Were you born rich?
Whoever says a degree is worthless has a safety net. If you don't, their advice will cost you dearly.
Were you born rich?
If the answer is no, stop listening to people who say a degree is worthless. That advice almost always comes from someone who can fail without falling. If their business goes under at 25, there is a family name, a house and a contact waiting. If yours goes under, you start from zero, in debt.
Rich people's advice
The script is always the same. Someone shows the founder who dropped out of college, the bank account, the car, and concludes that studying is a waste of time. Nobody shows the net underneath.
The numbers tell another story. Ramsey Solutions surveyed more than 10,000 millionaires in the United States. 79% received no inheritance at all. 8 in 10 came 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 The survey is the company's own and was not peer-reviewed. Even so, the picture is hard to ignore: most got there without an inheritance, and almost all of them studied.
And it wasn't an elite school. 62% attended a public state university, and only 8% a prestigious private school. More than half, 52%, went further and earned a master's or doctorate.
The professions that appear most among them are engineer, accountant, teacher, management and attorney, in that order.
Among those who found technology companies, the story repeats itself. A Kauffman Foundation study of 652 American founders found that 92% had a bachelor's degree and their average age at founding was 39 (Kauffman). The kid who dropped everything at 19 is the exception that became advertising.
School matters for those who have nothing
Now the data that settles the argument. Economists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger 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 for children of less-educated parents, and for Black and Hispanic students, the school kept weighing heavily (Dale and Krueger, NBER).
Read it again. College matters little to those who already have everything. It matters a lot to those who don't. The rich can say a degree makes no difference because, for them, it really doesn't. The network, the contacts, the first job, they already had at home. You will find that in the classroom, or nowhere.
In Brazil, the math is even harsher. People with a higher education degree earn on average about 148% more than those who stopped at high school, almost triple the average premium in OECD countries (OECD, Education at a Glance 2025).
Do the math
For anyone who leads, the message is direct. When a young person on your team says they are dropping out of college because they watched a video, ask who pays if it goes wrong. If the answer is "me", the advice they followed was not made for them.
And if the young person is you: study. Not for the paper. For the difficulty you choose to go through, which gives you back bigger. Whoever wasn't born rich will have to be entrepreneurial their whole life, in their own business or inside someone else's company. And they will need every tool they can pick up along the way.
In judo, the heavier fighter sometimes misses the grip and fixes it with strength. The lighter one doesn't have that option. They need technique. For those not born with weight, study is the technique.
"For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it?" (Luke 14
). Jesus doesn't say to give up on the tower. He says to do the math first. Whoever wasn't born rich does the math and finds out: dropping out of school is the most expensive project they could start.
