Does College Matter?

The Initial Data Offering (IDO) community is a place for data enthusiasts to discover new datasets daily.

The mission is to build a community of data enthusiasts and curate high-quality, unique datasets for businesses, researchers, and organizations worldwide.

I went to a state school. California State University Chico. I actually went for 5 years. Studied abroad twice, in Amsterdam and Guadalajara. The cost of attending Chico State was pennies on the dollar compared to what an Ivy League school would have cost even though I didn’t get into any Ivy Leagues. I went to De La Salle High School, the powerhouse football school known for its 151-0 record. My highschool which was private, was more rigorous than all the public schools in the area. I probably could have gotten into more prestigious colleges if I got a higher GPA at a public high school, but the experience and challenges I endured at De La Salle were more than worth it.

What Chico State lacks in an alumni network and access to the top Wall Street jobs, it makes up for in teaching you how to hustle. It teaches you the social skills. It was #1 party school in the country when I attended. It gave me opportunities to travel the world and arguably my time studying abroad was the most valuable education/experience I had in college.

So while the Ivy Leagues are getting Banking internships and job offers, Chico is stuck getting offers to be a manager of Enterprise Rent-a-Car. Not great in comparison, but if you want it bad enough, you can be just as successful coming from a state school.

The real learning happens once you land a job. Once you build a network. Once you get a sense of what real work is and find out who you want to be and what you enjoy working on. Ivy League schools come with expectations that you are going to land a top job. That you should have access to the best opportunities. State schools there are no expectations or guarantees, but that’s what makes people who come from those schools and are successful that much better.

I think we should devalue the education and school you go to and start to value the accomplishments. Self-taught- great! Taught yourself how to code- cool! When I hire now and when I have hired in the past, I care less about where you went to school and more about what you have accomplished. Ribbon.cool, a Social Leverage Fund IV company is trying to recognize accomplishments in ones career with a verifiable platform. At the end of the day, your real education comes from being on the job. Your job coming out of school is to get a job. The best colleges in the world have outstanding alumni networks whether they are state schools or Ivy League. The best schools in the world get the best employers recruiting from their schools, but that doesn’t mean you can’t succeed at a Tier 2 school. The networking and work ethic is what really matters.

As I hear of more and more people looking for jobs in this economy, both coming out of college and with strong experience, I continue to believe it doesn’t matter where you go to school. Focus on the accomplishments and what you have achieved.

As my kids grow up over the next decade plus I believe higher education will be drastically different than it is today. I wonder if we will still believe 4yr education is necessary. Maybe we skip the general ed and go straight to 2yrs of school. Maybe getting a job right out of high school for a few years before going back to school will become a typical path. Maybe there will be more business builders right out of school that take some 1yr training courses taught by an AI Agent in a virtual classroom while the students where the latest AR/VR glasses developed by Apple? Who knows………