Whether it’s Nike’s Phil Knight, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, or Google’s Sergey Brin, many of the world’s most influential business founders can trace part of their success back to Stanford University. Nestled in the foothills of Silicon Valley, the school has long functioned as a launchpad for tech’s elite.
But the rise of artificial intelligence is challenging long-held assumptions about the value of higher education. As tech reshapes entry-level work and companies rethink traditional hiring pipelines, the payoff of a four-year degree—especially from elite institutions—is increasingly up for debate.
Still, Brin doesn’t regret his own academic path. Speaking to Stanford engineering students last month, he said his decision to study computer science was not driven by a fixation on credentials.
“I chose computer science because I had a passion for it,” he said. “It was kind of a no-brainer for me. I guess you could say I was also lucky because I was also in such a transformative field.”
Even in an era when AI can write code, Brin cautioned students against chasing—or abandoning—fields of study based solely on automation fears.
“I wouldn’t go off and switch to comparative literature because you think the AI is good at coding,” he said. “The AI is probably even better at comparative literature, just to be perfectly honest anyway.”
Jamie Dimon and Alex Karp agree: You can land a high-paying job even without a degree
Brin met Google cofounder Larry Page in 1994 during his second year of graduate studies at Stanford. Together they developed PageRank, an algorithm they later renamed Google and would become a company in 1998.
Google’s hiring practices today reflect how dramatically the industry has shifted. The tech giant is now embracing workers without college degrees.
“In as much as we’ve hired a lot of academic stars, we’ve hired tons of people who don’t have bachelor’s degrees,” Brin said. “They just figure things out on their own in some weird corner.”
Between 2017 and 2022, the share of job postings at Google requiring a degree dropped from 93% to 77%, according to analysis from the Burning Glass Institute. And Google isn’t alone: companies including Microsoft, Apple, and Cisco have reduced degree requirements in recent years, signaling a broader industry shift toward skills-based hiring.
That’s forcing a broader reckoning over what a degree actually signals and whether it’s still a reliable proxy for talent.
“I don’t think necessarily because you go to an Ivy League school or have great grades it means you’re going to be a great worker or great person,” said JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon in 2024. For many roles, skills matter far more than credentials, he added: “If you look at skills of people, it is amazing how skilled people are in something, but it didn’t show up in their resume.”
Palantir CEO Alex Karp has made a similar case, despite holding three degrees (including a JD from Stanford). He’s been outspoken about the pressure young people face to pursue elite credentials—and dismissive of how much they matter once on the job.
“If you did not go to school, or you went to a school that’s not that great, or you went to Harvard or Princeton or Yale, once you come to Palantir, you’re a Palantirian. No one cares about the other stuff,” Karp said during an earnings call last year.
That mindset is spreading beyond Silicon Valley and Wall Street, according to Great Place to Work’s CEO Michael Bush.
“Almost everyone is realizing that they’re missing out on great talent by having a degree requirement,” Bush told Fortune. “That snowball is just growing.”
For Brin, the implications ultimately go beyond hiring. With credentials losing their gatekeeping power, he said universities themselves may need to evolve:
“I just would rethink what it means to have a university.”
