- Google co-founder Sergey Brin admits the company is hiring a lot of personnel without bachelor’s degrees because they “tinker and figure things out from very strange angles.”
- Speaking to Stanford engineering students in late 2025, Brin emphasized that he studied computer science not for the degree, but out of passion and because the industry context was exploding.
- Brin warned Gen Z not to choose or drop majors just out of fear of AI automation, as AI might even excel in fields thought to be “safe” like comparative literature.
- Google is shifting strongly towards skills-based hiring: the percentage of job postings requiring a college degree dropped from 93% in 2017 to 77% in 2022.
- This trend is not unique to Google but has spread to Microsoft, Apple, and Cisco, showing the declining role of the university degree as a “passport” in the tech industry.
- Jamie Dimon (JPMorgan Chase) argued that studying at an Ivy League school or having high grades does not guarantee becoming a good employee; practical skills are the deciding factor.
- Alex Karp (Palantir) also emphasized that after joining a company, educational background becomes almost meaningless; everything is evaluated based on work performance.
- According to Great Place to Work, more and more businesses realize that degree requirements cause them to miss out on a large talent pool.
- Brin suggests that as degrees lose their role in controlling career opportunities, universities themselves need to rethink their mission and training models.
📌 Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, admits the company is hiring many employees without bachelor’s degrees because they “tinker and solve problems from very strange angles.” This trend is not unique to Google but has spread to Microsoft, Apple, and Cisco. This reflects a strong shift towards skills-based hiring in the AI era. As technology changes the nature of entry-level work, a degree is no longer the sole reliable metric. This opens up huge opportunities for self-taught Gen Z while placing pressure on universities to redefine their value in the new labor market.
