19th June 2026
There is an increasingly popular narrative which has seeped from the traditional YC-inspired startup community into the mainstream: that university is a waste, and talented young individuals should just “build things”. I think this is a horrible sentiment, grounded in a failure of society to expound the value of education, which leads not to more innovation, but significantly less.
There are two logical fallacies which I believe lead to this flawed conclusion: firstly, that the primary objective of university should be to prepare students for successful careers, and secondly, an overvaluation of the “innovation” software product companies represent.
That a university education's primary purpose be to serve as a path to a job is a very recent concept. For much of their existence, the sole purpose was the dissemination and discovery of knowledge (not ignoring the classism that came with them due to their restriction to the elite upper classes). Certainly, the knowledge gained could be useful and even necessary in the pursuit of many careers, but the idea that it be the university's responsibility to instruct you in anything beyond your academic material would have been met with confusion. The massification of higher education in recent decades and subsequent “degree inflation” has changed this, leading students and graduates to point their fingers at education institutions in their struggle to secure meaningful work.
I do not lay the blame on young people. University administrations appear continually confused (or intentionally deceptive) about their role, one moment advertising their degree offerings as a path to graduate roles with a carefully curated list of partner big-name companies, while in the next having mandatory classes based largely on basic theory. Government and industry have failed, despite some improvement in recent years, in developing meaningful alternatives to university education for jobs which would be better served by different training, such as technical colleges and apprenticeships. As I see it, a university's function should be to impart knowledge to students, and expand knowledge through research; this role is to become even more important in the age of artificial intelligence if humans wish to maintain the autonomy and depth of thought which has made us singular in nature. If it achieves that, but does not give a student a direct path into a job, that is not a failure of university, but of our expectations.
Returning to the second point, the value that university educations have played and continue to play in technological innovation is grossly underestimated, and that of software product companies equally overestimated. Aspiring founders obsess over the visionary of Jobs or the swagger of Zuckerberg, and use their lack of a degree as evidence for the irrelevancy of higher education. What we fail to sufficiently recognise is that behind every great company are countless engineers, PhDs, and researchers, whether working for said company or having previously developed the technological foundations for these companies to exist, who have honed their knowledge over years in an academic environment.
Few examples accentuate this more than the Bell Labs of the mid 20th century. In a number of decades, AT&T's iconic research lab, backed by a technical staff in excess of 1000 PhDs and many more highly trained engineers and technicians, achieved unprecedented innovatory output: the transistor, information theory, cellular telephony, the laser, the solar cell, satellite communication, Unix, C- and 11 Nobel Prizes plus 5 Turing Awards to go with it. No amount of “building” would have achieved this. However, nor are the conditions- large, steady streams of funding, albeit courtesy of a government-endorsed monopoly- that made this basic research possible plausible in today's market, where the bottom line is king, and certain optimizations are preferred to uncertain breakthroughs.
Granted, this is no attempt to belittle the role of founders in bringing products to market- an equally important pursuit, which is absolutely essential for technological advancement to reach the general population. In addition, non-scientifically oriented builders can create companies that enact real innovation (I'm thinking more on the Apple side, and less on the Facebook side). But if we are intentionally driving young, highly intelligent individuals away from basic research and engineering in favour of managing 10 Claude Code terminals at once while hailing this as innovation, we are depriving ourselves and our children of truly transformative change. And it is noteworthy that many of our greatest technology companies' founders- those of Intel, Sun, Cisco, Google, NVIDIA, …- were deeply technical, with significant academic training.
I have no issue with people building software product companies; they can often bring massive value to society and industry alike, while making their founders very wealthy. Both have a place. But one should not dismiss the value of education, which has served as the backbone of advancement, in developing great companies, or decry the institution of university, purely because it does not fulfil a role it was never designed to.