Some business CEOs have put the college degree on blast, questioning if higher education is really setting students up for success in the workforce. But the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, is pushing back against that narrative.
Blankfein has witnessed the power of a strong college education firsthand. The billionaire finance leader was born into public housing in Brooklyn, sharing a bedroom in his small New York City apartment with his grandmother or sister until he went off to college. At the time, his high school was on the brink of shutting down, Blankfein told CBS—but the then-teenager battened down the hatches, studied hard, became class valedictorian, and got into Harvard University at just 16 years old.
It was the launchpad to his illustrious career in finance, including a 12-year reign at Goldman Sachs.
Fast forward five decades, and Blankfein still believes schooling is the great wealth equalizer, even as AI threatens to swipe white-collar roles at a dizzying pace.
“I think education is the real accelerator for most people into the middle and upper classes,” Blankfein told CBS.
Blankfein says college helps make workers a ‘complete person’
Higher education has long been lauded as the best path to success, but some leaders are encouraging budding workers to skip college altogether.
Palantir and PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel—a Stanford University alumnus—has been particularly outspoken, even offering young entrepreneurs $200,000 grants to ditch the “corrupt institution” of higher education and “build new things” with his Thiel Fellowship. Blankfein hit back at the tech mogul’s rhetoric, advising the next generation of movers and shakers to set themselves up for success by going to college.
“I strongly disagree with the technology investor Peter Thiel,” Blankfein wrote in an excerpt from his upcoming memoir, Streetwise, shared with Vanity Fair last month. “To succeed in a career, you have to know the technical minutiae of your field, of course. But you also need to be a complete person—the kind of person other people want to engage with.”
The ex-Goldman Sachs leader, an alumnus of both Harvard University and Harvard Law School, says the elite college nurtured his confidence, writing skills, love of history, and engagement with current events. It was no cake walk—Blankfein wrote that he “survived” the experience more than he enjoyed it. But it was still “the best place to have gone.”
Blankfein might have missed out on that essential growth, integral to his career success, if he’d passed up on the college experience altogether.
“Your undergraduate years are your best opportunity to make yourself uncomfortable in a way that can help make you more curious and interesting,” he continued in his book.
Other CEOs agree: college builds essential skills, including the liberal arts
While some leaders with elite college degrees are bashing higher education, others like Blankfein are crediting their education to their current success.
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi says his alma mater, Brown University, prepared him to take the corner office with a diverse skillset at the ready. Engineering taught the ride-hailing leader “how to solve complex problems,” while liberal arts “just captured my heart.”
“One of my secrets is—really, I do give Brown credit for this—this balanced education that I kind of stumbled on,” Khosrowshahi said during a panel at the Ivy League college last year.
“Learning all of the…really important basics of engineering, but then marrying that with liberal arts, that really taught me to communicate in a compelling way, which is an absolute necessity when you’re in a leadership position.”
And despite whisperings that the traditional college pathway is on the outs as AI takes over workforces, some leaders are optimistic. Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi told Fortune last year that “education will be completely revolutionized” for the better thanks to tech innovations, creating new jobs never seen before.
And Anthropic cofounder Daniela Amodei is adamant the college humanities track won’t be tossed aside in a tech-driven work landscape. In fact, the discipline will continue to be critical to innovation at even the largest AI businesses.
“I actually think studying the humanities is going to be more important than ever,” Amodei said in an interview with ABC News last month. “The ability to have critical thinking skills and learn how to interact with other people will be more important in the future, rather than less.”
