Tim Cook Says You Don't Need College Degree For Success, As 50% Apple Hires Didn't Have One

The tech industry is full of CEOs and successful entrepreneurs that come from humble roots.

And while many studied hard and worked for years to get to the top, others also did the same without ever graduating college. And to Tim Cook, that's an important fact.

Images courtesy: Reuters

During the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board meeting on Wednesday, in the White House with President Trump and other members, the Apple CEO took a stand against jobs relying purely on educational qualifications.

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He insisted that there are certain skills in demand in the industry that students may not even learn in college. Things like coding for instance.

"And so to that end, as we've looked at the - sort of, the mismatch between the skills that are coming out of colleges and what the skills are that we believe we need in the future, and many other businesses do, we've identified coding as a very key one," Cook said during the meeting.

To that end, Cook was happy to say that about half of Apple's hires last year were from among people without a four-year college degree. And he believes these missing skills are exactly what the education system needs.

According to Cook, every child in the US should have some level of training in coding before they graduate high school. After all, more and more fields these days involve some level of technical tasks, especially as more and more jobs become automated by AI.

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That belief is why Apple launched its 'Everyone Can Code' program back in 2016. It's a school curriculum designed to help students learn coding in steps, all the way from kindergarten to college. Right now, at least 4,000 schools in the US use the curriculum.

Other major companies also feel this way, ready to hire degree-less employees, including Google, IBM, and more.

However, even as companies become more accepting of such hires, HR policies will likely take much longer to catch up. According to studies by the US Bureau of Labor, workers without a degree earn an average of 40 percent less than their peers with educational qualifications. In India too, you may be doing the same job, but an IIT or IIM graduate earn nearly double that of someone without that degree. And good luck even trying to land the job in the first place without a degree.

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Cook has a hope in this case however. After all, Apple itself was founded by a college dropout, Steve Jobs. He's not the only "uneducated" success either. Microsoft's Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard, as did Mark Zuckerberg decades later. Twitter's Jack Dorsey and Dell founder Michael Dell were also college dropouts when they began, as were many many more.

At the end of the day Cook says, you could study for half your lifetime if you want, but "expanding your horizons" is what's really important.