by a dinosaur.