A degree still opens doors for those not born rich

Those born rich can afford to say a degree is worthless. Those who weren't, can't. For them, a degree is still the shortest ladder, and the school they attended carries weight when someone decides whether to open the door.

What the numbers say

In Brazil, people with a higher education degree earn on average about 148% more than those who stopped at high school. The OECD average is 54% (OECD, Education at a Glance 2025). Few countries pay as much for a degree as Brazil does.

And few people get there. Only about 24% of Brazilians aged 25 to 34 have completed a degree, against 49% on the OECD average, and one in four drops out after the first year (CNN Brasil). When degrees are scarce, they are worth more.

In the United States, Ramsey Solutions surveyed more than 10,000 millionaires. 79% received no inheritance at all, and 8 in 10 come from families at or below middle income. And 88% have a college degree, against 38% of the population (Ramsey Solutions). The survey is the company's own, which sells a personal finance method, and it was not peer-reviewed. Even so, the picture is clear: most did not inherit their wealth, and almost all of them studied.

The ad and the table

The claim that the degree is dead has a favorite example: tech companies that dropped the requirement from their job ads. Nubank is on that list (Tecnoblog).

Now look at who is inside. A survey by Thalison Fernandes using public LinkedIn data on the degrees of 2,434 Nubank employees puts USP first, with 186 people, or 227 counting Poli, which is listed separately. Next come UFMG (70), Unicamp (67) and Mackenzie (54) (LinkedIn). The São Paulo headquarters explains part of it. But the top of the list belongs to schools the market knows by name.

The job ad doesn't require a degree. The hiring table chooses anyway. When a hundred people apply, the school's name is a shortcut for whoever has to decide fast.

Statistics fool easily

Statistics seem easy to understand, and that is exactly why they fool people. It is already going around that most American millionaires are engineers. The survey doesn't say that: it says engineering tops a list of five professions. And 88% with a degree doesn't prove the degree made the millionaire. Whoever enters and finishes college already brought something with them.

Economists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger ran the test that separates one thing from the other. They compared students admitted to the same selective colleges: some went, others chose a less competitive school. On average, the earnings gap over the career nearly vanished. But not for everyone. For children of less-educated parents, and for Black and Hispanic students, the school kept weighing heavily (Dale and Krueger, NBER). Those who already have a network gain little from the school. Those who don't find the network there.

At the top, the place matters too. Raj Chetty, David Deming and John Friedman showed that attending an elite college, instead of a good public university, raises the chance of reaching the top 1% of earners by 60% (Opportunity Insights). But a name-brand school is not the only door: among Ramsey's millionaires, 62% attended public state universities, and only 8% went to prestigious private schools.

The degree isn't worth the paper. It is worth the difficulty you accept to earn it: years of exams you can't push off, subjects you wouldn't choose and have to master, a routine that doesn't depend on willpower. Whoever gets through that comes out bigger than they went in. And whoever wasn't born rich will need it, because they will have to be entrepreneurial, in their own business or inside someone else's company. A Kauffman Foundation study of 652 founders of technology companies in the United States found that 92% had a bachelor's degree and their average age at founding was 39 (Kauffman). The founder who dropped out at 19 is the exception that became advertising.

For anyone running a business, the lesson has two sides.

If you are starting out without a family name, study. And choose where to study with the same care you would choose a partner. The school walks into the room before you do, on the résumé, in the referral, in the conversation with whoever decides.

If you hire, know that the filter exists even when the ad says it doesn't. Use the school as a signal, not a sentence. The best talent sometimes comes from where nobody looks, and whoever learns to see that hires better than the market.

In judo, the belt doesn't fight for you. But it tells your opponent, before the grip, how much time you have spent on the mat. A degree works the same way: it doesn't replace the fight, it opens the match.

Before kings

"Do you see a man skilled in his work? He will stand before kings; he will not stand before obscure men" (Proverbs 22

). The Bible does not despise preparation. Those who prepare are placed before those who decide.

That is what study is for those not born with the door open. It isn't the end of the road. It's what puts you in the right room.