Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett doesn’t care where you went to school — even if you’re poised to run a major U.S. company.
When looking for CEOs to run Berkshire Hathaway-owned companies, like insurance giant Geico or fast food chain Dairy Queen, Buffett doesn’t even glance at where applicants attended college, he wrote in his most recent annual shareholders letter.
In his experience, business talent and experience tend to trump an Ivy League education, Buffett noted.
“I never look at where a [CEO] candidate has gone to school. Never,” wrote Buffett, 94. “There are great managers who attended the most famous schools. But there are plenty … who have benefitted by attending a less prestigious institution or even by not bothering to finish school.”
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Buffett, who holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Nebraska and a master’s degree from Columbia University, wrote that his perspective shifted after watching other people succeed without Ivy League diplomas. Those others ranged from Berkshire Hathaway colleagues and friends to Harvard University dropout and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.
“I don’t think college is for everyone,” Buffett told students of Ivey Business School at Western University in 2012, adding that none of his three kids finished college. “The best education you can get is investing in yourself. But this doesn’t always mean college or university.”
To be clear, Buffett values an education. He just isn’t picky about the form it takes.
“I avidly believe in lifelong learning,” he wrote in his shareholders letter. “I’ve observed, however, that a very large portion of business talent is innate with nature swamping nurture.”
The value of a college degree
Buffett, who once considered dropping out of college himself, may be ahead of a larger hiring and cultural trend. Nearly half of Americans think a four-year college degree is less important for landing a high-paying job it was 20 years ago, according to a Pew Research Center survey published last year.
In his letter, Buffett paid tribute to Ben Rosner — a former Berkshire Hathaway executive who sold his retail clothing business to Buffett in 1967, according to The Washington Post. Rosner, “a retailing genius,” didn’t attend school past 6th grade, Buffett wrote.
College graduates typically earn more than other Americans, on average. But less than 12% of 2023 Fortune 100 CEOs attended Ivy League schools for their undergraduate degrees, and less than 10% had MBAs from those same institutions. Buffett’s own successor-in-waiting — Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman of non-insurance operations Greg Abel — is a University of Alberta alumnus.
Some other successful businesspeople agree with Buffett. Billionaire serial entrepreneur Mark Cuban, for example, thinks that everyone should try college — but the real value is the experience itself, rather than a diploma’s prestige, he said in an interview with social media personality Jules Terpak last year.
“I’m not one of these people that says: ‘Don’t go to college. Go start a company,'” said Cuban. “If you want to start a business, go to college and learn the language of business.”
Even Gates, who famously started a company instead of finishing college, agrees.
“I’m not some person who promotes dropping out of college,” Gates told CNBC Make It earlier this month. “I’m a huge fan of a broad set of knowledge, and I think it’s an exceptional case where the urgency is such that you interrupt those college years to go do something else.”
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