Academic qualification ensures success in life?

Summary: Academic
qualifications are commonly felt to give a person the best chance of success
in life. How far is this true?

Context: The definition of success differs from person to person and field to
field. One could take economic success as a touchstone to label a person
successful in life, ignoring his of her other failures, like divorce, health,
inefficiency, etc. Others may look at a capacity for overcoming challenges,
irrespective of what someone earns and the nature of their private life. So
who is a successful person and who is a failure? Do school and college
grades and examination results provide a way of predicting or ensuring
future success? If that is true, then we should encourage as many young
people as possible to go to university and work hard to gain formal
qualifications. But is it true? Aren’t some college drop-outs like Bill Gates and
Richard Branson hugely successful icons of success? And should we
automatically consider the millions of young people who have not had the
opportunity to gain academic certificates to be failures in life?

Arguments

Pros Cons

Whether one is proposing marriage, applying
for a job or looking for a new business partner,
the first thing people ask is, "what do you do?"
In other words they judge you by your
academic qualifications. No bio-data résumé or
curriculum vitae is acceptable without the
inclusion of education qualifications. Therefore
it is an unannounced rule of both the corporate
world and the social world that a man's
acquisition of academic qualifications is a giant
leap towards opportunities in every walk of life.
Success never depends upon grades. If success
and opportunities were measured by grades then
the corporate world and potential marriage
partners would not ask for biodata in résumés,
where other qualifications are also mentioned.
Nor would they interview the prospects in order
to find out what they are like as people, rather
they would give a blind appointment to the
people with the best paper qualifications. So
qualifications alone are never enough, success
depends upon physical characteristics,
personality, and a willingness to work hard.

Academic qualifications ensure you have the
basics in learning. If your basic grounding in
Maths, Science and Languages is strong, you
can get success in life because mastering these
subjects allows you to calculate, to innovate and
to communicate. These essentials for success
cannot be learned without professional help – in
schools and colleges. And in order to prove that
someone has acquired this knowledge, they are
Success is not getting a grade or a degree, if
that was it then why aren't all the graduates
from Harvard, Oxford or Cambridge uniformly
successful? The rule of success is hard work
and destiny of course. If a student of
engineering gets good grades but he is not
practically effective in relationship-buildings
and solving crises or proper planning, even
though he may be successful in getting a job but
tested. If their learning is satisfactory, then they it will not lead him far. On the way he is sure to
are given a certificate to indicate their
competence – an academic qualification.
There may be a few people like Bill Gates and
others who have made it, in spite of their drop-
out background and lack of academic
qualifications, but can this be generalized?
Should I tell my child to leave schooling
because if Bill Gates can do it they can also do
it? A few exceptions cannot be taken as a
general rule.
And even for those few high-profile people who
have made it without academic qualifications,
let’s ask a simple question - if you look at a
global directory of successful people you might
find a few hundred like Bill Gates, but what
about those millions of doctors, engineers, IT
professionals, lawyers, and advocates who rely
upon their formal education? Can you run a
country without them? And could even Bill
Gates have prospered without the skills of these
IT professionals and engineers?
We spend ten years of schooling and several
more years of our precious life in college, and
then one fine morning someone comes and says
that this is not required for success. When asked
for proof, they say "look at Bill Gates!" But
success isn’t a just matter of building a huge
firm from scratch and making billions of dollars
– by that definition, only a tiny number of
people in the world could be considered
successful. No, success is about making the
most of your talents and abilities, and that
requires dedication and study in academic
institutions that will stretch you intellectually.
An academic education gives people a rounded Can academic qualification stop us from
experience of life, with opportunities to meet becoming a civilization of drunkards, rapists
people from a wide range of backgrounds and and war-mongers, marked by broken families,
fade out.
If you look into a directory of successful people
who are doctors, engineers and IT
professionals, then you will notice that many of
them dream to be employed by people like Bill
Gates or Richard Branson, who are prosperous
despite not having college degrees. In other
words, prosperity does not depend upon
academic qualifications but upon opportunities
provided by entrepreneurs who may not be
necessarily be highly educated. Successful
entrepreneurs even benefit from not having
academic qualifications, because going to
college and taking examinations forces people
to learn and think like millions of other
graduates. This actually makes it less likely that
they will come up with the truly mould-
breaking insights and “disruptive” ideas on
which successful innovations and new business
models are built.
Unfortunately the materialistic world has
changed the concept of success. It has become a
rat-race where every student chases grades and
therefore the entire perception of success and
prosperity has changed. Rather than studying to
reach our full potential, we do it because we
think it is necessary for a successful career. So
we spend ten years in school and a few more
years of our precious life in college to get
educated, then more time is passed in hunting
for jobs. Even after that we may find ourselves
in the wrong profession and lacking job
satisfaction. And then recession comes along,
when we are told that our wealth has been
blown away by the foolishness of expensive fat-
salaried CEOs. Now comes a time when we go
to work with a constant fear of losing the job
we don’t enjoy. Is this the correct understanding
of prosperity? So now the definition of success
is changed. If you are able to save your job then
you are successful!
to consider the importance in life of values and
culture. These are necessary things required to
label a person successful in all aspects of life.
More broadly, widespread further education
makes us a civilized nation. It uplifts our morals
and ethics by exposing us to the great thinkers
of the past. It makes us aware of our rights and
liberties, and helps entrench a liberal
democracy with active citizens and a lively
media.
Academic qualifications may not be enough on
their own to ensure success, but they indicate
that their possessor has got what it takes.
Imagine a new world order in education, where
people don't study but join their business or
look for jobs straight from school, with no
qualifications to prove their worth. How would
employers choose between them? Academic
grades are important, because in order to gain
good exam grades or a degree, students have to
work hard, master demanding skills and learn a
great deal of specialist knowledge. These are
valuable attributes for success in any field of
endeavour, which is why employers value
academic qualifications. Simply getting into a
good college indicates to a future employer that
the student is out of the ordinary.
domestic violence and crime? If you look at
countries where the largest number of people
have higher academic qualifications, they are
the ones most affected by social breakdown.
And would you call the conduct of the US wars
on Iraq and Afghanistan a successful example
of the superiority of the US economy and
society? In fact true success is shown in having
the moral courage to speak out against atrocities
and injustice, showing generosity towards the
poor, and respecting our parents. These are
characteristics which are found in people from
all social and educational backgrounds, but
often absent in many educated Americans and
Europeans, in spite of the universities they have
been to and the grades they have achieved.
Often academic qualifications have no real
relevance to the jobs graduates are employed to
do. A few decades ago employers in areas such
as banking, engineering, management and
government service recruited people straight
from school at the age of 15 or 16, training
them on the job and promoting them to higher
levels of responsibility according to their
ability. Today none of these jobs has changed
very much, but all now require applicants have
a university degree. Why has this changed? One
reason is that the upper and middle classes are
trying to protect their own jobs – demanding
new recruits have expensive academic
qualifications excludes many talented young
people from poorer backgrounds.