Linkedin CEO Says Fancy Degrees Will Matter Less in the Future of Work (businessinsider.com)
- Reference: 0179631330
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/10/02/179232/linkedin-ceo-says-fancy-degrees-will-matter-less-in-the-future-of-work
- Source link: https://www.businessinsider.com/linkedin-ceo-will-college-degrees-matter-ai-future-of-work-2025-10
A 2024 Microsoft survey found 71% of business leaders would choose less-experienced candidates with AI skills over experienced candidates without them. LinkedIn data showed job postings requiring AI literacy increased about 70% year-over-year. Roslansky said AI will not replace humans but people who embrace AI will replace those who don't.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/linkedin-ceo-will-college-degrees-matter-ai-future-of-work-2025-10
Believe what you want: everyone else does. (Score:5, Insightful)
From Wikipedia: "Roslansky left college in his sophomore year to focus full time on a company he and two roommates created."
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In other words, another narcissist whose only skill is convincing others to follow him.
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oh, yeah! ROFLBBQ!!!
History doesn't repeat but it rhymes (Score:4, Insightful)
I remember in the late 90's before the dot-com crash, the stock market was wildly over-valued by the same metrics that say it's over-valued now, and people literally said to me, "no, this is just the way the new economy works. Technology has greatly increased the rate of real growth and the market prices are just reflecting that." Then it crashed. Technology did end up causing growth, at about the same rates we'd seen historically over the long periods of time. Don't buy the AI hype. At best it's a marginally better search engine.
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Marginally better?
No ads (yes, I know this is going to be short-lived) makes it far superior at the moment.
It kind of feels like when Google first released their search; It was so clean and uncluttered.
First hit's free (Score:2)
And we all know where Google ended up.
Bias in search indexes was fun and all, but bias in robot friends is going to be *lit*.
college is about connections (Score:2)
When you go to a top notch ivy league school, you meet wealthy business owners and wall street types. This puts you in front of the line with jobs since you already have a connection to these high paying starting jobs.
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Why would you need a top notch school when you know wealthy business owners and wall street types growing up because they are your parents.
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> Why would you need a top notch school when you know wealthy business owners and wall street types growing up because they are your parents.
You don't. But Harvard and Yale need you to afford others' the opportunity to meet people from your social class. People who go to those schools are bright, but what sets them apart is personal ambition. They don't go there because of the quality of the education, but the quality of their classmates and the school's alumni. But the branding on their degree was important as well. That branding is becoming much less important.
Linked in doesn't know AI (Score:2)
With all the AI posts on LinkedIn that are presented as something real, LinkedIn doesn't really know what AI is, despite claiming expertise. Seems like the CEO knows even less.
Dream (Score:2)
A republican's dream! Anyone can dispense medical advice!
Bull fucking shit (Score:2)
The ultra wealthy are tired of paying for us to get educations. They have a nearly unlimited supply of cheap overseas labor they can bring in on a hundred different work visa programs.
And of course the last thing they want is a well-educated population who won't suck down their bullshit.
So there is a concerted effort to undermine higher education.
Just a reminder Pol pot did the exact same thing. So does every other dictator. When you see them going after higher education you're next.
CEO's are people too (Score:2)
by which I mean they are desperate not to lose their high playing jobs and will follow what ever direction the business zeitgeist suggest they go in, rather than use any real business insight or follow a moral compass.
Repeated AI Prophet / Sales Tactics (Score:2)
I've heard *EXACTLY* this phrasing from AI sales droids and would be AI prophets for about two and a half years now:
> AI will not replace humans but people who embrace AI will replace those who don't.
It's a neat way of wrapping up their propaganda to those who have no critical thinking skills. It's meant to cause fear, nay panic, in those of us who have seen some utility in AI tools, but not enough to try shoehorning it into ever single aspect of our jobs. These folks want us to use AI everywhere so that the systems can gather training data on all aspects of the job market, and since they
It's the network (Score:2)
The advantage university adds is that the common rabble interact with the rich, so they have the opportunity to advance their position, if they brown nose the right a-hole. Same as it ever was.
My main AI skill is fixing AI crap... (Score:2)
I have no other AI skills...
Just ability to fix the crap it spewed....
Totally a lie. (Score:4, Informative)
Forget about debating the merits of college, fancy or otherwise. But without having a "Graduated from College" on your CV / LinkedIn profile you will not progress through the job application process in 2025 . Your CV will be dead on arrival. Including , I feel quite certain, at this guy's own company(!). His comment is not based on any current, existing, reality.
Really should have a filter to block out any /. article that has "CEO" in the title..
Of course they would (Score:2)
Less experience means you don't have to pay that person as much. You don't get the same quality of work out of them—and crucially, you never will. Unless you're using an LLM to help you learn as a specific goal, you won't learn much from prompting it to solve your problems for you.
So basically you have a workforce that never gets better, no matter how many hours they put into the work, so you can continue to pay them poorly FOREVER. They're just prompt-generating meat-sacks. I've argued for years that
Less than zero? That's quite a feat! (Score:2)
His parents were real estate entrepreneurs. He dropped out of college. What really matters is having parents rich enough to support you while you make your first startup, like what happened to the CEO of Linked-in.
