Gen Z graduates are already facing a crushing reality that college degrees no longer guarantee them a six-figure job. As AI gobbles up the roles of everything from computer programmers to junior financial analysts, and the market for entry-level opportunities continues to dwindle, the young generation is at a disadvantage.
The CEO of LinkedIn—one of the world’s largest employment platforms—is warning Gen Z that their situation won’t look any better down the line. Ryan Roslansky has cautioned that instead of chasing candidates with Ivy League degrees, employers will be on the hunt for AI-savvy talent with the adaptability to keep up with the new ways of working.
“I think the mindset shift is probably the most exciting thing because my guess is that the future of work belongs not anymore to the people that have the fanciest degrees or went to the best colleges,” the LinkedIn chief executive and EVP of Microsoft Office said recently during a fireside chat at the platform’s San Francisco office, as reported by Business Insider.
Instead, Roslansky predicted the job applicants most likely to land a job and succeed in their roles will be “the people who are adaptable, forward thinking, ready to learn, and ready to embrace these tools…It really kind of opens up the playing field in a way that I think we’ve never seen before.”
CEOs say college skills are ‘degrading’ and degrees aren’t the golden-ticket for success
Roslansky’s got a point. Some of the world’s most successful leaders have already made it without ever receiving a college diploma—and they also happen to be in tech. Whether that be the CEO of $5 billion cloud juggernaut Figma, Meta mogul Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, or Block and Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey. And in an increasingly tech-driven business landscape, LinkedIn’s CEO isn’t the only one questioning the worth of college degrees.
The leader of $40 billion bank Standard Chartered, Bill Winters, admitted that his MBA was a “waste of time.” The CEO said the skills he learned at Wharton have “degraded, degraded, and degraded” over time as AI has majorly impacted the relevance of skills. And the iconic Harvard University dropout himself, Zuckerberg, echoed that colleges aren’t setting up graduates for the jobs they need, sinking them into a “big [financial hole]” with sky-high tuition costs. The Facebook creator cautioned that the tide is changing as people figure out whether pursuing a degree makes sense anymore.
“There’s going to have to be a reckoning,” Zuckerberg said on the This Past Weekend podcast with Theo Von this April. “People are going to have to figure out whether that makes sense. It’s sort of been this taboo thing to say, ‘Maybe not everyone needs to go to college,’ and because there’s a lot of jobs that don’t require that…People are probably coming around to that opinion a little more now than maybe like 10 years ago.”
Even billionaire hedge fund mogul Warren Buffett doesn’t care if his employees went to Stanford or Princeton—or any college at all. In discussing Berkshire Hathaway’s 2005 acquisition of Forest River, an RV manufacturer led by Pete Leigl, he said “no competitor came close to his performance” despite Leigl not hailing from an incredibly prestigious university. Buffett also referenced Microsoft entrepreneur Bill Gates, who achieved billion-dollar success without a college diploma.
“One further point in our CEO selections: I never look at where a candidate has gone to school. Never!” Buffett said in his 2025 annual letter to shareholders released earlier this year. “Of course, there are great managers who attended the most famous schools. But there are plenty such as Pete [Leigl] who may have benefited by attending a less prestigious institution or even not bothering to finish school.”