They don't matter much now. (Score:1)
People used to tell me "Well, you'll need a degree to work for a big company like IBM." Now IBM is a giant H1B offshoring company that competes with Tata and Wipro. They don't do much American hiring at all now anyway. I have no degree. I have hired around 200 people in my career and seen multiple times when entitled degree holders get absolutely crushed by a room full of seat-of-the-pants coders with experience. I wouldn't count on a degree getting you anywhere in IT beyond academia.
First
Education: dropped out (Score:2)
Fancy CEO without a degree, selling snake oil, tells that snake oil makes degrees matter less
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Indeed. Always interesting how only those WITHOUT a specific education level claim it is worthless.
Reality check (Score:2)
College and university became a replacement for "we checked this candidate and found them to have qualities employers in this specific field would want" in previous century.
In this century, colleges and universities decided to try to use this as a tool to push radial social agenda. To surprise of no one, this led to their status as people who can certify workers as "candidates that to have qualities employers in this specific field would want" rapidly eroding.
Well, it was a system that lasted over half a ce
Lessons learned from Project 100,000 (Score:1)
Whenever I see some kind of mention on what leads to success in the workplace I think of the failures in Project 100,000 from Defense Secretary Robert McNamara during the Vietnam war. There's plenty that needs to be said about the program and Wikipedia really only scratches the surface: [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The US Armed Forces has had some kind of formalized testing for the best recruits for a very long time. By the Civil War this testing was finely tuned enough to determine who was fit to be
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_100,000
How to pick resumes? (Score:2)
So, how does HR winnow down the mass of resumes they receive? College degrees, university names, and GPAs are one way. Experience is another. Buzzwords are yet another. If not looking at these things, what will HR look at? Being "adaptable, forward thinking, ready to learn, and ready to embrace [new tools]" are all great things. How do you distinguish the people who have these traits from a sheet of paper? Even with an in-person interview, I'm skeptical that even the best interviewers can figure this
Hallucinations (Score:5, Insightful)
When I use AI tools in topics that I know well, often which I learned in university, I can easily pick out errors in AI output. Those errors occur quite often.
In topics that I don't know, it's damn near impossible to pick out errors. I'm fairly confident those errors still exist. But, I can't see them due to my own knowledge limitations. Regardless, the AI remains confident regarding all output whether correct or not.
The knowledge provided by university which is denoted by those fancy degrees is arguably more valuable in the era of AI due to hallucinations. You need humans who can tell when the AI is correct or not.
Re:Hallucinations (Score:4)
This whole article is full of shallow and misguided thinking.
The reason employers are so keen on AI is because we are still in the midst of the hype bubble. We have already seen the appearance, and subsequent disappearance, of a whole lot of "prompt engineer" job openings. It is simply too early to predict the impact, and the statements made presently are fueled almost entirely by hype.
On the other hand, college degrees are losing relevance for some fields of knowledge work because the colleges have been watering-down the curriculum so grab up more of that student loan money. I have seen the trend specifically in Computer Science, where recent grads couldn't code their way out of a brown paper bag. I have heard that this applies to some other such fields as well. So there IS an issue here that may be motivating employers to care less, at least in some industries, that has nothing to do with AI.
I also have a hard time seeing a world in which practicing lawyers, doctors, certified accountants, etc., don't have formal educations (regardless of the state of AI).
Lastly, "AI Skills" are easy to obtain. Super-easy. Hell, AI can outright teach them to you. Anyone with a degree can easily learn AI skills. If these shake out to be mandatory (for practical reasons and not just hype) for future jobs, then everyone who already has degrees can easily skill up. There won't be some sort of generational gap full of old degree holders who can't learn anymore and can't get AI skills vs young people with no education past high school who have some sort of genius-level grasp of AI such that they can outperform all this educated, experienced, and accomplished talent that is already in the industry. That's just silly.
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> Lastly, "AI Skills" are easy to obtain. Super-easy. Hell, AI can outright teach them to you. Anyone with a degree can easily learn AI skills. If these shake out to be mandatory (for practical reasons and not just hype) for future jobs, then everyone who already has degrees can easily skill up. There won't be some sort of generational gap full of old degree holders who can't learn anymore and can't get AI skills vs young people with no education past high school who have some sort of genius-level grasp of AI such that they can outperform all this educated, experienced, and accomplished talent that is already in the industry. That's just silly.
This wording isn't directed at folks wanting or needing to learn "AI Skills." This is directed at management teams looking to hire / fire folks. It's meant to be a scare tactic to make them think they *HAVE* to have AI skills at every job level. And it's meant to make the common worker believe the *ONLY* option they have is to jump aboard the AI hype train or they'll be left behind. It's been this specific wording for a few years now, that you either get with the AI, or the job market will move on to those
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The Gell-mann amnesia effect but with AI instead of Journalism.
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Exactly. You may, under some circumstances, get away with fewer workers when using AI, but these need to be much better qualified, experienced and knowledgeable.
Methinks this asshole just wants to hire cheap because "no degree".